Expectations and the Meaning of Institutions: Essays in Economics by Ludwig M. Lachmann

by Ludwig Lachmann, Don Lavoie (Editor)

This collection of Ludwig Lachmann's essays challenges contemporary attitudes to economics and seeks to apply an interpretive approach to the discipline. The essays, spanning six decades, address a wide range of issues in microeconomics, macroeconomics, methodology and the history of thought. They outline Lachmann's approach to economics, with the emphasis on the meaning of human institutions in a world of unpredictable change, rather than on quantitative and stable relations. Collecting Lachmann's most important work together for the first time, it includes two essays never previously published.

Genres: Economics

340 pages, Hardcover

First published June 22, 1994

About the author

German economist who became a member of and important contributor to the Austrian School of economics.
He grew to believe that the Austrian School had deviated from Carl Menger's original vision of an entirely subjective economics. To Lachmann, Austrian Theory was to be characterized as an evolutionary, or "genetic-causal", approach against the equilibrium and perfect knowledge found in mainstream Neoclassical economics.
Lachmann's "fundamentalist Austrianism" was rare—few living Austrian economists saw their work as departing from the mainstream. He underscored what he viewed as distinctive from that mainstream: economic subjectivism, imperfect knowledge, the heterogeneity of capital, the business cycle, methodological individualism, alternative cost and "market process". His brand of Austrianism now forms the basis for the "radical subjectivist" strand of Austrian Economics.
His work was highly influential upon later, American developments of the Austrian School.
He was also a strong advocate of using hermeneutic methods in the study of economic phenomena.