ABSTRACT
Shortly before I received the invitation to the visiting professorship in London, I had once half jokingly remarked to my wife that if I could plan my career, I should wish now first to go to London as professor, return to Vienna after a few years, first as professor and later as president of the Austrian Nationalbank, and finally, when my active work as scholar or administrator was completed, to return to London as Austrian minister. Except for the first step—which was the most unlikely and yet the only one to come true—this was, in the then state of the world, by no means an unreasonable aspiration and would have given me that sort of life on the borderline of purely academic and public work which probably, in the later part of my life, I should have found most satisfactory—even if at times I might have longed for the more complete seclusion of a purely academic life. That in fact I was led into the life almost of a pure scholar was not entirely a matter of inclination and would certainly not have happened if I had stayed in Austria. But transferred into an entirely different environment, my factual knowledge was inevitably so much inferior to that of my colleagues that I got pushed rather further than was entirely to my liking into an entirely theoretical and bookish field.
