Friedrich August von Hayek, Ewald Schams

Hayek’s Ewald Schams, presented here in its 2013 English version, is a short commemorative preface intended for a collected edition of Schams’s essays. The editorial note identifies the German preface as written in 1980 and credits the translation to Dr. Grete Heinz. Hayek combines personal recollection, intellectual genealogy, and an assessment of a scholarly legacy whose survival is incomplete. His central claim is that Schams’s importance cannot be measured by academic appointments or large publications: his theoretical knowledge, contributions to discussion, and carefully worked essays made him a significant figure in interwar Viennese economics.

The opening places Schams alongside Richard Strigl and Leo Schönfeld in an intermediate generation between Mises, Schumpeter, and their contemporaries and the younger economists who included Hayek, Haberler, Machlup, Morgenstern, and Rosenstein-Rodan. This genealogy establishes Schams’s place within a network of intellectual exchange. A professional civil servant rather than a university economist, he participated through lectures and organised discussions. Hayek recalls his reserve, military bearing, and breadth of knowledge, while admitting how little the younger participants knew about his other interests and background.

Schams’s education also complicates any simple identification of the Viennese circle with a single theoretical tradition:

Schams differed from his contemporaries especially in that he had received his education at the University of Graz under Schumpeter and was thus in fact Schumpeter’s only Austrian disciple; he had therefore been introduced from the very beginning to the ideas of both the Lausanne and the Austrian school.

For Hayek, this combination helps explain Schams’s authority in discussion. His value lay partly in familiarity with different theoretical approaches, rather than merely allegiance to one school. The portrait consequently makes the informal institutions of economics—the Economic Society and, in Hayek’s qualified recollection, Mises’s seminar—central to understanding his influence.

The second movement turns from intellectual presence to written achievement. Hayek qualifies his account with “To the best of my knowledge,” observing that Schams never undertook a major scholarly work. The assessment that follows makes small scale compatible with exceptional care:

His essays are small, finely polished jewels that were the product of extremely conscientious work, concerned at first mainly with contemporary writings.

The metaphor supplies the preface’s rationale for renewed attention: concentrated essays deserve preservation and rereading. A Rockefeller fellowship subsequently enabled an extended stay in Paris, and possibly Italy, during which Schams became a selective collector and increasingly interested in the history of economic theory. Hayek’s introduction to antiquarian booksellers had a lasting consequence. After Schams’s death, he acquired the collection of eighteenth-century French economic works from Schams’s widow; it later entered the University of Salzburg as part of Hayek’s library.

The final movement explains the connection between these historical interests and Schams’s theoretical concerns:

Schams’s growing interest in the history of economic theory was primarily an outgrowth of his interest in economic methodology.

Hayek distinguishes knowledge of competing theoretical schools from strength in philosophical questions. Schams’s particular expertise concerned German- and French-language authors, although he also knew English writings. History here becomes a resource for methodological understanding, grounded in acquaintance with the diversity of economic thought.

The conclusion remains deliberately uncertain. Following his colleagues’ emigration, Schams appears to have become isolated; a long gap separates his earlier articles from a major essay published in 1950, possibly written much earlier. His widow reported no further manuscripts, and Hayek acknowledges that the emigrants did not see him again after the war. These limits prevent a continuous account of his later intellectual life. The preface’s relevance lies instead in recovering a less visible participant in Austrian economics and directing readers back to the surviving essays: Hayek’s renewed encounter with them convinced him that they still offered much to learn.