Introduction to a Symposium on Austrian Economics in the Immediate Postwar Period

The Austrian School is unique in the history of economic thought. This is true, of course, for many reasons, but I will resist the temptation to enumerate all of the respects in which, to my mind, the Austrian School is special. Suffice it to say – and most relevant to the theme of the present symposium – that the Austrian School is unique in that, just at the height of their international renown, for reasons utterly unconnected to economic science, the members of the School were driven by the mounting Nazi menace from their home base in Vienna to sundry locations scattered across the globe. At around the same time, moreover, the members of the School were, in the eyes of many within the economics discipline, seemingly rebuked in two debates of supreme consequence for both economic science and policy. Though he may have won the initial skirmish, F. A. Hayek, of course, was seen to ultimately “lose” the war with Keynes, while the combined forces of Hayek and Ludwig von Mises were judged to have been finally and roundly defeated by the market socialists, especially, Oskar Lange and Abba Lerner, in the famous Socialist Calculation Debates.