Science lost, science found in the post WWII Austrian economics movement: The case of Emil Kauder

Autor: Janek Wasserman
Rok vydání: 2019
Předmět:
Zdroj: The Review of Austrian Economics. 33:107-120
ISSN: 1573-7128
0889-3047
DOI: 10.1007/s11138-019-00438-z
Popis: In studies of the Austrian School of Economics, Emil Kauder frequently gets lost in the shuffle. This article reconstructs his intellectual biography. His biographical trajectory diverged sharply from his Austrian brethren. Born and trained in Germany, his educational background little resembled his peers’. Beginning as an economic historian trained by Werner Sombart, he became a devotee of marginalism in his thirties. A lack of academic recognition limited his research opportunities and theoretical work, yet he shaped the later Austrian movement by tutoring a young Ludwig Lachmann on marginal utility theory. After the rise of Nazism, he suffered intense persecution as a Jew and a conservative liberal. His emigration was arduous and disorienting, leading him to have an eclectic and peripatetic postwar career. Despite these encumbrances, Kauder made signal contributions to the recovery and advancement of Austrian ideas in the United States, particularly in his painstaking, nearly obsessive, cataloging of Carl Menger’s library in Japan and his articles on Austrian marginalism, which culminated in the 1965 History of Marginal Utility Theory. Friendly with Austrians as different as Karl Menger, Morgenstern and Mises, and cited approvingly (and consistently) by Murray Rothbard, Kauder offered a historical understanding of the Austrian School that appealed to the disparate strands of the tradition, yet left him at a remove from his more theoretically inclined comperes. Unraveling the tangled skeins of Kauder’s intellectual biography reveals a great deal about the state of Austrianism and its place in the US intellectual landscape of the mid-twentieth century.
Databáze: OpenAIRE
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