History of the Austrian School of Economics

David Howden review Hans-Hermann Hoppe's 2009 Festschrift.

It is natural to wonder what scholar today has inherited the mantle of Rothbard. To me this is the wrong way to look at it. Rothbard vastly broadened that mantle so that hundreds, thousands, and millions of people can wear it. 

Rothbard was a man of great achievement and immense scholarship, an indefatigable worker, and the most significant anarchist writer then living — i

With Man, Economy, and State, Mises concluded, "Rothbard joins the ranks of the eminent economists."

Austrians offer a distinct and valuable approach to basic economic questions, an approach that should be central to research on theoretical and applied topics in economics and business administration.

"Production has been altered in such a way that the length of waiting time has been extended. But the demand for consumers' goods has not dropped so as to make the available supply last for a longer period.

Social cooperation among men — and this means the market — is what brings about civilization and it is what has brought about all the improvements in human conditions we are enjoying today.

Among the absolutist writers following Bodin, the 17th-century servitors of the absolute state, all hesitance or piety to the medieval legacy of strictly limited taxation was destined to disappear. State power, unlimited, was to be glorified.

The percolation of ideas is an endlessly fascinating topic, and Margit von Mises adds scores of detail that will enable her readers to track the penetration of Mises's philosophy to the most unlikely places.

But the centrality of the knowledge-corrective character of the market process for both Mises and Hayek cannot seriously be doubted. Whatever the differences between a Hayekian articulation of the market process and a Misesian articulation, the centrality of the notion of the corrective process for both, is the crucially important circumstance.