A tradition in twelve books.

Carl Menger publishes the Grundsätze: a quiet, systematic book that begins not with nations, classes, or labor, but with one person weighing wants against means. Value, it argues, is not a property of things; it is a judgment. The marginal revolution has a Viennese address, and a school has its founding text.

With the Untersuchungen, Menger opens the Methodenstreit against Gustav Schmoller and the German Historical School: can economics state exact laws, or only collect histories? Berlin coins “die österreichische Schule” as a dismissal; Vienna keeps the name and wears it.

Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk's Positive Theorie des Kapitales roots interest in time itself—present goods outrank future goods—and recasts production as ever longer detours through intermediate goods. In the same year, Wieser's Der natürliche Werth gives the school its idea of cost: the satisfaction forgone elsewhere.

When the third volume of Das Kapital finally appears, Böhm-Bawerk reads it against the first—and writes the classic critique of the labor theory of value. The confrontation between Vienna and Marxism begins here and runs, through the calculation debate, across the whole century.

The young Ludwig von Mises does what many held impossible: he brings money itself under the marginal-utility logic. And he warns, two years before the war and a decade before the great inflation, where politically managed interest rates must lead.

Out of a 1920 essay grows Die Gemeinwirtschaft: without private property in the means of production there are no prices; without prices, no calculation; without calculation, no rational economy. The socialist calculation debate, the school's central argument of the twentieth century, starts on this page.

Friedrich Hayek delivers four lectures at the London School of Economics and publishes them as Prices and Production: booms are made in the credit system, and what the boom distorts, the slump must correct. Through the 1930s this is the chief rival to Keynes's answer to the Depression.

The Vienna seminars scatter to Geneva, London, and New York. From Geneva, Mises publishes Nationalökonomie, the first complete system of the school: economics re-founded as a general theory of human action, in a language and a Europe that were both about to vanish.

Written in wartime London and dedicated “to the socialists of all parties,” Hayek's The Road to Serfdom becomes an unexpected bestseller in America and carries the Austrian warning about planning far beyond the seminar room. Hayek argues that as the state directs more of economic life, individuals lose room to make plans of their own. The same year, Mises aims the same argument at the total state in Omnipotent Government.

In New York, Mises rewrites his system in his new language. Human Action is the fullest statement of the school ever put between two covers, praxeology from its first sentence to its last, and the book around which the American revival will gather.

In Chicago, Hayek widens the school's economics into a political philosophy. The Constitution of Liberty makes the case for a society of free people under general rules: the book he would be handing to statesmen for the next thirty years.

Israel Kirzner's Competition and Entrepreneurship puts the alert, acting entrepreneur back at the center of market theory. A year later Hayek receives the Nobel Prize, and a small conference in South Royalton, Vermont gathers the students who will carry the school into its second century. The shelves of the seventies, eighties, and nineties in this collection are their work.