Un nuevo ejemplar de The Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics se ha publicado recientemente en la página web del Ludwig von Mises Institute. Se trata del Vol. 14, No. 4. Destaca en él la reseña de Jesús Huerta de Soto a la última biografía que se ha escrito de Ludwig von Mises, aquella de Jörg Guido Hülsmann.

Dice el profesor Huerta de Soto:

Hülsmann brings to his work many new perspectives and discoveries. These contributions reveal an intense research effort and thousands of hours of study devoted to delving into original documents and into files and libraries all over the world, in search of any detail related to the life of Mises. Hülsmann’s book teaches us something on every page and can even surprise us with news we did not know before. This makes reading it an enormous pleasure, especially for those of us who have devoted our lives to study and research in the field of Austrian economics.

A continuación quiero destacar tres párrafos de la reseña, que posiblemente llame la atención a los lectores:

Furthermore, Hülsmann points out profound differences between two Austrian lines of thought: one which originated with Menger and would continue with Bohm-Bawerk and Mises; and another which would clearly branch off starting with Wieser, whose concept of natural value, his idea that it could be directly calculated in terms of utility, and his view of production as separate from distribution (see pp. 380 and following) collide head-on with the most traditional Austrian analysis. […]

In addition, Hülsmann very clearly explains Weiser’s unequivocal stance in favor of the Banking School and of the veil-of-money theory (pp. 226–227), erroneous doctrines which would end up influencing Schumpeter (p. 250, n. 76) and modern monetary-equilibrium theorists, like Selgin and others (p. 228).

Otra de las referencias interesantes para tratar es la desafortunada distinción entre liberales clásicos (donde Guido Hülsmann ubica al mismo Mises) y los neo-liberales (donde entraría el propio Hayek). Huerta de Soto se opone abiertamente a esta distinción:

Nevertheless, one of the aspects that evokes the strongest reservations in me is Hülsmann’s classification of Hayek as a “neo-liberal,” within a system of categorization in which he divides the principal Austrian authors into “classical liberals” (the group to which Mises himself would belong) and “neo-liberals” (among whom Hayek would be found). In my opinion, it is much more fruitful to classify economists as either Austrians (Mises and Hayek) or neoclassicals (both members of the Chicago school and Keynesians, who focus on the analysis of equilibrium and maximization).

Para cerrar, Huerta de Soto identifica una nueva injusticia del autor para con Hayek y Kirzner:

Finally, for me, perhaps the weakest point of Hülsmann’s work lies in his failure to develop a theory of entrepreneurship. According to Hülsmann, entrepreneurial profit arises from the acceptance of uncertainty (and not from pure, creative acts of entrepreneurship, p. 772). Furthermore, it seems to me unjust that Hülsmann excludes Kirzner from the list of American authors influenced by Mises—among whom he does mention Rothbard and Schultz (p. 945)—and also unjust that he does not consider Hayek an Austrian economist in the Misesian sense, as he states on page 989.