9 My Teaching Activities in Vienna

No other calling was as desirable to me as that of a university professor. As a liberal, I recognized early on that I would always be denied a full professorship at a German-speaking university. This was regrettable to me only because it forced me to earn my living through nonacademic work. The title of Privatdozent¹ seemed to offer sufficient opportunity for salutary teaching.

In 1913 I was admitted to the faculty of law at the University of Vienna in the capacity of Privatdozent; in the spring of 1918 I received the title of “professor extraordinarius.”² I made no further advances in my academic career in Austria. I am assuming that my name was dropped from the list of lecturers by the National Socialists in 1938, but they did not consider it worthy of their efforts to inform me.

I lectured during the early years of my academic career. I later limited myself to conducting a two-hour seminar on the problems of economic theory. Its success grew from year to year. Nearly all students who took the study of economics seriously attended my seminar. Admittedly, this was just a small percentage of the many hundreds of students who earned their doctorates in either law or the social sciences every year. But my seminars were overcrowded. A seminar does not customarily have more than 20–25 participants; mine regularly had 40–50.

After Wieser’s retirement and Grünberg’s move to Frankfurt, the three professorships in economics were held by Othmar Spann, Hans Mayer, and Count Ferdinand Degenfeld-Schonburg. Spann was barely acquainted with modern economics; he did not teach economics. Instead he preached universalism, that is, National Socialism. Degenfeld was more poorly versed in the problems of economics; the level of his instruction would have barely sufficed at a trade school of low rank. Mayer was Wieser’s favorite pupil. He knew the works of Wieser and also those of Böhm and Menger. But he himself was without a facility for criticism, had never expressed an original thought, and had never really grasped what economics was all about. The awareness of his sterility and lack of creativity depressed him gravely and caused him to be unstable and malicious. He occupied his time with an open war against Spann and with spiteful intrigues directed against me. His lectures were miserable, and his seminar was not much better. It was not my imagination that the students, young doctors, and the numerous foreigners who studied in Vienna for a semester or two preferred my instruction.

Spann and Mayer were jealous of my success, and tried to alienate my students from me. My students claimed that they were treated uncommonly badly during examinations; I was not able to prove the accuracy of this claim. But I did make it clear to the students in my seminar that I placed no importance on their being officially registered. They made wide use of this allowance. Of the forty to fifty who attended, an average of onlyeight to ten was formally enrolled. The professors also made it difficult for doctoral candidates in the social sciences who wanted to write their dissertations with me. Those seeking the Habilitation³ had to take special care not to be known as students of mine.

Students who had registered for my seminar were denied access to the library of the economics department unless they had registered for a seminar offered by one of the three professors as well. These measures fell entirely short of their purpose. I had seen to it that the library of the Handelskammer had been outfitted with a premier book collection. Modern Anglo-Saxon literature, in particular, was better represented there than it was in the university library.

I could not be bothered by all of these things. More serious was the low level of instruction at the University of Vienna in general. The splendor which had surrounded the university during my student years had long disappeared. Many professors could hardly be called educated men. A spirit foreign to culture and science presided over the faculties of the school of law and the school of humanities. In the first half of the 1920s, I was often invited to meetings with leading professors, the subject matter being the increase in state budget appropriations for the university. I was invited to these meetings because they counted on my recommendation to the financial counselor, Herr Patzauer, an associate of Commissioner Zimmerman. A letter written by a foreign friend of the Viennese culture was read during one of the meetings. In it, the terms “pragmatism,” “behaviorism,” and “revival,” appeared. It became apparent that no one present had ever heard these expressions. On another occasion, it became clear that Benedette Croce’s name was unknown to all, and that of Henri Bergson was unknown to most. Among the participants in these meetings were the president of the Academy of Sciences, Oswald Redlich, a professor of medieval history, and Count Wenzel Gleisbach, of professor of criminal law.

One can thus imagine the average educational level of students. I administered the examinations in economics and finance in the state’s master examinations in the social sciences. The ignorance displayed by the candidates was devastating. More vexing was the fact that the members of the examination committee did not take this failure seriously. I remember having a hard time persuading the committee to fail a candidate who believed that Marx had lived in the eighteenth century, and that the tax on beer was a direct tax. The same student also revealed in his examination in public law, among other things, that the idea of “ministerial accountability” was unknown to him. I would of course one day learn that this kind of ignorance could also be encountered in the highest of places. Austria’s president, Miklas, who had been a secondary school history teacher, once participated in a discussion on the “most favored nation” clause with me and Professor Richard Reisch, the then president of the National Bank. In the course of the discussion I mentioned the Peace of Frankfurt. Miklas inquired as to when and between which countries this treaty had been signed.

There existed in Austria an unbridgeable divide between the vanishingly small group of Viennese intellectuals and the masses of so-called educated people. The educational system had taken such a deep downward turn that it no longer offered young people an education. The majority of doctors of law, of the social sciences, and of philosophy was inadequately trained in their professions, could not think, and was careful to avoid serious books. Of one hundred Viennese attorneys, ten, at the most, could read a journal in English or French. The proportion was much smaller outside of Vienna and among jurists in public service.

I brushed up against these conditions as an official with the Handelskammer. As a teacher I had dealt only with a select group of the most gifted. Even from 1906 to 1912, when Itaught economics to the senior class of the Vienna Commercial Academy for Girls, and during the 1918/1919 academic year, when I offered a course for officers who sought reentry into civilian life at the Vienna Export Academy (later the Institute for World Trade), I dealt primarily with above-average students.

The main emphasis of my teaching activity lay in my Privatseminar. Beginning in 1920, I took care to gather a number of young people around myself every two weeks from October to June. My office in the Handelskammer was spacious enough to accommodate twenty to twenty-five persons. We usually met at seven in the evening and adjourned at ten thirty. In these gatherings we debated, without restraint, the important problems of economics, social philosophy, sociology, logic, and the epistemology of the sciences of human action. Within this circle the younger Austrian School of economics thrived. Within this circle Viennese culture experienced one of its last flowerings.

Here, I was neither teacher nor seminar leader. I was merely a primus inter pares,⁴ who received more than gave.

Everyone belonging to the circle came voluntarily, guided only by his drive for knowledge. They came as students, but over the course of the years became friends. Later, even some of my contemporaries joined the circle. Foreign scholars visiting Vienna were welcome guests and eagerly took part in the goings on.

The Privatseminar had no official standing or function whatsoever. It was connected to neither the university nor the Handelskammer. It was and remained forever the circle of my much younger friends. Outsiders knew nothing of our gatherings; they saw only the published works of individual participants.

We cultivated neither school, nor community, nor sect. It was through contradiction rather than agreement that we supported each other. But in one thing we were united: in the desire to further the sciences of human action. Each was free to go the way his own law guided him. We never organized or took on anything resembling the foul “goings on” of the imperial and postwar German “scientists.” We never considered publishing a journal or collection of works. Each did his own work, as is befitting a thinker. Still, each one of us labored for the circle, seeking no reward other than the recognition—not the applause—of friends.

There was greatness in this unpretentious exchange of ideas; in it we all found happiness and satisfaction.

Beside the Privatseminar, there was yet a second association of friends of economic inquiry. Since March 12, 1908, Karl Pribram, Emil Perels, Else Cronbach and I had held regular gatherings dedicated to the discussion of economic problems and fundamental questions in related fields. Before long, the circle grew. The lovely conference Handelskammer of the Zentralstelle für Wohnungsreform⁵ provided a dignified setting. When I was away from Vienna during the war, the admission of new members was handled carelessly. The harmony of the proceedings had been disturbed, and by the time I returned home, gatherings had ceased. Immediately after the war I sought to revive the group. In order to avoid coming into conflict with the authorities, however, we had to establish a formal association, which we called the Nationalökonomische Gesellschaft⁶. A short while later we began having difficulties yet again and it became clear that cooperation with Spann was not possible. In time we succeeded in excluding Spann, and the society was able to resume its activities.

Anyone demonstrating genuine interest in economic problems could be elected to membership in the society. We held evening meetings at irregular intervals in the conference room of the banking association, where society members and out-of-town guests gave lectures, always followed by lively discussion. The nucleus of the society’s membership was formed by participants of my Privatseminar; but standing alongside these were a set of outstanding economists such as Richard Schüller, Siegfried Strakosch von Feldringen, Victor Graetz, and many others.

As the Gesellschaft did not want to be an affront to university professors, it felt it necessary to make Hans Mayer its president. I, myself, was vice president. When I left for Geneva in 1934, after which I only returned to Vienna for short visits, the Gesellschaft slowly began to fade away.

On March 19, 1938, Hans Mayer wrote to all members issuing notice that all non-Aryan members were to take leave of the Nationalökonomische Gesellschaft, “in consideration of the changed circumstances in German Austria, and in view of the respective laws now also applicable to this state.”

This was the last that was heard of the society.

List of regular Privatseminar participants.

• Ludwig Bettelheim-Gabillon
• Victor Bloch
• Martha Stefanie Braun (Stephanie Browne)
• Friedrich Engel von Janosi
• Walter Fröhlich
• Gottfried von Haberler
• Friedrich A. von Hayek
• Marianne von Herzfeld
• Felix Kaufmann
• Rudolf Klein
• Helene Lieser-Berger
• Rudolf Löbl
• Gertrud Lovasy
• Fritz Machlup
• Ilse Mintz-Schüller
• Oskar Morgenstern
• Elly Offenheimer-Spiro
• Adolf G. Redlich-Redley
• Paul N. Rosenstein-Rodan
• Karol Schlesinger
• Fritz Schreier
• Alfred Schütz
• Richard von Strigl
• Erich Vögelin (Eric Voegelin)
• Robert Waelder
• Emanuel Winternitz