Austrian School

Overview

The Austrian School is a heterodox tradition in economics founded by Carl Menger with his 1871 book Principles of Economics (Grundsätze der Volkswirtschaftslehre), one of three works (alongside Jevons and Walras) credited with launching the marginal revolution.[1] Menger's students Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk and Friedrich von Wieser carried the school through the early 20th century; it was then led by Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek, both of whom emigrated from Vienna in the 1930s, with Hayek receiving the 1974 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.[1] In the United States, Murray Rothbard became the school's most influential postwar figure, combining its subjectivist economics with a libertarian political philosophy and helping found the Ludwig von Mises Institute (Auburn, Alabama) in 1982 as an institutional home for the tradition.[1]

Methodologically, the school is distinguished by subjectivist value theory, methodological individualism, deductive ("praxeological") reasoning rather than mathematical modeling, and deep skepticism of central economic planning and calculation — most famously in Mises's and Hayek's "socialist calculation" arguments.[1] For this wiki, the Austrian School matters chiefly as the source of the leading theoretical opposition to land value taxation from outside the Marxist and mainstream-neoclassical traditions: Rothbard's 1957 essay is the canonical Austrian objection to Georgism, and Hayek separately raised a narrower assessment-based objection in The Constitution of Liberty (1960) — both catalogued on this wiki's Austrian critique objection page.[2][3]

See Also

• Objection: the Austrian critique of LVT — the objection this school's economists are the source of, with Georgist responses
• Murray Rothbard — the school's most influential 20th-century critic of the single tax
• Friedrich Hayek — the school's Nobel laureate figure, with a milder assessment-based objection to George's proposal
• Rothbard, "The Single Tax: Economic and Moral Implications" (research summary)
• Geolibertarianism — a rival libertarian synthesis that accepts Georgist land ethics against the Austrian mainstream

Sources

1. "Austrian School of Economics," Mises Institute. mises.org/austrian-school/history-austrian-school-economics; corroborated by "Austrian school of economics," Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austrian_school_of_economics — used for the school's founding by Menger (1871), its lineage through Böhm-Bawerk, Wieser, Mises, Hayek, and Rothbard, its core methodological commitments, and the 1982 founding of the Mises Institute.
2. Murray N. Rothbard (1957), "The Single Tax: Economic and Moral Implications" — wiki summary — used for the school's canonical critique of Georgism.
3. F.A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (1960) — wiki summary via Friedrich Hayek page — used for the school's narrower, assessment-focused objection to the single tax.