Richard M. Ebeling

Cooperation in anonymity

ANONYMITY: A STUDY IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF ALFRED SCHUTZ by Maurice Natanson Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986. 172 pp.,

Human Action, Ideal Types, and the Market Process: Alfred Schutz and the Austrian Economists

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Wilhelm Röpke’s Relevance in a Post-Totalitarian World

Schutz and the Austrian Economists emphasized meaning and intentionality for understanding social and market processes. This is clearest in their conception of the logic of action and choice, and the mental process by which social and market agents formulate interpersonal expectations for purposes of successful mutual orientation.

The misdirection of Keynesian aggregates for understanding monetary and cyclical processes

Ebeling portrays Wilhelm Ropke as a leading European advocate of a liberal economic order and a conservative social order built around the institutions of civil society. While not an advocate of laissez-faire, Ropke believed that a competitive market economy was essential to a free and humane society, which was the opposite of the totalitarianisms of the twentieth century. In the postwar period, Ropke considered the welfare state and inflation to be new dangers threatening the freedom and stability of Western societies from within. Ebeling shows that Ropke’s ideas can also be applied to the contemporary dilemma of the continuing growth of the welfare state, the controversy over European economic integration, the crisis of international migration, and the new dangers from religious fanaticism.

Hayek and Mises

Keynes took economic thinking back to a new “dark age.†At its core was its focus on macroeconomic aggregate building blocks: Aggregate Demand, Aggregate Supply, Total Output and Employment, and the average Price Level and Wage Level. This new world of Keynesian or macroeconomics turned its back on the contributions of nearly a century and a half before the appearance of The General Theory. Practitioners of Keynes’s macroeconomic framework threw to the wind the alternative theories developed for understanding many of the subtleties of the intricate and interdependent relationships of a market system, including monetary and cyclical processes.

The Austrian theory of the trade cycle and other essays

There is no single man to whom I owe more intellectually, even though he [Ludwig von Mises] was never my teacher in the institutional sense of the word . . . Although I do owe him a decisive stimulus at a crucial point in my intellectual development, and continuous inspiration through a decade, I have perhaps most profited from his teaching because I was not initially his student at the university, an innocent young man who took his word for gospel, but came to him as a trained economist . . . Though I learned that he was usually right in his conclusions, I was not always satisfied with his arguments, and retained to the end a certain critical attitude which sometimes forced me to build different constructions, which however, to my great pleasure, usually led to the same conclusions. (F.A. Hayek, ‘Coping with ignorance’, 1978, pp. 17–18)