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Method, Process, and Austrian Economics Essays
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We are witnessing what appears to be at least a modest revival of interest in
the Austrian tradition on the part of the economics profession. There can be
no doubt that this revival is to be attributed to the tenacity with which Mises
continued to pursue his writing and teaching when it appeared that the profession
had decisively turned its collective back on that tradition. 1 Much,
perhaps most, of Mises's substantive contributions to economics had been
completed before Mises arrived in the United States early in World War II.
But the decades that followed witnessed an explosion of work in economics
along lines that Mises considered profoundly mistaken. Instead of developing
theory informed by subjectivist insights, the profession was turning
toward a mindless and spuriously quantitative empiricism; instead of pursuing
the subtle social processes set in motion by interacting, purposeful
human individuals, the profession was entranced by the "hydraulics" of
dubious models constructed from crude aggregative components. The
Austrian-trained economists who had sought the intellectual leadership of
Mises in Vienna during the twenties and thirties became, as a result of the
imminent conflagration in Europe, geographically scattered and disorganized.
During the lonely decades that followed, undeterred by thinly disguised
disparagement on the part of his professional colleagues, and
without the suitable academic base to which his stature and contributions
entitled him, Mises continued to publish prolifically and to teach and lecture
to whomever would listen.
In the 1960s and 1970s it appeared that economists were retreating, to a
degree, from some of the aggregative excesses that had marked the immediate
postwar era. There has been a return, in the professional mainstream,
to a theoretical perspective aware of the importance of the microfoundations
of the discipline. There has been a return to the neoclassical
theory developed during the half-century following the marginalist revolution
of the 1870s-a milieu in which the Austrian tradition in economics
originated and flourished.
Israel M. Kirzner - Personal Name
1st Edition
o-6~9-05545
NONE
Method, Process, and Austrian Economics Essays
Management
English
D.C. Heath and Company
1983
New York
1-271
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