Chapter 23 – The Rejected Legacy – Austria and the Austrian School after 1945
The Austrian School effectively ceased to exist on Austrian soil by the end of the 1930s.
Apart from a few exceptions – Hans Mayer, Alexander Maher, Ewald Schambs, Richard von
Striegel and Leo Illy, Schoenfeld – many of its members had already left the country
in the preceding years, or had had to flee for racial and political reasons after the
annexation of Austria by the German Reich in 1938. Academic productivity declined dramatically
and almost came to a standstill at the beginning of the war. While Hans Meyer continued to
produce the Zeitschrift für nationale Ökonomie, Journal of Economics, with Alexander Maher
as editor, he had to share the role of publisher with Walter Euken, 1891-1950, Guilherme Marchi,
1989-1941, the supporter of Mussolini, and Heinrich von Stackelberg, 1905-1946, the leader
of the Nationalsozialistische Dozentenschaft, Association of National Socialist Lecturers
of the University of Cologne. Despite this concession, the ensuing volumes appeared only
at irregular intervals, 1939 and 1944. Moreover, the readership had been significantly reduced
due to emigration and the events of the war. Incidentally, neither term Viennese nor Austrian
School received any mention in these volumes. A fundamental paradigmatic shift in economics
had taken place in the Anglo-American sphere even before the annexation. Following the
brilliant success of the general theory of employment, interest and money in 1936 by
John Maynard Keynes, interest in the Austrian School declined almost overnight. Its advocates
suddenly found themselves in the position of being outsiders. The Keynesian theory and
its interpretations, with mathematical equilibrium analysis as one of its centerpieces, dominated
modern economics for more than three decades from this point in time onward. Against this
backdrop, Hans Meyer carried on with his teaching at the University of Vienna until becoming
a professor emeritus in 1950. After the war, the statue of Menger that had been removed
after the annexation was unobtrusively restored to its original place in the Arkadenhof courtyard
of the University of Vienna. Otherwise, there was no way to approach proximity with anyone
even remotely connected with the former greatness of the school. The number of students enrolled
at the Faculty of Law and Political Science, in 1954-1955 there were 1900, was now smaller
than it had been before the war. Alexander Maher and Ewald Shums, two teachers of the
The Austrian School, who had worked unhindered throughout the Nazi period, were only allowed
to return to teaching after some time had elapsed. There was a general shortage of young
academics. Mayer's first post-doctoral student was Karl Gruber, 1909-1995, who, as the newly
elected governor of the Federal State of Tirol, had his habilitation procedure transferred
from Tirol's capital Innsbruck to Vienna, and remained completely removed from the tradition
of the School.
After Leo Illy, Schönfeld, who was a mature student, the first young scholar to whom Hans
Mayer awarded a habilitation was Wilhelm Weber, 1916-2005.
This was in 1950, the year Mayer became an emeritus professor.
In 1949, after a five-year gap, a new edition of the Zeitschrift für nationale Ökonomie
was published in the form of a Festschrift on the occasion of Mayer's 70th birthday.
A reviewer compared it to the opulent commemorative volume for Friedrich von Mises and lamented
on one hand the dramatic extent of the destruction and lowering of standards in economics and
German-speaking countries. On the other, he complained that emigrated members of the Austrian
School had not contributed to the Festschrift. Indeed, scholars who had remained in Austria,
and public authorities and politicians as well, had done little or nothing to improve
of Relations with the Emigrants and Exiles who had been damaged for the long term by
past events. Mises, whose apartment had been ransacked during his absence, wrote immediately
after the war that he did not want to meet the mob that had applauded the massacre of
excellent men. In full accord with the prevailing sentiment, economists in Austria at that time
made it all too clear that they had no serious interest in a return of the emigrants and
Exiles In October of 1945, the bestowal of an honorary
doctorate upon socialist Chancellor Karl Renner, 1870-1950, by the Faculty of Law and Political
Science at the University of Vienna, became a symbol of reconciliation. In the very same
academic ceremony, the faculty was represented by its middle-class conservative president
Ludwig Adam Morwitz, 1890-1955, the Catholic Legitimist Ferdinand Degenfeld-Schonborg
and the last tenured professor of the Austrian School in Austria, Hans Meyer, but speakers
at the ceremony primarily invoked a balance between the middle-class Catholic and the
social democratic camps, and in addition paid an astounding tribute to public service employees.
In this emerging ideological-political duopoly, which would later be criticised as a concordance
democracy or as moderated pluralism, there was hardly room for exiles, emigrants, liberals,
Jews or dissenters of any kind.
Invitations from Austrian faculty colleagues, from Hans Mayer, for example, to exiled economists
to hold guest lectures and talks were often not even approved.
Nevertheless, Friedrich Hayek made tireless efforts to intensify contacts with Austria
Hayek held a higher professional opinion of students there than he did of the majority
of faculty colleagues, who had, by this time, been promoted in his former home country.
Among the authors of the Festschrift vor Hans Mayr, only two could be counted outright
as followers of the Austrian School, Leo Illy Schoenfeld and Ewald Schanz. Some other authors
like Hans Bayer and Alexander Mahr showed eclectic sympathies. The overwhelming number
of contributions emphasized their critical distance to the Austrian tradition, in some
cases even demonstrating a lack of secure knowledge of the sources. To what extent this
first large anthology upon post-war Viennese soil was already removed from international
The central economic research was made clear, for example, by the fact that out of 25 contributions, only three were written in English, and only one discussed the ubiquitous Keynesian paradigm in any detail.
The Festschrift appeared to intend to defiantly deny that the centers, the research programs, and the lingua franca of economics had in the meantime become Anglo-American, and that Vienna would henceforth find itself on the fringes of economic research.
The first concise and objective critique in the German-speaking world of Keynes's theories,
from the viewpoint of the Austrian School, was made by Hans Mayer. Mayer criticized Keynes for
his many imprecise definitions, as well as his completely useless all-encompassing terms,
such as volume of labour, volume of employment and involuntary unemployment. The results thus
achieved were a setback, because the mercantilists had already worked with all-encompassing terms.
systems.
Mayer considered Keynes' psychological assumptions, a general propensity to consume, a liquidity
preference, and the expectation of future earnings from capital values, to be unrealistic.
In response to the proposition of a comprehensive socialisation of investment under Central
Direction, Mayer asked whether there would still be leeway in this model for the manoeuvres
of private self-interest.
Finally, Mayer criticised Keynes for not having considered a purpose for the economy as a
and the whole, as the Austrian School had attempted to do with the optimum of fulfilment
of demand, because full employment as a goal is a misjudgment of means and ends.
Mayer's critique of Keynes came much too late and was ultimately ineffective.
Even his two students Wilhelm Weber and Alexander Mahr vouched for the Austrian School's insight
in a limited way only.
On one occasion they declared themselves its supporters, another time they denied even
and belonging to the school although admitting being in its debt.
They effectively advocated, with some reservations, a neoclassical Keynian worldview.
Their healthy distrust of macroeconomic aggregates was the main reminder of their having come
out of the Austrian tradition.
Irrespective of these differences with the school's tradition, Wilhelm Weber in particular
made bonafide attempts to improve relations with the emigrants.
He was able to persuade Oskar Morgenstern and Gottfried Habeler to be co-publishers
of the Zeitschrift für nationale Ökonomie, which after 1970 appeared as the Journal of
Economics.
Weber, along with Friedrich A. von Hayek, also quietly supported the ultimately unsuccessful
preliminary talks between the university administration and Hayek, their purpose being to persuade
him to come to Vienna.
Hayek found the idea of reviving the Austrian School in Vienna very enticing.
After Fritz Machlub had withdrawn his candidacy in 1967, the Austrian government even considered
Hayek for president of the Österreichische Nationalbank, the Central Bank of Austria.
Despite these gestures to a long overdue reconciliation, post-war Austria and its duopolistic intellectual
climate remained alien to many immigrants, especially to those who had retained the individualist
liberal tradition of the Austrian school.
The symbolic reconciliation with Ludwig von Mises, the ancestor of the American state
skeptics, amounted to nothing more than presenting him on behalf of the socialist Federal President
Adolf Schaff, 1890-1965, with the Ehrenkreuz für Wissenschaft und Kunst, Medal of Honor
for Science and Art, of the Republic of Austria, at the Austrian Embassy in Washington in 1962.
After becoming a professor emeritus, Friedrich von Hayek accepted a guest professorship at
at the University of Salzburg in 1969.
But feeling rather isolated both academically and intellectually, he returned to the University
of Freiburg after only four years.
It was easier for the nomenclatura of the resurrected Republic of Austria to be reconciled
with those who had more or less turned their backs on the Austrian School after their emigration
of expulsion.
In 1965, Oskar Morgenstern was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Vienna
and played a leading role at the Institut für Konjunkturforschung.
In 1971, Fritz Machlub became an honorary senator of the University of Vienna and Gottfried
Habeler received honorary PhDs from the University of Innsbruck, 1970, and the Vienna University
of Economics and Business, 1980.
Martha Stephanie Brown was awarded an honorary PhD from the University of Vienna, 1989.
In 1971, Hayek participated in a symposium organized by Wilhelm Weber and John Richard
Hicks, 1904-1989, which took place in Vienna on the occasion of the centenary of the first
publication of Carl Menger's Principles. In addition to Oskar Morgenstern, Fritz Machlup
and Gottfried Habeler, other participants included the son of the school's founder,
Carl Menger, and Kenneth G. Arrow, born 1921. Never before had three future economics Nobel
It was pointed out in the English language presentations, among other things, that varying strands of thought existed among the Austrians.
Two authors even chose to speak of a Menger tradition instead of a school. Indeed, more than a few theoretical achievements from Austria had found their way into the mainstream.
Over the entire span of its existence, the actual quintessentials of the Austrian School
were no longer easy to define. Fritz Machlub later looked back and formulated the six most
important characteristics of the Austrian School in an English article for an anthology celebrating
the 100th birthday of Ludwig von Mises. Most of the emigrated Austrian economists made contributions
as follows. 1. Methodological Individualism
The explanation of economic phenomena stems from the actions or inactions of individuals.
Groups or collectives cannot act except through the actions of individual members.
2. Methodological Subjectivism
Economic phenomena stem from individual judgements and are based on personal knowledge
and subjective expectations toward the future. 3. Taste and Preferences
Subjective valuations of goods and services determine the demand for them.
In turn, consumers determine types of goods, quantities, and prices.
4.
Opportunity Costs
The economic actor takes into account alternative possible applications.
Choosing one possible use means sacrificing other possible uses.
5.
Marginalism
Economically relevant valuations are determined by the significance of the last unit added
to or subtracted from the total.
6.
Time Structure of Production and Consumption
Production and consumption are determined by subjective time preferences.
Machloupp pointed out that within the Austrian School the economic notion of time is regarded
in different ways.
Finally, Machloupp introduced two further characteristics that were particularly applicable
to Mises and his students.
7.
Consumer Sovereignty Consumer demands are the optimal drivers
measures of production, distribution, prices and allocation of resources, so long as they
are not hindered by the external intervention of laws, public authority measures or quartel
agreements.
8. Political Individualism Political freedom requires economic freedom.
Political and economic restrictions lead, sooner or later, to the extension of coercive
measures on the part of the State and undermine individual freedom.
Machlup's succinct and precise descriptions gave us a clear indication as to why, in the political and intellectual climate of the Second Republic, it was almost inevitable that the Austrian School's research programme would be met with disapproval.
In many ways, the Republic embodied the antitheses of the individualistic liberal creed of the Austrian School.
In 1978, for example, the government share of nominal capital of Austrian companies still amounted to 32.6% and government-owned companies employed 19% of the entire workforce.
The two major parties, with their ambivalent attitude towards the individualistic liberal tradition, were omnipresent.
With 2.4 million voters in 1979, the Socialist Party had 721,000 members, and the Christian
Social People's Party at least 560,000 members.
For a long period of time, voters were in favour of an economic policy which allowed
the federal debt to be raised from 10% of GNP in 1974 to 38.5% in 1985, and finally
to 68% in 1995.
Since this background, the established view was that the Austrian School was not to be
seen as anything more than an interesting but closed chapter in the history of economics.
This became particularly clear during a symposium in 1985, where an Austrian organisers indeed
attempted to bridge the gap with the American Austrians and extended an invitation to Israel
M. Kirzner, born 1930. The majority of speakers kept their distance from or even expressed
Antagonism toward the Austrian School. In view of the crisis of Keynianism, and aside
from Kirzner, only Hans Seidel, born 1922, spoke tentatively about the present and future
relevance of the Austrian School. At the time, in fact, the principles of the Austrian School
at Austrian universities were being taught systematically by Innsbruck professor Karl
Socher, born 1928, alone. For the first time in decades, the Austrian School was spotlighted
as a research subject once again, this time as a noteworthy tradition of the University
of Vienna. Almost all the authors of the aforementioned symposium emphasized their distance in terms
of content, but at the same time they were pleased to use the chance, with their language
skills, knowledge of the intellectual environment and the stores of historical books at their
Disposal, to assume an internationally recognizable leading role in the narration and interpretation
of the history of thought of the Austrian School.
In this context, Erich W. Streisler, born 1933, the holder of Menger's former chair
at the University of Vienna for the last third of the 20th century, published about two dozen
papers on the history of ideas and science of the Austrian School.
He was one of the first to include the political, sociological and historical-intellectual aspects
as well. His estimation of the Austrian School's relevance to modern economics in terms of
decision theory was very high in the end. His assistants and faculty colleagues Werner
Neudeck, Gerhard Orosel, Peter Rosner and Karl Milford also published articles concerning
the history and epistemology of the School. Hans-Jörg Klausinger of the Vienna University
of Economics and Business, published works on the interwar history of the school.
At the University of Graz, it was Heinz de Kurz, director of the Graz Schumpeter Center,
along with Manfred Prisching, who published several articles on Josef Schumpeter and also
Boehm-Bawerk and the Austrian School as a whole.
Tracing historical roots is actively continued in the Austrian universities to this day,
but attempts to revive the Austrian School's fundamental ideas have been almost entirely
and they limit it to non-university and private initiatives.
The Carl Menger Institute, founded in Vienna in 1987, had to close down after just a few
years.
Today, the Friedrich August von Hayek Institute, founded in 1993, has taken on a well-known
promoting role by organizing events on topics pertaining to the Austrian School, publishing
books and by financing one guest professorship in Vienna each semester.
Of the more recent initiatives, the Institut für Wirtschaft founded in Vienna in 2007 deserves
particular mention. Of course, these activities cannot in any way compensate for the fact
that Austria has rejected its great legacy.