Preface to the English Edition

When preparations for the 2008 German edition were complete, the prospect of an English translation lay in the far distance. That it would come about so quickly, only shortly after the German edition’s appearance in 2009, is owed to our friend and mentor, Hans-Hermann Hoppe. He not only lent his support and good counsel in the case of the first German edition— now in its second edition—but also brought it to the attention of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, suggesting it publish a translated edition. This development is without doubt a great joy for the authors. Along with it comes the expectation that the recast contents will reach a much wider audience than ever before.

Whoever believes that the honor of having one’s work translated includes the convenient self-contentment of looking on as others labor with the same text one had successfully concerned himself with years before, makes a formidable error. Rendering a comprehensive bibliography in another language in a user-friendly way is alone a task that can scarcely be brought to perfection. All in all, the pitfalls of translation are numerous, unexpected, and theoretically endless, especially in the scientific literature. This is ever more the case when intellectual or political schools of thought are to be conveyed across culture or language groups, preferably without losing meaning. The many discontinuities, violent upheavals, and contradictions in the history of middle Europe, wherein ideas, institutions, and terms were repeatedly in need of turning upside down and reframing, pose unusual problems. Take the question, for example, of whether certain historical personalities should be cited according to their legal names or according to the inherited, aristocratic titles they carried with them to foreign lands. Further, one stumbles upon the limits of language when fundamental, historically authentic but long antiquated German terms are to be rendered in a modern foreign language; or if no English equivalents for the baroque multiplicity of official titles, position descriptions, and service categories of the Austrian bureaucracy or European universities are readily found.

A first translation was undertaken by Robert Grözinger and financed by André Homberg, and appeared as an online version at Mises.org. Upon the wish of the publisher and the authors, it was replaced by the present edition, which Arlene Oost-Zinner attended to in an exemplary manner. Veronika Poinstingl offered significant help with research and correction, as did Rahim Taghizadegan and Gregor Hochreiter of the Institut für Wertewirtschaft (Institute for Value-Based Economics) in Vienna.

The title of the German edition, Die Wiener Schule der Nationalökonomie (The Viennese School of Economics), which emphasized Vienna’s natural role in the history of the “old” Austrian School of Economics, was modified. We ultimately decided that the internationally established, technical term was the most appropriate for the English edition, despite the fact that the Austrian School originated in Vienna and it was there that it experienced its first bloom and first international recognition.

We thank all of our friends, advisors, translators, and supporters for their work and cooperation on this book. Their efforts have made the present edition possible. Special thanks are due our publisher, Douglas French, president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, who actively supported our work. Finally, we wish to extend our sincere and loving thanks to those in closer proximity—Elvira and Veit Georg, and Kerstin—for their abundant support.

Eugen Maria Schulak
Herbert Unterköfler
Vienna, January 2011