HCJ-2

The next HCJ-2 topi is the (second) Austrian School of Economics (and to a lesser extent, philosophy) - this is Hayek, Von Mises, etc on economics and politics. The reading is The Road to Serfdom by Hayek. They are marked by a trenchant rejection of Marxist economics and (to a lesser extent) Kantian metaphysics. They are thought of as being 'right wing' (in the US - 'neo-cons' in the uk 'neo-liberal') but they are not conservative in the normal way (ie Hegelian, nationalistic, religious) because they are trenchantly anti-nationalist and many are anti-religious and very, very anti-sentimental and anti-romantic movement (they are like Adam Smith and David Hume in these respects). They are anti-democratic in so far as they think goods and services should be allocated by an abstraction they call 'The Free Market' (something like Adam Smith's 'hidden hand') but at the same time anti-fascist. They see no real distinction between fascism and socialism. The video here is a pretty good exposition on Von Misses, which is a bit of a hagiography and with the wrong music in the background (it is Austrian music - but the wrong thing - the important Austrian music from the same intellectual mileu should be de-centred tonal serialism which is the very essence of Modernism (itself very much a movement centre on Vienna - Freud, etc)(such as Webern or Berg or the later Schoenberg - logical music - worth listening to here, out of interest rather than pleasure since it is some of the most technically high brow music ever composed.)

A related theme in philosophy is Logical Positivism, which is more politcally radical but is really from the same mileu and sort of bridges the individualism and anti-metaphysics of Von Mises to the Avante Garde anti-bourgoise avantgardism of the the Bauhaus (as previously discussed).

Anyway welcome to the world of "The Austrians":