The Marginal Revolutionaries: How Austrian Economists Fought the War of Ideas by Janek Wasserman (review)

"We are all Austrians now," Rep. Ron Paul famously claimed after his third-place finish in the 2012 Iowa Republican caucuses. Janek Wasserman relates this anecdote to illustrate how under the radar, yet quite influential, the free-market Austrian School has remained since its founding. His comprehensive yet concise work expertly details its intellectual origins and evolution over the intervening century as it split into competing branches and centers of influence. He also convincingly demonstrates the mechanism of the "appropriation of the idea of the Austrian School for ideological and political purposes" (273) in more recent decades as the School's intellectual lodestars passed from the scene but the desire for sociopolitical relevance and influence remained.

Wasserman first made his mark in Austrian Studies in 2017 with the publication of Black Vienna: The Radical Right in the Red City, 1918-1938. That lengthy analysis of the far-right antagonists of Austromarxist "Red" Viennese filled an important lacuna in interdisciplinary Englishlanguage fin-de-siècle research. Marginal Revolutionaries does the same over a longer stretch of Austrian intellectual history by first stressing diverse aspects of the societal environment in which what we know today as Austrian economics came to fruition. For while its founding is generally acknowledged to be 1871, the year in which Carl Menger's Principles of Economics and its theory of marginal utility was published, the School thereafter always had several intellectual leaders who were often at odds with each other as to the School's prescription for public policy and how broad its interdisciplinary nature should reach.

The first two chapters broadly contextualize the genesis of the Austrian school in prewar Vienna's "Founder's Period"—the last great bourgeois flourishing from the 1870s through the turn of the century. From there it chronicles the rise of the School's free-market opposition to Austromarxism and the height of the School's domestic influence in the late Habsburg and interwar period. The third and fourth chapters illustrate the effects of the Nazi rise to power on the School's free-market approach, the exile of the School's leading lights abroad, and the resultant rethinking of the methods by which academic and political influence could be gained in the service of free-market economics elsewhere in free Europe and the New World. Chapters Five and Six discuss the growing influence of social science and humanities disciplines on the School as it found new funding sources, foundations, and favor in the Anglophone world, and how this moved the School away from its Central European origins and theoretical concerns. The last chapter—perhaps most relvant to the majority of readers, and thus too brief—outlines the contemporary legacy of the Austrian School, including its appropriation by the Alt-Right.

Wasserman's meticulous research and narrative bring us several important insights. Among the most useful is the repeated demonstration—with different examples over its 125-year history—that the Austrian School must be seen foremost not as a bounded methodology of economic theorizing, but rather as an evolving, contradictory, and multidisciplinary movement seeking influence differently in changing sociopolitical contexts. Paraphrasing Voltaire, Wasserman makes a strong case that the object of analysis is neither properly "…Austrian, nor a school nor economics" (6). Another important aspect is that the longevity and influence of the Austrian School has often been due not to the free interplay of the laissezfaire marketplace of ideas that Austrian proponents claim is the iron law of authentic success. Rather, its longevity is likely due to a wellcoordinated infrastructure of foundations and private donors with a personal stake in specific policy outcomes. Finally, Wasserman's careful archival research also sheds new light on the personalities of key Austrian School figures, showing that public and vitriolic feuds carried on within the School masked a generally supportive environment in the mission of advancing free-market ideology. Perhaps the best example is evidence that two bitter rivals in public, Ludwig...