ABSTRACT
I have chosen subjectivism as my topic for this paper and surely few will question the appropriateness and importance of this topic for an Austrian conference. Austrian economics has recendy lost one of its great modern masters, Friedrich A. Hayek. It is therefore perhaps particularly fitting to open this paper with Hayek’s often quoted tribute to the role of subjectivism in the growth of economic understanding. It is, he wrote, ‘probably no exaggeration to say that every important advance in economic theory during the last hundred years was a further step in the constant application of subjectivism’ (Hayek 1955: 31). Our thesis will be that the subjectivism that developed out of those pioneering insights of Carl Menger who founded the Austrian school, has come to mean entirely different things to different doctrinal traditions within modern economics - each of which derives substantially or wholly from the Mengerian tradition. In calling for the endorsement of that one variety of subjectivism which informs modern Austrian economics, we shall argue that it is this variety that most faithfully preserves and deepens Menger’s own fundamental insights.
