AN AUSTRIAN PERSPECTIVE ON THE HISTORY OF ECONOMIC THOUGHT

“THE CONCRETE REALIZATION that important economic knowledge had been lost over time came to me*** from absorbing the great revision of the scholastics that developed in the 1950s and 1960s. The pioneering revision came dramatically in Schumpeter's great History of Economic Analysis, and was developed in the works of Raymond de Roover, Marjorie Grice-Hutchinson and John T. Noonan. It turns out that the scholastics were not simply 'medieval', but began in thethirteenth century and expanded and flourished through the sixteenth and into the seventeenth century.

FAR FOM BEING COST-OF-PRODUCTION MORALISTS, the scholastics believed that the just price was established on the 'common, estimate' of the free market. Not only that: far from being naïve labour or cost-of-production value theorists, the scholastics may be considered 'proto-Austrians', with a sophisticated subjective utility theory of value and price. Furthermore, some of the scholastics were far superior to current formalist microeconomics in developing a 'proto-Austrian' dynamic theory of entrepreneurship. Moreover, in 'macro', the scholastics, beginning with Buridan and culminating in the sixteenth century Spanish scholastics, worked out an 'Austrian' rather than monetarist supply and demand theory of money and prices, including interregional money flows, and even a purchasing power parity theory of exchange rates.

IT SEEMS TO BE NO ACCIDENT that this dramatic revision of our knowledge of the scholastics was brought to American economists, not generally esteemed for their depth of knowledge of Latin, by European-trained economists steeped in Latin, the language in which the scholastics wrote. This simple point emphasizes another reason for loss of knowledge in the modern world: the insularity in one's own language (particularly severe in the English-speaking countries) that has, since the Reformation, ruptured the once Europe-wide community of scholars. One reason why continental economic thought has often exerted minimal, or at least delayed, influence in England and the United States is simply because these works had not been translated into

English.

FOR ME***, THE IMPACT of scholastic revisionism was complemented and strengthened by the work, during the same decades, of the German-born 'Austrian' historian, Emil Kauder. Kauder revealed that the dominant economic thought in France and Italy during the seventeenth and especially the eighteenth centuries was also 'proto-Austrian', EMPHASIZING SUBJECTIVE UTILITY AND RELATIVE SCARCITY AS THE DETERMINANTS OF VALUE. From this groundwork, Kauder proceeded to a startling insight into the role of Adam Smith that, however, follows directly from his own work and that of the scholastic revisionists: that Smith, far from being the founder of economics, was virtually the reverse. On the contrary, Smith actually took the sound, and almost fully developed, proto-Austrian subjective value tradition, and tragically shunted economics on to a false path, a dead end from which the Austrians had to rescue economics a century later.

INSTEAD OF SUBJECTIVE VALUE, entrepreneurship, and emphasis on real market pricing and market activity, Smith dropped all this and replaced it with a labour theory of value and a dominant focus on the unchanging long-run 'natural price' equilibrium, a world where entrepreneurship was assumed out of existence. Under Ricardo, this unfortunate shift in focus was intensified and systematized.

IF SMITH WAS NOT THE CREATOR of economic theory, neither was he the founder of laissez-faire in political economy. Not only were the scholastics analysts of, and believers in, the free market and critics of government intervention; but the French and Italian economists of the eighteenth century were even more laissez-faire-oriented than Smith, who introduced numerous waffles and qualifications into what had been, in the hands of Turgot and others, an almost pure championing of laissez-faire. It turns out that, rather than someone who should be venerated as creator of modern economics or of laissezfaire, Smith was closer to the picture portrayed by Paul Douglas in the 1926 Chicago commemoration of the Wealth of Nations: A NECESSARY PRECURSOR OF KARL MARX."

***Autor: Murray N. Rothbard [primeira edição, Mises Institute. O trecho foi retirado da introdução ao primeiro volume e começa  no último parágrafo da página x indo até o primeiro da xii]