Glossarium.

A model of society without a state: all tasks that are public today (law, protection, defence) are provided by private suppliers on a contractual basis. Rothbard's and Hoppe's radical conclusion drawn from natural law and argumentation ethics.

The view that the propositions of economics hold prior to all experience: derivable from the axiom of action through conceptual analysis, not through empirical testing.

Hoppe's proof (1988) that property rights are performatively presupposed the moment anyone engages in argumentation. Whoever disputes norms acknowledges the norm of argumentative freedom, and with it self-ownership.

The school of economic thought founded by Carl Menger in 1871. Five generations, from Vienna through Geneva and New York down to the present: subjective, methodologically individualist, oriented to the market process.

What counts is not the number of sellers but the openness of market entry.

The proposition that man acts: consciously, purposefully, driven by scarcity. The Misesian starting point of all praxeological derivations.

The Austrian explanation of upswing and downswing: interest rates lowered artificially through credit expansion distort the structure of production, the upswing turns into a boom and must be corrected.

The impossibility of rational economic planning without market prices. Mises (1920) and Hayek showed that socialist planning fails because, without private property in the means of production, no price signals can arise.

Whoever receives new money first gains; whoever receives it last loses out. An expansion of the money supply is not neutral in its effect but redistributive, along the points where it enters the system.

The using-up of the structure of production under the appearance of prosperity: more is consumed than the returns provide, and the underlying substance is quietly run down to that end.

Lachmann's correction to the homogeneous capital stock: capital is a heterogeneous configuration of complementary goods, redeployable only within limits.

The study of the structure of production goods. In Böhm-Bawerk and Hayek: capital as a time-staggered, heterogeneous apparatus of production, not as a mere sum of money.

The theory of exchange action. Introduced by Mises as a branch of praxeology: the concrete analysis of market processes, in contrast to the abstract doctrine of action.

Hayek's thesis of 1968: competition is not a state but a procedure that generates knowledge in the first place.

Mises's image of the market as a daily vote: it is not the entrepreneur but the purchasing consumer who directs production.

Schumpeter's formula for the capitalist process of innovation: the new displaces the old, not through gradual adjustment but through the radical replacement of existing structures of production.

Hayek's 1976 proposal: abolish the state monopoly on money and let private issuers compete to provide the most stable currency.

Preference reveals itself only in actual choice, not in surveys or introspection.

Why does water cost nothing and diamonds so much, even though water is essential to life? Menger resolved it in 1871: what is valued is not the category as such but the specific unit at the margin.

Oppenheimer's distinction from 1908: there are only two paths to wealth, labour and exchange (the economic means), or the uncompensated appropriation of the labour of others (the political means).

Kirzner's mechanism behind the Market Process: alertness to overlooked profit opportunities.

The theory of the entrepreneur as the discoverer of profit opportunities not yet realized. Kirzner's reinterpretation of the Schumpeterian entrepreneur: not destructive, but equilibrating and alert.

Mises's thought experiment of an economy without change, serving as a heuristic point of contrast. It reveals entrepreneurial profit as a pure disequilibrium phenomenon.

Money substitutes without full backing: unbacked banknotes and demand deposits.

The banking practice of backing demand deposits with only partial reserves. A point of dispute within the Austrian School: Mises and Hayek see it as a source of inflation, Rothbard and Hoppe as a breach of contract.

A banking system without a central bank: competing private banks issue their own banknotes, disciplined by clearing and the obligation to redeem them.

A monetary order that binds the currency firmly to gold. For Mises the only system that removes the money supply from political discretion and thereby curbs inflation and the business cycle.

Hayek's graphical model of the time-staggered structure of production. Axis: time, from raw material to consumer good; height: the value of the intermediate products. A tool for analysing credit cycles.

The study of how meaningful structures are understood. In the Lachmann school around Don Lavoie, it was discussed as a methodological extension of praxeology to include interpretation and the formation of expectations.

Purposeful behaviour under uncertainty. The title of Mises's principal work, published in 1949: a systematic account of praxeology as the foundation of all social science.

The imputation of the value of consumer goods to the producer goods that yield them. Menger's and Wieser's solution to the distribution problem.

A policy of individual market interventions without comprehensive planning. Mises showed that every intervention produces unwanted consequences that call for further interventions: a spiral of intervention reaching all the way to a fully planned system.

Hayek's central problem: how does the dispersed knowledge of many individuals come together into a working order? The answer: through prices and spontaneous institutions, not by central planning.

In the Austrian tradition (Hayek, Mises), the state of being free from coercion by other people. A precondition of spontaneous order and of economic calculation.

Misdirected investment as the signature phenomenon of the boom: capital that flows into stages of production never backed by any real deferral of consumption.

The additional utility of one further unit of a good. Menger's discovery of 1871 resolved the Diamond-Water Paradox and established the Subjective Theory of Value.

The Austrian counter-concept to neoclassical market equilibrium. The market is not a state but a movement: a discovery procedure in which entrepreneurs correct disequilibria.

The dispute between Menger and Schmoller over the method of economics (1883 onwards). Austrian School: theoretical-deductive. Historical School: inductive.

The assumption that social phenomena are ultimately to be explained by the actions of individual actors. Collectives have no capacity for action of their own.

A definition of the state: the state as the compulsory territorial monopolist of ultimate decision-making and taxation.

A legal order prior to positive law, following from human nature and the conditions of human life. Rothbard's ethical grounding of libertarianism: property as a right of self-defence.

The rate of interest that equates saving and investment and reflects time preference.

The forgone benefit of the next-best use. Wieser's concept of cost: costs are not objective outlays but the renunciation of alternatives.

The claim that different classes, races or epochs each follow their own, mutually incompatible logic.

The general theory of human action. A logical-deductive science of the conditions and consequences of purposeful conduct.

Hayek's Nobel lecture of 1974: the economist who seeks to steer society feigns a knowledge that no one can possess.

Hoppe's term for an order in which only private law applies, with no public law that grants the state preferential treatment. A concrete elaboration of the anarcho-capitalist model.

The thesis that the price level rises in proportion to the money supply.

Mises's proof (1912) that the exchange value of money must historically trace back to a pre-monetary exchange value of the money commodity. It closes the gap between the subjective theory of value and the demand for money.

Böhm-Bawerk's central idea: more capital means more intermediate stages and longer chains of production, but also a greater final yield. The roundabout method is worthwhile because it raises productivity.

Hayek's term for the uncritical transfer of the methods of the natural sciences to the social realm.

The dispute from 1920 to 1940 between Mises and Hayek, on the one hand, and the socialist economists (Lange, Lerner, Taylor), on the other, over the possibility of rational planning. The Austrian position: without private property, no prices; without prices, no calculation.

Social orders that arise from the actions of many, but not from their intention. Hayek's term for language, law and markets: the result of human action, not of human design.

Mises' umbrella term for the mindset that expects the state to solve every problem: the omnipotent state as a secular agency of salvation.

The temporal sequencing of production into goods of higher and lower order (Menger 1871), from raw material to the first-order consumer good.

Value does not arise in things but in the acting subject. In 1871 Menger, Jevons and Walras initiated the turn against Smith and Ricardo.

Böhm-Bawerk's stock of consumer goods that sustains the workers throughout the duration of roundabout production.

A libertarian theory of class: it divides society not by ownership of the means of production, but by one's relationship to the treasury, net payers against net recipients.

Mises' doctrine of the understanding of human value judgements and motives for action, the counterpart to praxeology.

The preference for present goods over future goods. For Böhm-Bawerk, the root of the phenomenon of interest: interest as the agio between present and future goods.

The separation of scientific analysis from political value judgement. Economics states what a means brings about, not which end one should choose.

Can anything scientific be said about social welfare without smuggling in value judgements?

The empathetic understanding of the motives behind other people's actions. For Mises and Hayek, the methodological counterpart to physical explanation: a reconstruction of meaning rather than a causal law.