Friedrich August von Hayek, “Richard von Strigl” (1944)

Hayek’s obituary presents Richard von Strigl as a teacher and scholar whose death threatened the continuity of the Austrian School in Vienna. Moving from his institutional position through his publications to a pupil’s testimony and a final assessment of his legacy, Hayek locates Strigl’s importance in the transmission of an intellectual tradition as much as in original research. A former participant in Boehm-Bawerk’s seminar, Strigl connected younger economists with that tradition while conducting his academic work alongside demanding duties at Vienna’s Unemployment Insurance Board.

Most of the young economists who graduated in Vienna in the years immediately preceding the present war owed more to him than to any other teacher; and it was because he gave more of his time to the Hochschule für Welthandel than to the University that during those years the former tended to become the more important centre for the teaching of economics.

This judgment makes teaching a force shaping the institutional geography of economics. Hayek’s account of the books similarly emphasizes intellectual influence and expository achievement. He identifies the 1923 Die ökonomischen Kategorien und die Organisation der Wirtschaft as a subtle methodological study, the 1926 Angewandte Lohntheorie as an innovative contribution to applied wage theory, and the 1934 Kapital und Produktion as an unusually clear treatment of a difficult subject. He calls Strigl’s 1937 introduction probably the best modern introduction to economic theory available in German, while noting its deliberate exclusion of some newer theoretical tools. The obituary evaluates these contributions without reconstructing their substantive arguments.

The testimony of Strigl’s pupil J. Steindl shifts the emphasis from scholarly accomplishment to the ethical and political significance of teaching. Steindl recalls liberal thought as an alternative to the reactionary nationalism of Austrian academic life:

His personality contributed to this: humane and cultured, a good pedagogue and a great friend to his pupils, he had the mark of a great teacher who is able to transmit permanent values which stretch beyond the errors of the time.

Here intellectual inheritance includes habits of judgment and conduct, not merely economic doctrine. Steindl connects Strigl’s silence after the invasion of Austria with both illness and his estrangement from opportunistic political conversions, though he does not establish a single explanation. Hayek preserves that testimony as evidence of a scholarly character whose influence exceeded formal recognition.

The conclusion contrasts Strigl’s modest public standing with the hopes invested in him. His professorial title and honorary doctorate from Utrecht did not bring broad renown, but his continued presence in Vienna had carried significance for colleagues dispersed by war and political upheaval.

Yet with his death disappears the figure on whom one's hope for a preservation of the tradition of Vienna as a centre of economic teaching and of a future revival of the "Austrian School" had largely rested.

The obituary’s central claim is thus about the vulnerability of intellectual continuity: a school survives through particular teachers, relationships, and places, and their loss cannot be measured by publications or honors alone.