This book intends to renovate the view of social sciences in the German-speaking world. It explores the intellectual tension in the social science in Austria and Germany in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. It deals with how the emergence of the new school (Austrian School) changed the focus of social science in the German speaking world, and how it prepared the introduction of an evolutionary perspective in economics, politics, and sociology. Based on (mostly hitherto unknown) primary evidence, this development is lively described in a series of encounters and decisions by each social scientists.

Reviews

"For more than twenty years I have benefitted from the careful, archivally-based research of Professor Yagi on the Austrian and German Historical Schools of Economics. Each of the chapters in this volume represents an original contribution to our understanding of the origin and development of these schools. Taken as a whole, it is an exemplar for how to do substantive history of economic thought."

Bruce Caldwell, Research Professor of Economics and Director of the Center for the History of Political Economy, Duke University

Contents

1. General Introduction 2. Portrait of an Austrian Liberal: Max Menger's Liberal Position 3. Carl Menger as Journalist and Tutor of Crown Prince 4. Carl Menger's Grundsätze in the Making 5. Carl Menger and Historicism in German economics 6. Anonymous History in Austrian Economic Thought 7. Alternative Equilibrium Vision in Austrian Economics 8. Karl Knies, Max Weber, and Austrians: a Heidelberg connection 9.Determinateness and Indeterminateness in Schumpeter’s Economic Sociology: The origin of social evolution 10. Evolutionist Turn of the Marx-Weber Problem