Abstract: Drawing on McCraw's (2007) biography, this paper assesses the character of Joseph Schumpeter. After a biographical summary of Schumpeter's life and career as an economist, the paper considers a thread of deliberate posturing and pretense in Schumpeter's grandiose ambitions and claims...

In recent work Philip Mirowski and Rob Van Horn have made a number of important revisionist claims regarding the history of the 'Chicago School.' The claims involve the role of F.A. Hayek in creating the School, the reasons behind some changes of views of members of the School on policy matters,...

Ludwig M. Lachmann was born in Berlin in 1906 and died in Johannesburg in 1990. For more than forty years, until his retirement in 1972, Lachmann established himself as a prominent South African economist and for a time served as head of the economics department at the University of...

The interest-rate controversies between Böhm-Bawerk and Fisher have attracted little attention and, in the opinion of most commentators, justifiably so. Böhm-Bawerk and Fisher argue over what appear to be two minor issues – Böhm-Bawerk's claims that his third cause of interest (productivity...

Four talks on Keynes in relation to the Bloomsbury Group: I. Maynard Keynes of Bloomsbury (Craufurd Goodwin); II. Keynes as Policy Advisor (E. Roy Weintraub); III. Keynes and Economics (Kevin D. Hoover); IV. Keynes and Hayek (Bruce Caldwell). The talks were delivered as part of roundtable...

There is something extreme about Mises' apriorism, namely, his epistemological justification of the a priori element(s) of economic theory. His critics have long recognized and attacked the extremeness of Mises' epistemology of a priori knowledge. However, several of his defenders have glossed...

In a recent article in "Challenge" magazine, Andrew Farrant and Edward McPhail argue that the central message of F.A. Hayek's, "The Road to Serfdom" is that any attempt to create a welfare state must lead inevitably to totalitarianism. I argue in my paper that this was not the central argument;...

This paper constitutes the start of a project dedicated to Austrian economist and economic sociologist Friedrich von Wieser (1851-1926). Its central claim is that especially in recent decades, Wieser has become a disproportionately underresearched scholar, and the paper provides a set of...

So far Schumpeter's affinities with the German Historical School (GHS) have been inadequately acknowledged or even unexplored in major accounts of Schumpeter's work. This essay argues that Schumpeter formulated some of his principal theses in accordance with the conceptual framework of the GHS....