Jesus Huerta de Soto, Book review of The Austrian school: Market order and entrepreneurial creativity

Abstract

I imagine that Jesus Huerta de Soto’s new book The Austrian School: Market Order and Entrepreneurial Creativity must have been extremely difficult to write. He explains his goal for the text as: “we shall explain the fundamental principles of the dynamic, Austrian concept of the market, and we will point out the main differences between the Austrian perspective and the neoclassical paradigm” (p. ix). In short, de Soto tries to respond to the popular but pesky question, “what is so special about Austrian economics?” I say that this book must have been difficult to write not because this question is difficult to answer. On the contrary, de Soto does an excellent job surveying the many distinctive features of Austrian economics. Communicating the uniqueness of Austrianism comes easy to de Soto, for he has clearly researched widely in the tradition and mastered its positions. Instead, I imagine that this book was a great challenge to put together because there are so many different ways that the material could be structurally organized and presented. The creative challenge of this book was not a matter of conducting original research or formalizing original theoretical insights. Instead, it was likely a process of synthesizing a broad swath of expertise (for which the reader is lucky to have an author like de Soto) into a clear and compact presentation. When answering, “what exactly is unique about Austrian economics?” one could concentrate on the uniquely aprioristic and methodological foundations of the tradition: deductive reasoning, the analytical compatibility between means and ends, meaningful distinctions through Aristotelian essentialism, and the use of hypothetical constructs and counterfactuals. Or one could emphasize the unique theoretical contributions of Austrian economics: the knowledge and calculative roles of market prices, the impossibility of socialism, Rev Austrian Econ DOI 10.1007/s11138-009-0101-9