Friedrich August von Hayek, Ernst Mach (1838–1916) and the Social Sciences in Vienna

Hayek’s translated symposium discussion contribution, originally published in 1967 and presented here in its 2013 English version, offers a retrospective account of Ernst Mach’s influence on Viennese intellectual life. Its scope is explicitly testimonial: Hayek recalls his university years between 1918 and 1921 to show that Mach’s importance preceded the formation of the Vienna Circle around Moritz Schlick in 1922. The central argument is that Mach provided an indispensable resource for questioning metaphysics and clarifying scientific method, particularly in the social sciences, without necessarily securing agreement with his positivism.

My task is limited to testifying briefly about the pervasiveness of Ernst Mach’s influence in Vienna even before the ‘Vienna circle’ around Moritz Schlick² was formed in 1922.

This opening establishes both the historical claim and the limits of Hayek’s evidence. He describes an intellectual atmosphere through remembered encounters, reading, and debate. Vienna was already receptive to a philosophy oriented toward natural science, represented by teachers including Heinrich Gomperz, Adolf Stöhr, and Robert Reininger. Hayek cannot precisely reconstruct his first encounter with Mach after returning from the war in November 1918, but his reading record confirms an early engagement. Mach’s writings helped redirect his education: although formally enrolled in law, he divided his attention roughly equally between economics and psychology, leaving legal study peripheral.

The contribution moves from this autobiographical starting point to earlier signs of Mach’s presence in social-scientific discussion. Hayek recalls the influence of Mach on Schumpeter’s first work in 1908 and Wieser’s sustained examination of whether Mach’s ideas could apply to the social sciences. Wittgenstein’s contemporaneous engagement supplies another indication that this influence extended beyond a single discipline. These examples support Hayek’s suggestion that the postwar enthusiasm he experienced had substantial prewar antecedents.

Political controversy intensified that interest. Lenin’s attack on Mach and Friedrich Adler’s defence of him made philosophical questions a subject of dispute between Communists and left socialists. Those debates also reached non-socialists such as Hayek. Opposition to Othmar Spann’s metaphysically oriented economics gave Mach’s arguments a further use: they offered a means of resisting conceptual obscurity. The editorial notes qualify Hayek’s recollection here, correcting his statement that Spann succeeded Wieser: Spann was Wieser’s colleague, while Hans Mayer took Wieser’s chair. This correction matters because the contribution’s authority rests on recollection rather than a systematically verified institutional history.

Hayek distinguishes the attraction of Mach’s criticism from acceptance of the political and methodological programmes associated with it. Otto Neurath’s appropriation of positivism particularly troubled those who did not share his socialism.

Neurath hoped to convert Mach’s positivism—by a very rough approximation—into a physicalism or, as he called it at times, a scientism.

The qualification “by a very rough approximation” marks Hayek’s distance from this conversion. Mach’s anti-metaphysical arguments remained valuable, but they did not automatically justify extending the procedures or vocabulary of physical science to every field. Hayek describes a selective engagement: he and his contemporaries sought to identify what positivism could contribute to the social sciences and humanities without accepting it whole. Mach thus functioned as a starting point for methodological discrimination, not simply as the founder of a doctrine to be adopted.

The most substantial conceptual passage concerns Hayek’s early psychology. Mach encouraged him to investigate the physiology of the senses, producing a youthful study that eventually developed into The Sensory Order, identified in the notes as his 1952 book. Yet the immediate stimulus was scepticism about Mach’s phenomenalism, particularly its treatment of pure, simple sensations as the elements of perception. Hayek compares his own insight with Mach’s recognition that Kantian things in themselves could be dispensed with.

I had the revelation that Mach’s concept of “simple and pure sensations” in his sensory psychology was actually meaningless.

Hayek’s objection turns on the explanatory role of relations. If the connections among sensations account for the structure of experience, the supposedly elementary sensations no longer provide an independent foundation. He therefore proposes eliminating them and understanding the sensory world through relations themselves. This is the contribution’s clearest example of influence through criticism: Mach’s questioning of unnecessary philosophical entities enables Hayek to question a basic entity within Mach’s own psychology.

The closing movement broadens this personal example. For young students dissatisfied with orthodox philosophy, Hayek remembers Mach as the most viable alternative. Avenarius proved inaccessible, whereas Mach opened routes toward Helmholtz, Poincaré, and, in Karl Popper’s more systematic pursuit, contemporary science and philosophy. The significance of these routes lay especially in disciplines whose claims to scientific standing remained uncertain.

I only wanted to suggest that Ernst Mach played an especially large role not only in the narrower realm of the natural sciences but specifically in disciplines where the methodological or scientific character of their theory was even far shakier than in the natural sciences and where there was an even greater compulsion to clarify what science really was.

Hayek finally separates this methodological importance from Mach’s status as a political symbol. He acknowledges the predominantly socialist membership of the Ernst Mach society but rejects the inference that it was therefore politically active, describing its political coloration as a pretext for suppression under Dollfuss. The contribution’s relevance lies in this distinction between intellectual influence, doctrinal assent, and political affiliation. It documents how Mach could shape a non-socialist economist’s development precisely by furnishing questions and critical resources that ultimately led beyond Mach’s own answers.