CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2024
| Author | Gruber, Julius, Josef, Jörg |
|---|---|
| Title | Semantics of Liberty and Authoritarian Apologetics |
| Summary | Previous International Relations literature has described the Austrian School of liberal economics and Friedrich August Hayek as “the outstanding twentieth century representative of the classical liberal tradition, with an immense influence on economics and politics.” (Van de Haar 2009 4, 5) At the same time, “Hayek has not been given the priority or space he arguably deserves within this field.” (Spieker 2014 920) Over the past decade, an extensive critical research program in the disciplines of historiography and economics has traced the Austrian School’s significant impact on the construction of contemporary international economic governance institutions. (Slobodian 2018); (Wasserman 2019) At the same time, authors such as Leeson (2017) and Yagi (2023) have repeatedly highlighted the apologetic rhetoric of Austrian School economists towards various authoritarian regimes, contrasting the school’s persisting image as an economic and political philosophy of individual liberty. (Eberstein 2001) In this paper, I problematize the limited contextualization of the Austrian School’s authoritarian tendencies in International Relations literature. Grounded in the critical analyses of recent scholarship, I compare Austrian School economists’ defense of international authoritarianism in various contexts, both inside and outside the explanatory scope provided by previous IR literature. Based on this examination, I conclude that particularly considering the Austrian School’s outstanding impact on international economic governance institutions and international policy-making in the 20th and 21st centuries, International Relations literature must integrate adjacent disciplines’ identification of inherent authoritarian tendencies and of the centrality of the sociocultural embeddedness of Austrian economics into its contextualization of this outstandingly impactful branch of liberal economic and political thought. |
| Supervisor | Etkind, Alexander |
| Department | International Relations MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2024/gruber_julius.pdf |
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