Suchergebnisse

Friedrich August von Hayek gilt als einer der bekanntesten Vertreter der Österreichischen Schule der Nationalökonomie. Im Jahr 1974 erhielt er für seine Arbeiten den Nobelpreis. Hansjörg Klausinger stellt den Ökonomen vor. Dabei geht er auf Hayeks wichtigste Werke und sein Verhältnis zu John Maynard Keynes ein. Er beleuchtet auch das Umfeld, in dem Hayek gearbeitet hat.

Das Buch richtet sich an eine breite Leserschaft und versucht, dieser die Einsichten der Österreichischen Schule der Nationalökonomie nahezubringen. Dazu werden hervorragende Vertreter:innen dieser Schule mit ihrem Leben und Werk vorgestellt. Es bietet eine lesenswerte, leicht fassbare Einführung.

Hans Mayer (1879-1955) has been portrayed either as a tragic hero or, more often, as an evil traitor who presided, as the school's only representative at the University of Vienna, over the decline of the Austrian school in its home country for almost three decades. While from the outset his goal had been to secure the survival of the school in Vienna's increasingly hostile academic environment, in the course of time he invested most of his energies not in his scientific work but in unending conflicts in the realm of academic politics. Thus for Mayer the school's defense became more and more an end in itself, justifying any sacrifice on its behalf, even that of his own reputation, for example during the Nazi rule in Austria, 1938-45. This paper tells the story of this strange academic life and its repercussions for the evolution of Austrian economics.

The development of Austrian economics in the interwar period was marked by the contrast between its high esteem at the beginning of the 1930s and its dwindling influence throughout the remainder of the decade. A variety of reasons have been conjectured for this decline (and the eventual dissolution) of the Austrian school of economics (see Caldwell 1988, pp. 517–21). A rarely mentioned factor of a more sociological nature that may have contributed to or that at least indicated the school's decline was its loss of coherence during the late 1930s, when, as a consequence of the emigration of the most prominent members, Vienna lost its role as the Austrian school's main center of communication. Insofar as this lack of coherence led not just to diversity within a unifying framework but to crucial divergences among the school's leading members, this might help to explain why after 1945 the Austrians were no longer perceived as a distinct school—some parts of their thinking had been fused into the neoclassical mainstream and others had largely fallen into disregard.