page_title: History of economic thought
section_title: The Austrian school of economics
hierarchical_section_title: History of economic thought / Neoclassical (19th and early 20th century) / Continental neoclassical / The Austrian school of economics
context_page_description: The history of economic thought deals with different thinkers and theories in the subject that became political economy and economics, from the ancient world to the present day in the 21st Century. This field encompasses many disparate schools of economic thought. Ancient Greek writers such as the philosopher Aristotle examined ideas about the art of wealth acquisition, and questioned whether property is best left in private or public hands. In the Middle Ages, scholasticists such as Thomas Aquinas argued that it was a moral obligation of businesses to sell goods at a just price.
  In the Western world, economics was not a separate discipline, but part of philosophy until the 18th–19th century Industrial Revolution and the 19th century Great Divergence, which accelerated economic growth.
context_section_description: While economics at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth was dominated increasingly by mathematical analysis, the followers of Carl Menger (1840–1921) and his disciples Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk (1851–1914) and Friedrich von Wieser (1851–1926) (coiner of the term "marginal utility") followed a different route, advocating the use of deductive logic instead.  This group became known as the Austrian School of Economics, reflecting the Austrian origin of many of the early adherents. Thorstein Veblen in The Preconceptions of Economic Science (1900) contrasted neoclassical marginalists in the tradition of Alfred Marshall with the philosophies of the Austrian School.
caption: Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk (1851–1914)
exif: {}