Introduction

By HENRY HAZLITT

Dr. L. Albert Hahn has long enjoyed a high reputation in Europe, as well as among German-speaking and German-reading economists throughout the world. But linguistic barriers, unfortunately, are still real. Economic thought is not yet an international unit. It is still broken to a large extent into nationalistic or linguistic compartments, which tend to influence each other only sluggishly and often with a deplorable time lag. That is the only reason why Albert Hahn needs any introduction to American readers.

In the following pages some of his recent thinking is made available for the first time in book form in English. We owe this not to a translator, but (as with other talented writers in the forced exile of recent years) to Dr. Hahn’s own acquisition of the skill to compose in a second language since he has made his home in New York.

It is unnecessary for me to give here any exposition of Dr. Hahn’s contributions to economic thought, or even a biographical sketch. Both tasks have been done adequately by others. It is enough to point out that Dr. Hahn enjoys an enormous advantage as an analyst of Keynesian fallacies. As he has reminded us himself: “all that is wrong and exaggerated in Keynes I said much earlier and more clearly.” This intellectual head start enables him to approach and dissect the errors of the Keynesians on their own ground and on some of their own premises.

Dr. Hahn got his education in a hard school. He lived through the dreadful inflation in Germany. He witnessed other European inflations at first hand. He saw the breakdown in practice of the specious theories that had supported those inflations. It was not merely increased scholarship and thought, but his daily experiences as a business man and as a banker, that led him to desert his pre-Keynesian Keynesianism.

There is no more important task for the economic theorist today than to disentangle the network of confusion and error that now goes under the name of the Keynesian Revolution. Until this work has been thoroughly done, clarity and real progress in economics will not be possible. There is no more sophisticated, penetrating and thorough guide in this task than Albert Hahn.

New York, October, 1948