Hayek’s Review of Explorations in Economics (1937)

Friedrich August von Hayek’s brief review assesses the Festschrift honouring F. W. Taussig through its intellectual quality, editorial discipline, and expression of Taussig’s influence as a teacher. Its central judgment is emphatically favourable:

Among the considerable number of Festschriften which have appeared during the past few years the present one occupies a very high place, well worthy of the great figure whom it is intended to honour.

Hayek makes the contributors’ personal connection to Taussig integral to this assessment. Participation was confined to former students and colleagues, so the collection’s distinction testifies specifically to the inspiration of his teaching. Editorial restraint strengthens that achievement: forty-eight authors contribute within 534 pages, with only one contribution exceeding twenty pages. For Hayek, the volume demonstrates that brevity need not diminish intellectual substance.

The review moves from this general appraisal to the book’s three approximately equal divisions: international trade and tariff problems, wages and capital, and the social setting of economic activity. Opening essays by Viner, Schumpeter, and Talcott Parsons survey Taussig’s contributions to these respective fields. Hayek deliberately declines to single out individual essays among the remaining forty-five:

It would be unfair to select for comment from the forty-five other contributions the few which might be discussed within the compass of a short review.

This restraint defines the review’s scope: it evaluates the collection’s collective standard and intellectual range without adjudicating particular theoretical arguments. Hayek regards Taussig’s circle as encompassing a substantial share of the American economists from whom important theoretical contributions could be expected.

His final survey qualifies the section headings. International trade receives especially rich treatment, while “Wages and Capital” extends beyond its apparent boundaries:

The title of the second is perhaps somewhat too narrow, since it covers the whole of the theory of distribution, including the theory of monopoly.

The third division ranges from methodology and the alternatives of laissez-faire and socialism to railway regulation, public finance, and economic history. Hayek closes by noting that the bibliography reveals an even wider range of Taussig’s interests than younger colleagues may recognize. The review’s relevance lies in this account of a broad intellectual legacy sustained through teaching, personal association, and concise scholarly contributions.