ABSTRACT
The older Austrian economists used thought experiments to rule out certain claims and conjectures about the organization of society, especially those advanced by the socialist writers. Contemporary Austrian writers hark back to Carl Menger’s Principles of Economics for insights about information, ignorance and uncertainty, but they have kept a cautious distance from the several classic imaginary constructions that have guided the Austrian school throughout much of its history. The demise of the benevolent dictator model after 1941 did not put an end to imaginary experiments in Austrian economics. The construct of the evenly rotating economy emerged in Ludwig von Mises’ Human Action and became a leading feature of Austrian economics in America. As in Friedrich von Wieser and Eugen von Bohm-Bawerk, the purpose of F. A. Hayek’s invocation of the benevolent dictator model is simply to fix our attention on important matters that must accompany rational economic calculation regardless of who owns the means of production.
