ABSTRACT
Werner Sombart is generally considered an antagonist of the Austrian school. In his early writings he had avowedly been a sympathizer towards Karl Marx’s theories as well as of the social democratic movement, although these sympathies had always been ambiguous and mixed with serious criticism of various aspects of Marxism and socialism.1 In discussing Sombart’s later anti-socialist book Der proletarische Sozialismus, Ludwig von Mises stated that Sombart could not be considered an opponent of Marxist theory. Sombart’s teachings were – even if subconsciously – built on Marxist ground (Mises [1929] 1976: 117), although his Marxist concepts were not of the naive materialistic kind of the founders but “of a more refined form which he [Sombart] and his like-minded have given to the doctrine” (ibid.: 118).
