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Historical Setting of the Austrian School of Economics,

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This essay by Ludwig von Mises was published in 1969. It is an informative and opinionated overview of the historical background behind the Austrian School of Economics. The Austrian School began in the 1870s with the pioneering work of the Austrian Carl Menger. The School was focused in Vienna, which at the time was the head of the "multi-cultural" Austro-Hungarian Empire. (I imagine it wouldn't qualify as multi-cultural in the eyes of today's leftists because of its allegiance was to the crown and Christianity, rather than PC ideology). Although its focus was in Austria, there were significant followers in Germany, as well as some Czechs.

The Austrian School was on the side of liberalism (which at that time meant less government) and its central opponents were members of the German Historical School, which supported statist economic policies and was allied with the Prussian monarchy. A good part of this essay is focused on this dispute.

The philosophical underpinning of the School was the rationalist philosophy of Kant and Leibniz, with the influence of philosophers such as Brenanto (who influenced Husserl).

Certainly Ludwig von Mises was the right man to write this essay. He was acquainted with Menger and was a student of Bohm-Bawerk. He was involved in the controversies that this work addresses. Von Mises wrote it near the end of his incredibly productive life, and I found interesting the pessimism that pervades the work.

Historical Setting is a good little book for those interested in turn of the century history of economic thought, or with Austrian Economics in general. Mises was in an ideal position to write a history of Austrian economics because he was old enough to be heavily involved with prewar Austrian economics, but young enough to be in the middle of interwar and postwar Austrian economics. Unfortunately, Mises wrote mainly about prewar AE in this volume. My own interest is in the Interwar and Postwar years, so I would have benefited from an extension of this work into at least the mid twentieth century. That being said Historical Setting is still a worthwhile read.