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NOTE The Austrian School of Economics

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Guido Holzman, it's a pleasure to have you here, University of Angers, if I say it correctly.

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Perfect, okay, because everybody else introduces you as the professor from Angers.

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Yes, and then I always say I come from Angus, but not with.

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Clever, but it's a well-rehearsed line.

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I know the problem.

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Let's do a brief review. The massive biography of Mises, a seminal biography of this thick.

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Several books in German, one book in German.

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Yes, a few small books in German.

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And then most recently, let's see, we had the Ethics of Money Production,

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Which is a very interesting case of a book that had a sort of small start, but a long life, you know.

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I mean, especially after 2008, everybody got interested in the topic of money.

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Well, in any case, there's also this monograph on deflation, right?

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Small essay, some 50 pages or so.

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Yeah.

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So this is quite a lot of work, a lot of production for a young professor.

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Oh, thank you very much.

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Yeah, I don't feel that young anymore, but yeah.

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Well, the biography took you how many years?

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Oh, this was, in total, some 10 years in the making, I think.

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Yeah, yeah.

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Well, it was a frightening project because, wait, anybody could just imagine what you took on.

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I mean, just imagine a stack of papers about, let's say, 10 feet high.

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Yeah, neither did I.

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Neither did I.

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No, if you had known, you never would have started.

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Probably.

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Yeah.

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Yeah.

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But then once you're in the middle of it, then you go until the end.

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It's like the good German manners, and you eat what is on your dish, you finish.

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Don't leave it half empty.

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Why?

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Would that be true?

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Well, this is something that you also teach your children, as I know.

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No, I teach them about the sunk cost fallacy.

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Sunk cost fallacy, okay.

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Don't eat that.

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Oh, that line.

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I should have known this.

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I should have stopped halfway.

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That was all sunk cost.

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Forget all this.

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Right.

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Why finish it?

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It's just making words.

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I'm not the sunk cost guy.

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We go to the end guy.

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Oh, it's just tradition all the way.

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And also there's a profound shortage of food in Germany, right?

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Absolutely. So we need to work for our salary. You're slave labor, right? Writing a Mises

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biography.

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Now, tell me, you're so thoroughly German in your heritage and your accent and your look

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and your demeanor and your attitudes towards life. And yet, you're teaching in France.

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Yes.

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How did this happen?

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Well, I must say, in the meantime, I've been thoroughly Latinized, right? So many people

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wouldn't recognize the German in me anymore, right? Among the German friends, yeah, they

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think that I'm fairly Latinized. I gave a couple of talks in Germany in the past three

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or four years and said, well, yeah, one of the interesting things of having you is so

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different, right? So no longer a real German.

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Really?

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Yes, yes.

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It's almost like when Americans go to Britain for a few years or months or days and come

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Come back with a British accent?

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Yeah, yeah, yeah.

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No longer how you're supposed to be.

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I feel like you've gone over to the French side, huh?

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Yeah.

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But you lecture in French.

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I do lecture in French and I have one class in English.

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Oh, really?

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Yeah.

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So because we have lots of foreign students and especially in business it's important.

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One criteria for students to choose the programs into which they sign up is how many English

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Language Content is there because English is the business language. So in our program

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is International Management. We have about half of our classes that taught in English

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and our goal is to go to 18, 19, maybe 100% in the next few years.

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Oh, is that right? So that you could attract more international students and the only language

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that...

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Also prepare the French guys who are better for the international market.

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I see, yeah. And English is, of course, the international languages as it should be, I

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think you would agree.

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Yes, I mean, yeah, English is made for business, German for philosophy.

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Oh, and economics?

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Also to some extent, yeah, but we, yeah, but that, so this higher torture for economists,

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read in German.

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Well, as a matter of fact, I know we could spend our short amount of time together talking about

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your works, and we probably should, but why don't you say something about this new book

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by Schulach and Unterkofler?

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Oh, thank you very much for asking me about this. Yeah,

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So these are two Austrians, Eugen Maria Schulag is a philosopher and he is in fact the only

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self-employed philosopher I know.

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So he has his own company which he sells philosophical consulting services and it works.

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And next to it he is lecturing at a couple of universities, both private universities

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and public universities.

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He's been very successful in everything he's doing. He's a first-class intellectual, enormously cultivated person and a great fellow. It's wonderful to be around with him. He's a very sweet person and has a wonderful wife also.

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And his co-author is Herbert Unterköfler, whom I know a little less well. We have met occasionally.

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We spoke on the phone one time. Actually, his English is very good, I thought.

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Excellent.

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Yeah.

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He's in business.

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So he's also working as a consultant and had always very strong intellectual interests.

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So we now here have two people from outside of academia who write a very, very scholarly

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book and by this very fact already, they are in a great Austrian tradition that we can

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trace back at least to the times of Mises.

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Something that I point out in my Mises biography was that in the 1910s, 20s, 30s, so until

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Until the rise of the Nazi party within Austria, there was kind of a free market network of

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different groups that were pursuing a scholarship on a non-professional basis.

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So they all had their daytime job, but then would meet in the evenings and sometimes on

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the weekends and so on to discuss things and present papers and publish a lot.

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So it was really fascinating, and these guys have a greater legacy than most of the professional

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and so on.

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So these two, they have retraced the history of the Austrian School from its beginning,

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from the times of Carl Menger to the present day and they have based—there's not—I

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mean there are a few histories of this sort ranging from a few pages to whatever.

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So they have based this on the history of the Austrian School, the history of the Austrian

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School, the history of the Austrian School, the history of the Austrian School, the history

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and a book length that already exists, but what they've done is to base this book on original research and this is where they make a path-breaking contribution in particular.

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Even in the German-speaking world. Absolutely. Yeah. Nobody's ever done it. Inconceivable in the English-speaking world, of course.

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Yeah, because it's, of course, you need, well, here again, so not only to speak philosophy, you need to master German, but also to write a good history.

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And look, most of our histories of the Austrian School, and I realized this when I was going

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through the draft of your book, and I realized I knew nothing that was in here. I'd never

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read anything like this. And I realized that, I mean, it's obvious in retrospect, but of

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course English speakers have been writing histories of histories in English, of histories

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of in English, and it's all been this kind of inbred thing for a very long time. Do you

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understand what I'm saying?

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Yeah, yeah, yeah.

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And so your book on Mises was a breakthrough in that sense that, oh.

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These two, they go beyond me, I mean, way beyond me in many respects, so it's really...

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The book is called The Austrian School, a history of its ideas, ambassadors and institutions.

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So the German version, I was a reader of the privilege to be a reader of the German version,

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and there were a few things that I could really contribute, so I gave a few comments left and

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right, but by and large this was an outstanding piece of scholarship and was greatly privileged.

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The apparatus, as we say, is immense. We have a bibliography that's, what, 45 pages or something

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and so many footnotes and so many internal references. But here's the other thing. Didn't

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you find it entertaining?

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Yes. Very well written. Not at all from an arrogant point of view, not from a teacher's

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point of view, but somebody who has a passion for a subject and likes to share what they've

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found.

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And do you agree? Am I right about this? It's really the first history of the Austrian School

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we have.

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There was Mises' monograph.

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Well, again, we have a few histories of this sort, also as a rule attached to certain persons, like my Mises biography, which I give the background of the evolution of the Austrian School, Israel Kirzner's work, what Murray Rothbard has done, also a history of the Austrian School,

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and many shorter versions, short essays and so on.

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But again, what is here is astounding is the depth in which the same subject has been treated.

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In particular, what they also do is to give a much better impression of the breadth of the movement

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than I do, for example, in my Mises biography because they give...

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I concentrated on the few main figures and they go through a much larger number of...

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Well, I mean, they've got Menger teaching, here's the students, what did this student

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do, this student do, this student do, what did that student do? Yeah, it's great. It's

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so interesting and lots of it filled with just the right amount of gossip.

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And also the magnificent comparison of the sociological background between the Austrian

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School and then the German Historical School. That was just amazing.

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Yeah, amazing. Yeah. So it's engaging from the first page to the last. I have high hopes

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for this book, do you?

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Yes. I mean, for me, it is already, I mean, this is a milestone in the literature and it

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will remain.

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I mean, I hope in the sense that, yes, the young generation will read this book and it

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will form everyone's perspective on what the Austrian School is, where it came from

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and what it did and where it's going.

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That's how significant this work is.

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You agree with this?

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Yeah.

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Well, I mean, where it's going, of course, this is always difficult to say, right?

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I mean, and they don't actually speculate much on the question.

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No, they don't.

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Well, doesn't it end by saying Guido Hulsman is the...

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And of course, he's a very promising author. That's what they say. This comes out of personal acquaintances, probably, and so on. So I don't attachment. This is not the central part of the book. What is really central is this great scholarship that they display over the previous 200 pages. And truly nobody in the future will be able to get around this book who does research on the history of the Austrian school.

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I wish I had brought a copy up so I could show it, but have you seen it downstairs?

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Yes.

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Isn't it beautiful?

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Yeah, it's just beautiful.

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All books that...

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Well, Chad Parrish designed the cover and I just loved it.

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Arlene Nocena did the translation, which everybody is praising for its beauty.

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I mean, the readability of it is very, very high, and it's not an expensive book either,

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so...

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It would be great to have one of them here at the Austrian Scholars Conference.

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Well, I think we tried to arrange that this year, but it didn't quite work out.

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We're going to Austria, I guess, in the fall, so we'll see them and maybe we'll get them

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It's very exciting. It's a thrill, I think, for anybody who's attached to the Austrian

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School to understand something of its history and its meaning. And it's a heroic and interesting

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history.

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Yes. And they really convey a vivid picture of this. And they are now themselves part of

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this. I mean, both of them are associated with the Institute for Wertewirtschafts, Institute

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for Value-Based Economics, which regroups non-university academics doing scholarship

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in the tradition of the Austrian School.

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These guys are Unterköfler and Eugen Maria Schulag, and then there are a couple of younger

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guys, Raim Dagisauer, he has this Iranian name, I always screw it up when I want to

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and Gregor Hochreiter and a few other guys, even younger guys, and they are doing fantastic works with seminars and lectures, book publishing.

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And they have a real passion. I know that Schülach himself has a real passion for all the details of the history of the Austrian School because I don't know if you recall that Doug French went to Vienna, I think it was last year, something like this, and they had a tour of Vienna.

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of Vienna.

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But it's a very detailed tour.

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It began very early in the morning, and I was receiving iPhone pictures of the way this

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tour ended.

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In the morning, Doug looked very interested and enthusiastic and bright-eyed and everything.

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At noon, you could see he was kind of...

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By five o'clock, you know, everybody's just gone, and Shulak's still going, and look at

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this manuscript, look at this, and now we've got one more building to go to.

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Yeah.

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It's just...

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It's an enormous breadth of knowledge, and, yeah, I mean, in the past, this was one of

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our problems, right?

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I mean, we hadn't any local guide, all we knew about the live stations and so on was based on readings, right?

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It's like if you need to find your way, whatever, in Cairo or so based on manuscripts with hieroglyphs or something, right?

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So you try to find your way and here you have somebody who has living knowledge of all these stations because it's his city.

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Yeah, yeah. Well, it's a kick and it's a surprise, too. I think you're the one who sent them in.

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So the Mises Institute is having the Supporter Summit this year in September, so it's a great opportunity to profit from this.

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Yes, by profit you mean, of course, a benefit.

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Yes. For me, it's about the same thing. There's monetary profit, monetary profit and non-monetary profit.

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I was just thinking, how are we going to make money at this? I missed that part.

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And you have a book you're working on now, Capital Theory, and we won't go into the details because it's not your way, really.

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I mean you like to kind of save. Yeah, I like to remain vague and general. It's very strange.

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Well, it increases the aura, the sense of mystery of who you are and what you're doing, this is all good.

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Thank you so much, Guido Holzmann, for joining us today. It was my pleasure.

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