Austrian liberal economists aligned their discipline with the humanities and the arts
Evidence
Though the distance between the sinuous forms of Klimt and Schiele and the dry texts of economists might seem vast, Haberler and his fellow Austrian liberals were engaged with something similar. Their questions were basic, and at some level also aesthetic: How should we measure the “complicated latticework of individual economic acts,” and how can we represent it visually? What face of economic actions should we present to the public? Haberler wrote in 1927 that economics was concerned not only with outward actions but also with internal motivations, matters of the “psyche” and the “spirit,” or Geist. For this reason, he said, economics was one of the humanities, or Geisteswissenschaften, a “science of the spirit.” — Quinn Slobodian, Globalists, 179
Categorization
- XREF: Shows how the school conventionally remembered as hyper-rationalist actually framed economics as a ‘science of the spirit’ — useful corrective against one-dimensional portraits of neoliberal thought. — connects to: The Austrian liberal economists grew up amid Vienna’s Secession art movement — Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the…, 178; Science and art converge into ideology when their separation is absolutized; Commons scholarship can bridge ethics and economics through metaphorical bricolage across theories. — Laura Albareda and Alejo Jose G. Sison, Commons Organizing: Embedding Common…, 182 (+1 more)
- SHARE: Send to the reader’s contact working on the intellectual history or philosophy of social science — that early Austrian economics was claimed as a Geisteswissenschaft aligned with the Secession art movement rather than with the hard sciences is a genuinely surprising genealogy.
Broader Connections
- The Austrian liberal economists grew up amid Vienna’s Secession art movement
#exemplifies(0.92) — Quinn Slobodian, Globalists, 178 - Science and art converge into ideology when their separation is absolutized
#expands(0.75)