{"id":6430,"date":"2016-08-23T21:44:08","date_gmt":"2016-08-23T21:44:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/?p=6430"},"modified":"2016-08-23T21:44:08","modified_gmt":"2016-08-23T21:44:08","slug":"viennese-culture-austrian-economics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/blog\/2016\/08\/viennese-culture-austrian-economics\/","title":{"rendered":"How Viennese Culture Shaped Austrian Economics – Article by Erwin Dekker"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"The<\/a>Erwin Dekker<\/span>
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Schools of thought are frequently named after their country or place of origin. The Chicago School, the Frankfurt School, and the Scottish Enlightenment are just some of the many examples. The geographical place is a simple shorthand for something that would otherwise be difficult to specify and name. That is also the case for the Austrian School of Economics. Or at least that is what we commonly believe. Austrian is nothing more than a shorthand for a school of economics that focuses on market process rather than outcomes, emphasizes the subjective aspects of economic behavior, and is critical of attempts to plan or regulate economic processes. Sure it originated in Austria, but it is largely neglected there today, and currently the school lives on in some notable economics departments, research centers, and think tanks in the United States. The whole \u2018Austrian\u2019 label is thus largely a misnomer, a birthplace, but nothing else.<\/p>\n

But what if Austrian, or more specifically Viennese, culture is essential to understanding what makes this school of thought different? What if the coffeehouse culture of the Viennese circles, the decline of the Habsburg Empire, the failure of Austrian liberalism, the rise of socialism and fascism, and the ironic distance at which the Viennese observed the world, are all essential to understanding what the school was about? It would be exciting to discover that the Vienna of Gustav Mahler, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Sigmund Freud, Gustav Klimt, and Adolf Loos, would also be the Vienna of Carl Menger, Ludwig von Mises, and Friedrich Hayek. And if that is so, how would that change how we think about this school and about the importance of cultural contexts for schools of thoughts more generally?<\/p>\n

That is the subject of my recent book The Viennese Students of Civilization<\/em><\/a> (Cambridge University Press, 2016). It demonstrates that the literature, art, and cultural atmosphere are all essential ingredients of Austrian economics. The Viennese circles, of which the most famous was the Vienna Circle or Wiener Kreis, are the place where this type of economics was practiced and in which it came to maturity in the interwar period.<\/p>\n