Ludwig M. Lachmann, Review of This Age of Fable (1943)

Lachmann’s review of Gustav Stolper’s This Age of Fable: The Political and Economic World We Live In combines praise for its assault on political and economic myths with a pointed criticism of its historical limits. His opening establishes the methodological stakes: people commonly inherit their understanding of the world rather than construct it through independent reflection.

Experience, so far from warranting the empiricist view, teaches us that most people take their world-picture ready-made from somebody else.

This dependence gives the makers of simplifying formulas enormous influence. For Lachmann, responsible historical inquiry must penetrate those formulas to recover the human purposes and plans they conceal. His distinction between ideologies and ideas makes the review more than an appraisal of Stolper’s conclusions: it identifies historical understanding with the reconstruction of action rather than the reproduction of contemporary public opinion.

Lachmann welcomes Stolper’s attack on fashionable explanations across the political spectrum. The book challenges individualist and collectivist narratives, the gold myth, the opposition between production for profit and production for use, and claims about inflation and poverty amid plenty.

In this valiant struggle, hitting out impartially both Right and Left, he is brilliantly successful.

Such impartiality does not imply political neutrality. Lachmann locates Stolper’s sympathies in liberal conservatism, emphasizing its historical memory and resistance to stark ideological alternatives. He then follows the book into its second part, where international myths concerning national resources, war, Britain, Soviet planning, Germany, and dictatorship receive scrutiny. Although written mainly for Americans, evidently during 1941, the book retains immediate relevance in 1943: Lachmann especially values its contribution to Anglo-American understanding and its warning against enthusiasm founded on inadequately interpreted Soviet statistics.

The final paragraph turns Stolper’s critical method against an omission in his own account.

One fable is conspicuous by its absence from Dr. Stolper's enumeration: the utopia of national self-determination.

Lachmann questions Stolper’s depiction of the pre-1914 world as secure and his dating of the age of fable to the outbreak of war. The European order depended on a precarious balance of powers, while nationalism undermined the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, an essential component of that balance. National self-determination therefore exemplifies precisely the conflict between ideological promises and political arrangements that Stolper otherwise exposes. Lachmann’s closing invitation to extend the critique preserves his admiration while denying that the prewar order can stand outside the history of myth-making.