“For Austrians, on the other hand, man is a purposeful being. … He has spirit and will.” The author of these remarks, Dr. Richard Ebeling, delivered a lecture on Austrian Economics to an audience in Wichita.
Austrian Economics focuses on man as a human actor, rather than as a cog in a system of equations. Dr. Richard Ebeling delivered an introductory lecture on Austrian Economics to an audience in Wichita on September 10, 2015.
A companion article to the lecture is Austrian Economics and the Political Economy of Freedom, in which Dr. Ebeling explains: “The Austrian view of man refutes the positivist, historicist, and neoclassical conceptions of man as a mere physical, quantitative object, or as a passive subject controlled by the dark forces of history, or as a ‘dependent variable’ in a system of mathematical equations. … For Austrians, on the other hand, man is a purposeful being. He thinks, plans, and acts. Man may be made up of matter, but he possesses consciousness. He has the capacity to imagine, create, and initiate. His mind is not simply reducible to lifeless matter. He has spirit and will.”
View video of the lecture below, or click here to view at YouTube in high definition (recommended). Videography by Paul Soutar.