History of the Austrian School of Economics

Röpke's censored treatise foreshadowed Human Action.

The personal, political, and scholarly papers of Ludwig von Mises have been discovered in a formerly secret archive in Moscow. So have the papers of many of Mises's colleagues and associates during his years in Vienna, including friends and foes in academia, politics, and business.

As with other economists of the "old liberal" school, the rise of Nazism forced Röpke out of Germany and into intellectual exile. After the war, however, he made a triumphant return as adviser to finance minister Ludwig Erhard, another unsung hero of the period. Erhard repealed Germanys wartime economic controls and set the stage for the postwar boom. For this reason, Röpke is often called the brains behind the German economic miracle. He also became the most articulate opponent of European political integration.

A review of a book review is hardly standard procedure, but Backhouse's article is a major scholarly assessment of Rothbard's History. 

I closed Karen Vaughn's Austrian Economics in America with a sense of disappointment. In several ways, as it seems to me, it fundamentally misconceives its topic.

Murray Rothbard tells us that this gigantic work was first envisioned as a "standard Adam Smith-to-the-present moderately sized book, a sort of contra-[Robert] Heilbroner" .

The period between the World Wars was a golden age for the Austrian School of economics. Led by Ludwig von Mises, a group of scholars writing in the tradition of Carl Menger broke new ground in economic science. Their studies showed the superiority of free markets and sound money over all forms of government control. A top theorist in that Mises Circle of thinkers was Gottfried Haberler, who died in Washington, D.C., at the age of 94 on May 6, 1995.

For more than seven decades, Henry Hazlitt has taught the economics of freedom. With pathbreaking theoretical work and a unique ability to communicate with the non-economist—shown forth especially in his Economics in One Lesson—he has both advanced Austrian economics and made it accessible to everyone.

There are other worthy contenders, but three men stand out as great economists and freedom fighters in the Misesian tradition: Henry Hazlitt, W.H. Hutt, and Murray N. Rothbard.