ABSTRACT OF PAPER
Title: The Austrian Economic Society: Its early years, 1918-1955
Author: Klausinger Hansjoerg
In the interwar years a main feature of the Austrian economics community, as in many other disciplines at the time, was the prevalence of “extramural” circles and societies, often more important than academic economics at the University of Vienna. Besides the well-known Mises Circle and the “Geist-Kreis”, organized by F. A. Hayek and J. F.Furth, another forum for debate existed in the Nationalökonomische Gesellschaft (NOeG, i.e. Austrian Economic Society). Up to now, the NOeG “Circle” has been rather neglected in the literature and the little that is known, e.g. about its foundation and early history, largely depends on the personal reminiscences of contemporaries, e.g. of Ludwig Mises and Hayek. In contrast, this contribution attempts to base the historical account on a firmer basis by examining the documents and files in various offices and archives. As it turns out, some of the stories told by contemporaries have been, at least, imprecise if not misleading. Thus, this contribution will concentrate on restoring the record as regards e.g. the foundation of the NOeG in 1918 (by Schumpeter), its almost total lack of activity in the 1920s until the reawakening in 1928 (now led by Hans Mayer and Mises), the changing composition of its board, the papers presented by Austrian economists as well as by visitors from abroad, and ultimately on how it fared during the years of the Nazi regime (1938-45) – infamous for the exclusion of its “non-Aryan” members – and after. Furthermore, the paper aims at reconstructing a list, as complete as possible, of the papers presented at the NOeG in the interwar years, drawing on information from journals where those papers were published (mainly the Zeitschrift für Nationalökonomie) as well as on archival sources (e.g. the diary of Oskar Morgenstern). As a by-product this may also shed some light on the role of Hans Mayer and his uneasy relationship with Mises.
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