London School of Economics

Wikipedia contributors · CC BY-SA · EN · 04/10/2026

The London School of Economics and Political Science, commonly known as the London School of Economics (LSE), is a public research university in London, England, and a member institution of the University of London. The school specialises in pure and applied social sciences.

Founded in 1895 by Fabian Society members Sidney Webb, Beatrice Webb, Graham Wallas and George Bernard Shaw, LSE joined the University of London in 1900 and offered its first degree programmes under the auspices of that university in 1901. In 2008, LSE began awarding degrees in its own name. LSE became a university in its own right within the University of London in 2022.

LSE is located in the London Borough of Camden and Westminster, Central London, near the boundary between Covent Garden and Holborn in the area historically known as Clare Market. As of 2023/24, LSE had under 13,000 students, with a majority enroled being postgraduate students and just under two thirds coming from outside the United Kingdom. The university has the sixth-largest endowment of any university in the UK and it had an income of £548.2 million in 2024/25, of which £39.2 million was from research grants.

LSE is a member of the Russell Group, the Association of Commonwealth Universities and the European University Association, and is typically considered part of the "golden triangle" of research universities in the south east of England. The British Library of Political and Economic Science, commonly referred to as "LSE Library", is the main library of the university, and one of the largest libraries in the world devoted to the economic and social sciences.

Since 1990, the London School of Economics has educated 24 prime ministers or presidents, the second highest number of any university in the United Kingdom. Since the school's founding in 1895, over 40 world leaders, 21 Nobel laureates, two presidents of the European Commission and three presidents of the International Court of Justice have taught or studied at LSE.

History

Origins

The London School of Economics and Political Science was founded in 1895 by Beatrice and Sidney Webb, Graham Wallas and George Bernard Shaw initially funded by a bequest of £20,000 from the estate of Henry Hunt Hutchinson. Hutchinson, a lawyer and member of the Fabian Society, left the money in trust, to be put "towards advancing its [The Fabian Society's] objects in any way they [the trustees] deem advisable". The five trustees were Sidney Webb, Edward Pease, Constance Hutchinson, W. S. de Mattos and William Clark.

LSE records that the proposal to establish the school was conceived during a breakfast meeting on 4 August 1894, between the Webbs, Louis Flood, and George Bernard Shaw. The proposal was accepted by the trustees in February 1895 and LSE held its first classes in October of that year, in rooms at 9 John Street, Adelphi, in the City of Westminster.

20th century

The school joined the federal University of London in 1900 and was recognised as a Faculty of Economics of the university. The University of London degrees of BSc (Econ) and DSc (Econ) were established in 1901, the first university degrees dedicated to the social sciences. Expanding rapidly over the following years, the school moved initially to the nearby 10 Adelphi Terrace, then to Clare Market and Houghton Street. The foundation stone of the Old Building, on Houghton Street, was laid by King George V in 1920; the building was opened in 1922.

The school's arms, including its motto and beaver mascot, were adopted in February 1922, on the recommendation of a committee of twelve, including eight students, which was established to research the matter. The Latin motto, rerum cognoscere causas, is taken from Virgil's Georgics. Its English translation is "to Know the Causes of Things" and it was suggested by Professor Edwin Cannan. The beaver mascot was selected for its associations with "foresight, constructiveness, and industrious behaviour".

The economic debate between the LSE and the University of Cambridge during the 1930s is a well-known chapter in academic circles. The rivalry between academic opinion at LSE and Cambridge goes back to the school's roots when LSE's Edwin Cannan (1861–1935), Professor of Economics, and Cambridge's Professor of Political Economy, Alfred Marshall (1842–1924), the leading economist of the day, argued about the bedrock matter of economics and whether the subject should be considered as an organic whole. (Marshall disapproved of LSE's separate listing of pure theory and its insistence on economic history.)

The dispute also concerned the question of the economist's role, and whether this should be as a detached expert or a practical adviser. Despite the traditional view that the LSE and Cambridge were fierce rivals through the 1920s and 30s, they worked together in the 1920s on the London and Cambridge Economic Service. However, the 1930s brought a return to disputes as economists at the two universities argued over how best to address the economic problems caused by the Great Depression.

The main figures in this debate were John Maynard Keynes from Cambridge and the LSE's Friedrich Hayek. The LSE economist Lionel Robbins was also heavily involved. Starting off as a disagreement over whether demand management or deflation was the better solution to the economic problems of the time, it eventually embraced much wider concepts of economics and macroeconomics. Keynes put forward the theories now known as Keynesian economics, involving the active participation of the state and public sector, while Hayek and Robbins followed the Austrian School, which emphasised free trade and opposed state involvement.

During World War II, the school decamped from London to the University of Cambridge, occupying buildings belonging to Peterhouse.

Following the decision to establish a modern business school within the University of London in the mid-1960s, the idea was discussed of setting up a "Joint School of Administration, Economics, and Technology" between the LSE and Imperial College. However, this avenue was not pursued and instead, the London Business School was created as a college of the university.

In 1966, the appointment of Sir Walter Adams as director sparked opposition from the student union and student protests. Adams had previously been principal of the University College of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, and the students objected to his failure to oppose Rhodesia's Unilateral Declaration of Independence and cooperation with the white minority government. This broadened into wider concerns about links between the LSE and its governors and investments in Rhodesia and South Africa and concerns over LSE's response to student protests. These led to the closure of the school for 25 days in 1969 after a student attempt to dismantle the school gates resulted in the arrest of over 30 students. Injunctions were taken out against 13 students (nine from LSE), with three students ultimately being suspended, two foreign students being deported, and two staff members seen as supporting the protests being fired.

In the 1970s, four Nobel Memorial Prizes in Economic Sciences were awarded to economists associated with the LSE: John Hicks (lecturer 1926–36) in 1972, Friedrich Hayek (lecturer 1931–50) in 1974, James Meade (lecturer 1947–1957) in 1977 and Arthur Lewis (BSc Econ 1937, and the LSE's first Black academic 1938–44) in 1979.

21st century

In the early 21st century, the LSE had a wide impact on British politics. The Guardian described the LSE's influence in 2005 when it stated:

Commenting in 2001 on the rising status of the LSE, the British magazine The Economist stated that "two decades ago the LSE was still the poor relation of the University of London's other colleges. Now... it regularly follows Oxford and Cambridge in league tables of research output and teaching quality and is at least as well-known abroad as Oxbridge". According to the magazine, the school "owes its success to the single-minded, American-style exploitation of its brand name and political connections by the recent directors, particularly Mr Giddens and his predecessor, John Ashworth" and raises money from foreign students' high fees, who were drawn to LSE by the prominence of its academic figures, such as Richard Sennett.

In 2006, the school published a report disputing the costs of British government proposals to introduce compulsory ID cards. LSE academics were also represented on numerous national and international bodies in the early 21st century, including the UK Airports Commission, Independent Police Commission, Migration Advisory Committee, UN Advisory Board on Water and Sanitation, London Finance Commission, HS2 Limited, the UK government's Infrastructure Commission and advising on architecture and urbanism for the London 2012 Olympics

The LSE gained its own degree-awarding powers in 2006 and the first LSE degrees (rather than degrees of the University of London) were awarded in 2008.

Following the passage of the University of London Act 2018, the LSE (along with other member institutions of the University of London) announced in early 2019 that they would seek university status in their own right while remaining part of the federal university. Approval of university title was received from the Office for Students in May 2022 and updated Articles of Association formally constituting the school as a university were approved by LSE council 5 July 2022.

Controversies

In February 2011, LSE had to face the consequences of matriculating one of Muammar Gaddafi's sons while accepting a £1.5m donation to the university from his family. LSE director Howard Davies resigned over allegations about the institution's links to the Libyan regime. The LSE announced in a statement that it had accepted his resignation with "great regret" and that it had set up an external inquiry into the school's relationship with the Libyan regime and Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, to be conducted by the former lord chief justice Harry Woolf.

In 2013, the LSE was featured in a BBC Panorama documentary on North Korea, filmed inside the repressive regime by undercover journalists attached to a trip by the LSE's Grimshaw Club, a student society of the international relations department. The trip had been sanctioned by high-level North Korean officials. The trip caused international media attention as a BBC journalist was posing as a part of LSE. There was debate as to whether this put the students' lives in jeopardy in the repressive regime if a reporter had been exposed. The North Korean government made hostile threats towards the students and LSE after the publicity, which forced an apology from the BBC.

In August 2015, it was revealed that the university was paid approximately £40,000 for a "glowing report" for Camila Batmanghelidjh's charity, Kids Company. The study was used by Batmanghelidjh to prove that the charity provided good value for money and was well managed. The university did not disclose that the study was funded by the charity.

In 2023, the LSE formally cut ties with the LGBT charity Stonewall, a decision which was sharply criticized as transphobic by the LSE Student Union but praised by gender-critical activists as being conducive to freedom of speech.

In 2024 emails between LSE senior staff described students wearing keffiyeh who were protesting the university's investments in Israel as being "dressed as terrorists".

In 2025, LSE students who planned to take part in anti-Israel demonstrations celebrating the 7 October Hamas attacks were warned, as Universities UK (UUK) reminded students that expressing support for proscribed organisations, in particular Hamas, may constitute a criminal offence. The guidance came amid a wider context of arrests linked to Palestine Action, and ahead of planned demonstrations across UK universities, including LSE, King’s College London (KCL), University College London (UCL), and SOAS.

Industrial disputes

In the summer of 2017, dozens of campus cleaners contracted via Noonan Services went on weekly strikes, protesting outside key buildings and causing significant disruption during end-of-year examinations. The dispute organised by the UVW union was originally over unfair dismissals of cleaners, but had escalated into a broad demand for decent employment rights matching those of LSE's in-house employees. Owen Jones did not cross the picket line after arriving for a debate on grammar schools with Peter Hitchens. It was announced in June 2018 that some 200 outsourced workers at the LSE would be offered in-house contracts.

Since 2014/15, levels of academic casualisation have increased at the LSE, with the number of academics on fixed-term contracts increasing from 47% in 2016/2017 to 59% in 2021/2022, according to Higher Education Statistical Agency data (internal LSE data puts the latest figure at 58.5%). During this same period, comparable universities such as University of Edinburgh, University College London and Imperial all increased their rates of permanent staff relative to those on fixed term contracts. Only Oxford had a higher proportion of casual academic work for the 2021/2022 year (66%) although in contrast to LSE, the proportion remained constant rather than rising. As a result, the student-to-permanent staff ratio at LSE has worsened and had, as of July 2023, the worst student-to-permanent staff ratio among comparable universities in the UK, according to HESA data. According to research conducted by the LSE UCU Branch into staff well-being, 82% of fixed term academic staff at the LSE experienced regular or constant anxiety about their professional futures. In the same survey, overwork and mental health issues were reported as endemic among respondents, with 40% of fellows reporting that their teaching hours exceeded LSE's universal teaching limit of 100 hours per academic year for LSE Fellows.

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Adapted from “London School of Economics” by English Wikipedia contributors. Main paragraphs and sections are retained; tables, reference markers and technical markup are omitted. This is an encyclopedic adaptation, not a personal review. Original revision and contributor history ↗. Text is shared under CC BY-SA 4.0 ↗. Check current visitor access, tickets and transport with the relevant operator.