ABSTRACT
Like all his teachers, colleagues and major students, most notably Carl Menger, Friedrich von Wieser, Joseph Alois Schumpeter, and Friedrich August von Hayek, Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk was concerned with explaining the working of the economic system as a whole. The analyses of the Austrian economists were typically general, not partial. They tried to explain the allocation of resources to alternative ends, the exchange ratios between different commodities and services, and the distribution of the social product among different claimants in terms of given preferences of agents, given technical alternatives of production, and given endowments of agents with productive resources. One of their main concerns was the theory of capital and interest. While the Austrian economists advocated vastly different views as to the causes of interest (an ‘Austrian school’ does not exist in this regard), they were united in the rejection of the socialist doctrine that interest (or profits) was due to the exploitation of workers.
