Ludwig Lachmann

Ludwig Lachmann (1906 - 1990) an Austrian economist who was an important contributor to the Austrian School.

Ludwig Lachmann was a student at the London School of Economics in the 1930s where he first became interested in the Austrian School. He later taught in Witwatersrand University in South Africa.

He grew to believe that the Austrian School had deviated from Carl Menger's original vision of an entirely subjective economics. To Lachmann, Austrian Theory was to be characterized as an evolutionary, or "genetic-causal", approach against the equilibrium and perfect knowledge found in mainstream Neoclassical economics.

Lachmann's "fundamentalist Austrianism" was rare—few living Austrian economists saw their work as departing from the mainstream. He underscored what he viewed as distinctive from that mainstream: Economic subjectivism, imperfect knowledge, the heterogeneity of capital, the business cycle, methodological individualism, alternative cost and "market process".

His work was highly influential upon later, American developments of the Austrian School.

To commemorate Lachmann, his widow established a trust to fund the Ludwig M Lachmann Research Fellowship at the Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method of the LSE [1].