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“Between Worlds,” or an Imagined Reminiscence by Oskar Morgenstern about Equilibrium and Mathematics in the 1920s

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 June 2009

Robert Leonard
Robert Leonard
Affiliation:
Département des Sciences économiques, Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM), 315 St. Catherine St. East, Montreal H3C 3P8, Canada.
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Extract

“Iwas born in 1902 in Görlitz, a small provincial town in Germany, and raised in Vienna, the great city of the multinational Austro-Hungarian empire. On my father's side, my family goes back to about 1530 in Saxony, my Lutheran forebears having been farmers, church wardens, judges, and businessmen. My mother was a natural daughter of Frederick III of Germany …”

Yet another account of myself, for yet another encyclopaedia. Italian, this time. Once again, I put pen to paper and collapse the events of fifty years ago to a few familiar milestones. Now what shall I tell these Italians?

“I finished the Gymnasium and took my Dr. Rer. Pol. at the University of Vienna in 1925. Awarded a Rockefeller Memorial Fellowship, I spent the next three years in England, the United States, France and Italy. Returning to Vienna, I soon became Docent, later Professor, at the University, and Director of the Austrian Institute for Business Cycle Research …”

And then there will be the doctoral thesis, Wirtschaftsprognose, the other Institute, Princeton, and so on. It is remarkable really, the rehearsed inevitability of it all … So often have I gone through exercises of this kind that there are times when I even begin to believe them myself.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of the History of Economic Thought , Volume 26 , Issue 3 , September 2004 , pp. 285 - 310
Copyright
Copyright © The History of Economics Society 2004

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