I have argued with Pete on this before -- but Hayek is very clear
is staying that that Carl Menger had more influence on Hayek as an
economist than anyone else. Hayek says, among other things, that it
was reading Menger's _Principles_ that made him an economists. And
it is not an incidental fact that Hayek was editing Menger's collected
works just at the time Hayek achieved his own revolutionary break-
through in reconceptualizing the explanatory problem of economics, and
the contingent causal explanation for this empirical explanatory problem --
results first announced in Hayek's well-known paper "Economics and
Knowledge". And clearly Hayek's capital theory, and his monetary economics
is in the tradition of Knut Wicksell, owing much more to Wicksell in its
conceptions, tasks, and constructions than to Bohm-Bawerk or Mises.
A Web site family tree of economic relationships won't diffinitively
answer as a fact of the matter who owes what to whom, and why the current
academic economic situation looks as it does today, but it would spark
questions about this issue -- and would help challange old myths, like the
one I would argue Peter tells about Hayek and his having been influenced
by Mises more than by any other scholar. Mises open up Hayek's eyes to
two or three of the central problems that Hayek worked on in economics, but
in working on these problems, Hayek did so from a Menger/Wieser/Wicksell
perspective, and his challenge was how to provide adequate answers for
questions/problems sharply posed by Mises, but not adequately answered by
him, and often these Mises questions had their roots elsewhere, e.g. in
the work of Wicksell, Mises, Wieser, Bohm-Bawerk, and Menger (i.e. the
knowledge problem, the relation of equilibrium time constructs to monetary
economics and the trade cycle, the problem of socialist calculation, etc.)
Greg Ransom
Dept. of Philosophy
UC-Riverside
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edu, that should be!
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