Ortega y Gasset and the Austrian Economists: A Missed Encounter

Lorenzo Infantino ()
Additional contact information
Lorenzo Infantino: LUISS Guido Carli

A chapter in The Emergence of a Tradition: Essays in Honor of Jesús Huerta de Soto, Volume II, 2023, pp 157-165 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract There is an unwritten page in the history of ideas, because the main actors, who might have usefully come into contact with each other, did not. Due to the many accidents of life, they were unable to take each other’s works into consideration. If this had happened, today we would have at our disposal a more extensive basis of knowledge on which to work. What I am referring to is the encounter which never took place between José Ortega y Gasset and Carl Menger (and the first exponents of the Austrian School of Economics). They clearly showed hostility toward contractualist theories of society and their ‘false individualism’. Ortega and the ‘Austrians’ analyzed social phenomena through the lens of cultural evolution and were in search of a “true individualism.” They recognized how limited the forces of the individual are and how strong the necessity is to channel the knowledge and the resources of each into a grand social (atheleological) process.

Keywords: Austrian School of Economics; Contractualism; Cultural evolution; Individualism; Liberalism; Rationalism (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:sprchp:978-3-031-17418-6_14

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/9783031174186

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-17418-6_14

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Springer Books from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().