| Austrian School | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1906 |
| Died | 1990 |
| Nationality | German |
| Influences | Carl Menger, Friedrich Hayek |
Ludwig Lachmann (1906–1990) was a German economist who became a member of and important contributor to the Austrian School.
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Lachmann earned his Ph.D. from the University of Berlin, where he was enrolled as a graduate student from 1924 to 1933. He first became interested in Austrian economics while spending the summer of 1926 at the University of Zurich. Lachmann moved to England from Germany in 1933, and it is when he was at the London School of Economics in the 1930s as a student and colleague of Friedrich Hayek that he further developed his interest in the Austrian School. In 1948, he moved to Johannesburg, South Africa, where he accepted a professorship at the University of the Witwatersrand and would live out the remainder of his years.[1]
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.
To commemorate Lachmann, his widow established a trust to fund the Ludwig M. Lachmann Research Fellowship at the Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method of the LSE.[2]
He was also a strong advocate of using hermeneutic methods in the study of economic phenomenon.
Lachmann's ideas continue to influence contemporary social science research. Many social scientific disciplines explicitly or implicitly build on "radical subjectivist" Austrian Economics.
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