By Me. Cláudio Fernandes
The School Austrian from Economy It is one of the most important currents of economic science that has been structured since the 19th century. Many of its current representatives claim the association of the ideas of the Austrian School with the ancient tradition of economics developed by the late Spanish scholasticism, especially by the Salamanca school, as well as claim the continuity that the Austrians gave to the economic reflection that French-speaking theorists such as Bastiat , undertaken in the modern era.
This school of economics is so named because its main exponents are of Austrian origin and have developed their reflections in the city of Vienna. The work considered to be the inaugurator of this economic current was “Principles of Political Economy”, by Carl Menger and published in 1871. Menger was responsible for the development of the theory da utility marginal , which exposes the following statement:“the greater the number of units of a good that an individual owns, the lower the value he will give to each additional unit”. Menger and another great exponent of this current, Eugen von Böehm-Bawerk, opposed German-speaking socialist economic theorists, including Marx.
Eugen von Böehm-Bawerk was notable for fully criticizing the theory of exploitation and surplus value developed by Marx in O Capital. One of the main characteristics, both of Menger and of Boehm-Bawerk, was the criticism of theories defending state intervention in the market and of economic policy that did not take into account two essential factors for economic calculation:individual action (that is, Human Action, imbued with variable desires and needs) and time, especially economic cycles deeply affected by periods of scarcity, for example.
The main exponent of this School, Ludwig Von Mises (1881-1973) , was responsible for systematizing the ideas of Menger and other authors who thought of the economy as something complex that should take into account human action and time. From his early works to the treatise “Human Action”, Mises sought to develop an epistemological edifice called praxeology, which understands human action as being “the will set in motion”, that is, the search for satisfaction of needs sets man in motion. and that moves society and the economy. Economic knowledge, then, should, for Mises, be guided not by mathematical constants that are insensitive to human reality, but by the contingent and fallible condition that is inherent to the human being and that is reflected in the market. Only taking into account the triad action-time-knowledge, it would become possible, according to the Austrian School, to understand the economic factor and the outline of some economic calculation.
As one of the main Brazilian representatives of this school, Ubiratan Jorge Iorio, said in his work “Action, time and knowledge”:
“We can summarize the universe of the Austrian School's economic theory in the phrase:'the economy is human action over time, in markets, under conditions of genuine uncertainty'. […] Mises called praxeology (a term originated from praxis) the study of human action, from the point of view of its formal implications. And as action, in the sense given by the Austrian School, it means any act of deliberate (which can either be done or not done), In order to pass from a less satisfactory state to a more satisfactory one, it follows that all economic acts, such as those of exchanging, buying, selling, producing, saving, investing, consuming, lending, borrowing, exporting, importing, etc., are contained in the seminal concept of human action. ” (Iorio, Ubiratan Jorge. Action, Time and Knowledge. São Paulo:Instituto Mises Brasil, 2011. pp.61-62)
Authors like Hayek and Rothbard added important reflections to Mises's theses and continued as great names in twentieth-century economics. In Brazil, diplomat Roberto Fields and the businessman Donald Stewart were two of the most expressive enthusiasts and disseminators of the Austrian School's thought.
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