A Young Man in Vienna — Life in Early 20th-Century Austria and Its Possible Impact on the Initial Development of Hayek’s Thought

Abstract

This chapter examines a particular aspect of what Bruce Caldwell (2004:7), in the introduction of his Hayek biography, calls the ‘final challenge for the Hayek interpreter’. First of all, this chapter will ask why Caldwell expressed this definition. Secondly and more specifically, this chapter will investigate whether any specific aspects can be identified in the conditions of early 20th-century Vienna, where Hayek took the first intellectual and professional steps that may have evoked in him some of the fundamental questions that subsequently inspired him to produce such an impressively broad oeuvre. Hayek and his work were, of course, not in any particular way an inevitable product of his time, but throughout his career he always explicitly and deliberately engaged himself in many of his publications with contemporary developments. This could suggest that from the very beginning he would have felt a strong need to keep his scientific work closely connected to the concrete problems of his time.