William Henry Beveridge

Beveridge, William Henry

Born Mar. 5, 1879, in Rangpur, India; died Mar. 16, 1963, in Oxford. English economist and statesman. Follower of J. M. Keynes.

Beveridge was director of the London School of Economics and Political Sciences from 1919 to 1937. He was a member of the British Academy from 1937. In 1944 he was elected to Parliament as a member of the Liberal Party. He served as president of the Royal Economics Society from 1940 to 1944.

One of Beveridge’s main themes was unemployment. The change in his views on this question reflected the sharpening of the problem in bourgeois society. Whereas at the start of the 20th century he believed that the capitalist economy was itself capable of eliminating unemployment in various branches, by the 1940’s he was asserting that massive and chronic unemployment, which arose because of insufficient “effective demand,” could be eliminated only by means of a broad, constantly operating system of state regulation of the capitalist economy. He proposed a plan for implementing full employment; it included a number of measures—a program of public works, the establishment of complete control over foreign trade, the adoption of a social insurance plan, and so on. Like all such plans it could not eliminate unemployment, which is inherent in the capitalist mode of production.

WORKS

The Unemployment Insurance Statutory Committee. London, 1937. (Political pamphlet.)
Full Employment in a Free Society. London, 1944; 2nd ed., London, 1960.
London School of Economics and Its Problems: 1919–1937. London [1960].

REFERENCE

Beveridge, Janet. Beveridge and His Plan. London, 1954.

V. S. AFANAS’EV

William Henry Beveridge

William Henry Beveridge

Beveridge, William Henry

WORKS

REFERENCE

William Henry Beveridge

Synonyms for William Henry Beveridge

noun British economist (born in India) whose report on social insurance provided the basis for most of the social legislation on which the welfare state in the United Kingdom is based (1879-1963)

Synonyms