From Austroliberalism to Anschluss : Oskar Morgenstern and the Viennese Economists in the 1930’s. Note de recherche

This paper provides an account of the economics community in interwar Vienna from the perspective of Oskar Morgenstern. Beginning at the close of the 1920’s with his return to Vienna from study abroad, and ending in 1938 with the Anschluss of Austria, it retraces Morgenstern’s activities and thinking, and explores his relationships with Karl Menger, Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Abraham Wald and the Rockefeller Foundation. Morgenstern emerges from the decade as something of a maverick in the Austrian School, actively promoting the use of mathematics in economics and critical of any attempt to use economics to justify political stances, including the liberalism of Mises and Hayek.