So I recently finished an audiobook about “Early Austrian Economics,” about the famous Austrian School in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. This is a school that has long been admired by conservatives, because they supported the idea that free markets reflect the subjective preferences of individuals (specifically consumers). Thus, they considered free markets to be a positive thing on this account. Their work was highly focused on economic science, but it did have obvious political implications as well, because of the insight that markets meet the demand of society, and satisfy its needs and wants.
They agreed politically with most of the conclusions of the classical economists that had gone before them, but they noted a few (relatively minor) errors in their science, and corrected them. The Austrian School's math was not as advanced as some of the other economic schools of that time, such as the German historical school and the neoclassical school (with whom they were often in agreement). But they were on stronger ground than the German historical school with regards to philosophy, and they got along well with the strongly mathematical school of neoclassicism.
Carl Menger, an early Austrian economist
They tried to maintain positive relations with most of the other economists of their own time, in fact. They usually refrained from criticizing other schools on this account. But when the German historical school launched a massive attack on them for supporting economic theory as a scientific goal, the Austrian School was forced to counterattack with some heavy criticisms of their own, which demolished the German historical school. The German historical school has been largely discredited today, partly because of this Austrian counterattack.
Friedrich von Wieser, another early Austrian economist
Another group that received some Austrian criticisms was the Marxist school, since Eugen Böhm von Bawerk took the time to study Marxism in some detail. Böhm von Bawerk actually published a number of influential criticisms of Marx's labor theory of value, as articulated in Volume One of Karl Marx's “Das Kapital.” When Volume Three of “Das Kapital” was published by Friedrich Engels (some years after Marx's own death), it turned out that Marx had agreed with most of these criticisms, and debunked most (if not all) of his own reasons for holding the labor theory of value to begin with. The extent to which the Austrians influenced this disavowal is not clear, although it is possible that Volume Three reflected some revisions by Friedrich Engels, which were made to acknowledge the flaws pointed out by Marx's Austrian critics. Böhm von Bawerk suggested that Marx was aware of the serious problems with his labor theory of value, since he thought that Marx was “too smart” not to realize how flawed this theory really was.
Eugen Böhm von Bawerk, an early Austrian economist
By now, you can probably see why I like these early Austrian economists so much; and why I enjoyed listening to what they had to say so much. I also enjoyed a similar audiobook about a later generation of the Austrian School of Economics (such as Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek), called “The Austrian Case for the Free Market Process.” This one is made by the same group as this “Early Austrian Economics” audiobook, and I will thus link to both of these audiobooks below for anyone who is interested.
See also:
Part of the audiobook series
Great Economic Thinkers
Early Austrian Economics
See also the audiobook series
Secrets of the Great Investors
Others to be covered later
See also the audiobook series
The Giants of Political Thought
Others to be covered later
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