 Today, it's my great pleasure to introduce our Marian Rothbard Memorial Speaker, a close friend of mine, someone who I've worked with on papers, and I think he's here, and we should welcome him. Hey, Matt. Well, thank you very much. I'd like to begin by extending my deepest thanks to Joseph Salerno and to the Mises Institute for inviting me to give this lecture, and especially to Stephen Cassandra Torello for generously sponsoring it. On just a personal note, I've been listening to the Memorial Lectures at this conference since I was a student, and in that time, I had the chance to hear many scholars that I admire present their work and be able to draw inspiration from it. And so now, to be able to deliver one of these lectures myself is a real honor and a privilege, and I'd like to say that I'm very grateful for it. Now, as it happens, and in fact, Dr. Salerno just indicated, the topic of my lecture, the work of the American economist Frank Albert Federer, is a particularly appropriate one, I think, for a Marian Rothbard Memorial Lecture at the W. D. von Mises Institute, because Federer was greatly admired by Mises and by Rothbard, both of whom, as we'll see, have parts to play in the story that I'll relate. So I flatter myself that they would have approved my choice of topics. Now in relating this story, I'm going to ignore the advice of the King of Hearts by starting with the end. So if you peruse Rothbard's extensive list of publications in the 1970s, you may notice one that seems to stand out somewhat from the others, a relatively unknown 1977 edited volume of academic papers by one Frank Federer, given the stimulating title, Capital Interest in Rent Essays in the Theory of Distribution. And although this book seems a little different from some of the other publications of Rothbard at the time, and although at first glance it might seem to be a sort of innocuous side project, as I'll explain, it's actually the culmination of a half century of work, not just by Rothbard, but by many different authors in and around the Austrian tradition. This lecture, then, is the most recent part of a research agenda that's occupied me for the last several years, namely the study of the life and work of Frank Albert Federer, and especially his role in advancing the Austrian tradition in the United States. A few years ago, as a part of a different project, I became aware of the collection of Federer's papers and correspondence that are housed at his undergraduate alma mater Indiana University. These records had been virtually untouched since their donation, and as I explored them, I very quickly discovered that they contained a trove of materials relating to economics and social science, much of it highly relevant to the ideas and the history of the Austrian school. And in reading Federer's correspondence spanning essentially 70 years, I was especially struck by the sheer force of his personality and by his unique intellect, which was unlike anything I've really encountered since I had first read Mises, and which inspired me in turn to not only explore his ideas further, but also to do what I could to better publicize them and draw renewed attention to some of his important contributions to economics. The theme of this lecture is rehabilitation, especially in the sense of repairing a reputation and restoring it to a rightful place of prominence. Economics has a long history of rehabilitations, including W. Hutz's rehabilitation of safe law, and significantly for this lecture, Alfred Marshall's attempts to rehabilitate the economics of David Ricardo. The rehabilitation of Frank Federer is a far more obscure effort than either of these, but it's my purpose to show that it is every bit as important, particularly for economists working in the contemporary Austrian tradition. Federer was for several decades an acknowledged leader in American economics, and was particularly known as the most consistent advocate of the subjectivist economics of Karl Manger in the United States. Unfortunately, today his name has all but disappeared from mainstream economic writings, but the historical archives reveal that for the last century nearly, there has been underway a nearly unbroken series of efforts, especially by Austrian economists, to rehabilitate Federer's contributions and to use them to revitalize economic theory. So it is my aim in this lecture to relate some of this history and to chronicle the rise, decline, and rise again of someone that I consider to be one of the great economic theorists of all time. Crucially though, this is not simply a story about better alone, but it's also a story about the fortunes of the Austrian school and also its rise, decline, and renaissance. So my hope is that at least the name Frank Federer is familiar to everyone. After all, his name I think is etched on the wall above the screen, although perhaps his name has been strategically placed behind it, I don't know. But even for those who are familiar with Federer, it's worth mentioning some of his personal and professional history just as a way to put the discussion in context. Federer was an American born and raised in a small town of Peru, Indiana, whose only other main claim to fame was that it was also the birthplace of Federer's first cousin once removed, the songwriter Cole Porter. They had rather different career paths though. Federer was one of those many economists in the 19th century who were trained in at German universities by members of the German historical school and whose politics were heavily influenced by early American progressivism. But unlike many of his contemporaries, Federer developed a real love of economic theory and a strong devotion to the subjectivist economics pioneered by Carl Manger, Boygen von Bumbaverk, and Friedrich von Wieser. Federer called his approach to economics psychological, emphasizing the personal subjective aspect of value. His primary influence from America was John Bates Clark, who Federer believed should have been listed alongside Manger and William Stanley Jevons as the third discoverer of the subjective theory of value. And in his term, Federer and several of his friends or colleagues, contemporaries, particularly Herbert Davenport and Irving Fisher, came to be known as the American Psychological School of Economics, by which was meant very nearly the American Austrian school. In fact, really no one outside of Austria were the ideas of Manger, von Bumbaverk and Wieser developed further than they were in the United States. Hayek, for example, recalls that when he was a young student of the work of the American theorist, John Bates Clark, Thomas Nixon Carver, Irving Fisher, Frank Federer, and Herbert Joseph Davenport was more familiar to us in Vienna than that of any foreign economists except perhaps the Swedes. And among the Americans, none was more consistent or to use the term that was so often applied to Mises, none was as intransigent as Federer. Federer himself was personally acquainted with almost every leading Austrian economist from the roughly 1900 to 1950. He traveled to Vienna on several occasions to meet with the Austrians, had a close personal friendship with von Bumbaverk for a number of years, and was professionally connected with many Austrians, particularly after the Austrian immigration to the United States. Now, by any standard, Federer was one of the most successful economists of his day. In 1912, he was elected to the Presidency of the American Economic Association, and his teaching career, which lasted until he was 73 years old, was spent at Princeton and Cornell, Stanford, and Indiana, but also included positions at Harvard, Columbia, Johns Hopkins, and the University of Illinois. As a researcher, he spent the bulk of his career refining and developing the theories of value, price, and distribution along Austrian lines, both in his textbooks and in a series of articles published in the leading economics journals. He's especially known for developing highly original theories of capital, interest, and rent, each of which in turn influenced the Austrians, as we'll see. Nevertheless, by the time Measys and his students immigrated to the United States, the influence of the American Psychological School and Federer had all but disappeared, replaced by the theories of Alfred Marshall, Valra, Chamberlain, Keynes, and many others. Now, in his later years, Federer turned mainly to the study of monopoly and took on greater prominence as a public intellectual and as a critic of the monopolistic policies of the New Deal, but he never lost his passion for economic theory, which he continued to explore right up until his death in 1949. In particular, he was a ruthlessly consistent subjective value theorist and an enemy of all eclecticism in economics, traits that put him at odds with very nearly every important economist of his time, including some of his friends. So the question then is this, if Federer was indeed such a successful and influential economist, what happened to his work and why does he need rehabilitation? And the answer in short is that although he was a major force in economics in his time, Federer's contributions, just like those of the early Austrians, were never fully incorporated into economic theory and teaching. Again, again, his theoretical investigations led him down paths deemed too extreme by his fellow economists, even though his work usually consisted of little more than consistently extending Hungarian value theory. Nevertheless, his ideas were continually passed over in favor of more eclectic theories, particularly those that combined elements of classical price theory with insights from the newer psychological subjectivist value theory. So to understand why Federer failed to exert the influence he deserved, it's necessary to go back to the marginalized revolution that began to transform economics beginning in 1871. Some of the more superficial readings of this change tend to overstate its revolutionary character and imply that simultaneous discovery of the new value theory by Manger, Jevons, and Falra triggered the immediate overthrow of classical economics and of cost of production theories and value ushering in the marginalist, neoclassical subjectivist era. But historians of economic thought have known for a long time that this very neat and optimistic view is mistaken. The truth is that the marginalist revolution was always slow and incomplete. As Mark Blaug said of it, it was not a marginal utility revolution, it was not an abrupt change, but only a gradual transformation in which the old ideas were never definitively rejected. And it did not happen in the 1870s. So to take only one example in an article written in honor of Wieser in the 1920s, Federer observed that the subjective theory of value was still at that time met with resistance in the economics journals and was suffering attacks both from classical holdouts as well as sort of new incursions from the emerging school of institutional economics. So Federer recognized quite clearly the failure of the revolution in many of his works beginning at the turn of the century and continuing on for several decades. And he emphasized repeatedly that the promise of the revolution had been left unfulfilled. In fact, the marginalist revolution was actually a misnomer. The real revolution was in subjectivism, not marginalism. Marginalism being only one implication of the subjective theory of value. Marginalist methods of analysis had existed in economics long before 1871, most famously in David Ricardo's theory of land rent. They'd also been taken up by Alford Marshall, the great eclectic, whose work attempted to bridge classical and neoclassical theory, and also in America by Frank Taussig, who Federer and Schumpeter described the word justification as the American Marshall. I point out in passing though that I've been somewhat tongue in cheek here describing Taussig as an enemy of the revolution, as I believe his name is also etched in the wall by this screen. So I don't want to be too uncharitable to him. But nevertheless, he was eclectic in his value theory. And it was these kinds of works still infused with the classical cost of production theory of value, which tended to dominate economics teaching and theory after the turn of the century in the United States. The result of this was that the distinctiveness of the subjective theory of value that had been pioneered by Menger was ultimately lost. Instead, it became the conventional wisdom that the insights of the marginalist revolutions and of the Austrians had been fully integrated into economics. And there was therefore no real need to distinguish between different schools of marginalism, for instance. The idea was that the foundations of economics were generally agreed upon, even if there were some slight differences of emphasis between economists in different nations or on different topics. And even Mises at some point embraced a version of this view. But Federer did not accept the naive interpretation of the marginalist revolution. And up through the 1920s and 30s, continued to stress the distinctiveness and the importance of Mengian value theory as compared to the newer versions espoused in the textbooks of Marshall and Tausig and others. As Federer put it, to make the hallmark of the psychological school the marginal utility method, or to group that school with nearly all recent theory under the title of the marginal utility school, as is not frequently done, reveals a gross misunderstanding or no understanding at all of the major issues in value theory since 1870. And further, the term marginally is in its suggestion that marginality or finality is the most essential mark of this theory as contrasted with the cost of production theory. Subjective or psychological would much better stress the contrast with that which it displaced. This feature is merely a mechanical or best logical device far less significant than the broader psychological aspects of theory. So despite some great energy and erudition, the best efforts of Federer and the American Psychological School failed to exercise a lasting impact on economics. And there were both personal and intellectual reasons for this. On the personal side, there were many controversies amongst the Americans that prevented them from collaborating and presenting a more unified front against the various competitors in economic theory. Federer, for instance, instigated a rankerous exchange with Herbert Davenport over the meaning of economics and another one with Irving Fisher over capital and interest theory. That latter debate began in the early 1900s in the economics journals and continued privately in correspondence for nearly 30 years afterwards and only eventually ceased because Fisher died. So these controversies should be partly at least attributed to a personal failing on Federer's part. He could be a savage critic, even to the point of being quite uncharitable. And once he latched onto a particular line of criticism, he often found it very hard to let go, even in victory. So in any case, as a result of a combination of some of these internal conflicts, along with various retirements, debts, or simple shifts of interest among the American economists meant that by the 1920s, the American psychological school had been effectively decimated. But the problems ran deeper than just the personalities of the economists. Once more, the underlying challenge was always that the best and the most consistent insights of the Hungarian tradition had never fully taken root in the United States, despite the support they received from leading figures such as John Bates-Clarpe. Instead, under the influence of an old guard of economists in the US, people like Arthur Hadley, Lawrence Laughlin, and Frank Tausig, economic theory remained an eclectic combination of German historicism, the classical economics of Ricardo Mill and Marshall, and marginal utility thrown in for good measure. So as a result of this, the triumph of this alternative eclectic foundation for economics, once the energy of the psychological economists began to dissipate, Federer found himself virtually alone in the battle for economic theory in the United States. Now, the failure of American audiences to appreciate the uniqueness of the Hungarian tradition was driven home to Federer, especially in the 1920s and 30s. For instance, in 1936, Federer had contributed four chapters on value and price theory to a textbook on economic principles. These chapters were Federer's last systematic writings on price theory, and they represent a fairly state-of-the-art account for the time when they were published. More important, they very closely mirrored Bombaverk's exposition of exactly the same topics, and it's not a coincidence that in later works in the Austrian tradition like Man economy and state, you see these same writings of Federer on value and price theory cited alongside Bombaverk as classic treatments of the subject. In any case, after writing these chapters, Federer was subsequently invited to revise them for a new edition of the book. However, after he begun the revision process, the book's editor unexpectedly rescinded the invitation and completely removed Federer's chapters from the later edition, replacing them with the chapters of a different economist. And as the editor explained to Federer, a survey of the users of our text by the publisher has revealed that a very large portion of those who have used our text have not appreciated or perhaps understood your approach to the question of value and price. A very considerable number of those who have been using the work have stated that they were discontinuing its use because they preferred the approach to value and price, which they could find in other works. The publisher is convinced that our work can never be restored in the face of what seems to be a rather prevailing opinion regarding your chapters. The work will probably die unless we boldly face this issue. So examples such as this are important because they help to undermine the claim that by this point, all of the major insights of the Austrian school, especially with regard to the essential problems of value and price, had already been absorbed into economic theory and teaching. And that it was only in subsequent debates that the Austrians were more clearly distinguished from other neoclassical tradition. In any case, even an economist as professionally successful as Federer was increasingly able to find a sympathetic audience for his views. In his later decades in the 1930s and 40s, he was certainly accorded the utmost respect by his fellow economists, but even as they disregarded his most profound contributions to the science. So having said something about the decline of Federer's influence, the next step is to chronicle the long history of attempts to rehabilitate it. These efforts were led independently by several generations worth of economists, Austrian economists in particular, and especially at a series of crucial moments in the history of the Austrian tradition when it too was under attack and in decline. Moreover, the ultimate success of these efforts runs parallel to the resurgence of the Austrian tradition in America that was inspired by Mises. Now, neither Federer nor his students and colleagues were oblivious to the problems of trying to challenge dominant strands of economic theory. And as the debates of the early 20th century on topics like capital interest and rent began to die down and as economists began to move on to other subjects, it became increasingly obvious to Federer and others that it would require a renewed effort to sustain the Hungarian psychological subjectivist tradition in the United States. The question, though, was how to do this? And the answer seemed simple enough to keep alive the greatest contributions of the tradition, especially through republishing older works and contributing new ones as well. Now, throughout his career, Federer received countless requests to do both of these things. And one trend in particular is that from the 1920s onward, a persistent theme in his correspondence is the scarcity of his published writings, particularly his journal articles on price and distribution theory. An especially common request was for a new collection of Federer's papers that would help to resuscitate the subjectivist cause in the US, especially in response to the triumph of Marshallian price theory and other developments like the monopolistic competition revolution. To take only one example, in 1928, some colleagues recommended that Federer challenge Irving Fisher's dominance in interest theory by resuming their earlier debate and reprinting some of their early articles in a new collection and offering new arguments, new contributions to the dispute. This was one of many projects that Federer agreed to pursue at the time in the late 1920s, but that eventually stalled and ultimately came to nothing. This was likely a combination of the fact that Federer was overwhelmed by other professional obligations and also the onset of the Great Depression, which made publishing far more difficult for most people. In any case, Federer began to think that the only way he was really going to successfully bring his work back into the public eye was with some assistance, and by 1935, at least, he believed that he had found it. So one of the more significant efforts to republish Federer's work was undertaken in the mid-30s by the group of Austrians based in London, mainly at the London School of Economics. This group was led by Lionel Robbins and Hayek, along with other colleagues at University College London, like Paul Rosenstein Rodin. This particular plan for Federer, though, was mainly negotiated by a different UCL economist named Noel Hall. I think Noel Hall's name will not be familiar to most, so let me say something about him. Noel Hall, later Cernol, was Federer's master's student at Princeton, where he wrote on interest theory before returning to England to earn his PhD and become an influential member of the Robbins Hayek Circle in London. He was also, amongst other things, a pioneer in management education and eventually the master of Bracenose College, Oxford, where his main claim to fame was that in 1964 he welcomed the Beatles to Oxford. However, a few decades earlier, in 1935, Hall had traveled to the US to present Federer with an offer from Robbins and Hayek to publish a large collection of his writings relevant to Austrian economics. Federer agreed, and so together they quickly drew up a table of contents. The main topics of the collection were to be value, rent, interest, and population, really for the major topics in Federer's writings from his early career. Despite some early enthusiasm, however, nothing ended up coming of this plan volume either. So, a year later, in 1936, Federer was writing to Hall to ask about progress of the book, and Hall assured him that despite delays it was all well in hand and that it would eventually be published, although unfortunately at this point the project seems to have been dropped. It's not clear exactly why they abandoned it, but personal conflict is the most likely explanation, and for once it was not a conflict between Federer and somebody else, but rather between Englishmen. In late 1935, between his contacts with Federer, Noel Hall had a quarrel with Lionel Robbins over plans to found a National Institute of Economic Research in England. In Robbins' eyes, Hall had been undermining his efforts to find funding for the Institute and replace it with his own, and as a result, Robbins was furious about this, and while the two of them eventually did settle their differences, the damage was done, their friendship was broke, and their working relationship ended, and unfortunately, along with it, the planned book of Federer's papers. Hall did attempt to resuscitate the project a little bit later and pass it to Paul Rosenstein or Dan for publication through Allen and Unwin, but unfortunately it never appeared. So, after this and some various other failed efforts, Federer began to realize that if anything was going to come of these types of efforts, he was going to have to handle the projects himself, and so he made a series of attempts from the early 1920s to the late 1940s to do just that. So I have already mentioned some of his last textbook chapters, but he undertook a number of other original projects as well that were intended to clarify and extend his early work, and also to place it in the context of the history of economics. Just as for a few examples, in the spring of 1923, Federer began drafting a book on the history of the marginality doctrine, which is closely related to some of the other projects that I'll mention in a moment. In the summer of the same year, he wrote the bulk of a textbook for high school students that, again, he set aside, he returned to it some 20 years later and worked on it more, but once again without finishing, and some years later in 1931, he also revised his university textbook, but once more due to the Great Depression, the publisher believed it wasn't a good time to bring out a new edition, and so that project too was halted. And unfortunately, all three of these potentially fascinating manuscripts were destroyed after Federer's death, so we don't really know exactly what they contained or to what degree they've been finished, although the archival evidence indicates that they had at least advanced well into the drafting process. In any case, as Federer was choosing to these kinds of projects and topics, he was being driven by a number of other developments in economic theory in the 20s and 30s and reacting to them. Two trends in particular that had captured his attention were the development of the doctrine of overhead costs that was pioneered by John Maurice Clark and had a lot of implications for price and production theory, and then also the monopolistic competition revolution inspired by Edward Chamberlain and Joan Robinson. Both of these developments had roots in the economics of Alfred Marshall, which in turn had been influenced by the classical economics of David Ricardo. And as Federer worked to criticize the newer theories, he found it increasingly necessary to return to their foundations, in other words to criticize Marshall and the Ricardian tradition as well. And this needed to turn his attention quite naturally to the history of economic thought. So from his earliest days as a teacher, Federer had lectured on the history of distribution theory, and toward the end of his career, he began to think about a more ambitious treatment of that and related subjects. In 1937, for instance, he considered writing a book on economic terminology, which is a favorite topic of his. And by 1941, he developed a detailed proposal and outline of the work, which was tentatively titled The Language of Economics with special regard to ambiguities and resulting fallacies, admittedly not his most eye-catching title, but a worthwhile project nonetheless. The purpose of the book was a broad historical study of the major terms in economics, and especially the errors in reasoning and in policy that result from ambiguity, inconsistency, and abuse of terms. However, Federer offered this proposal to publishers without success. The Rockefeller Foundation, for instance, which had been a major source of funding for economic research in the interwar period, declined on the grounds that it simply didn't have the money. And this discouraged Federer so much that he abandoned the book project and turned his eyes towards yet another idea that he had. So after the failure of this project, he shifted his attention to the idea for a book on the development of economic thought since 1850, especially those controversies over value, price, and distribution theory, in which he had taken a leading role as a young man just after the turn of the century. The initial volume he suggested was going to be just a collection of his most influential and rare papers on economic theory, along with a few new contributions to give the work a kind of unity. And this time around, Federer was more successful with his proposal. And in early 1943, he arranged to publish this book with Princeton University Press under the title The Revision of Economic Fear. But as so often happened, as he worked to put the collection together, he began to change his ideas for it and his vision of what the project could accomplish. So the new manuscript that he imagined would include a greater amount of historical material relating to the development of economic theory leading up to the neoclassical period. In other words, the beginning with Adam Smith and focusing on the major thinkers of classical economics. The plan was to use a brief historical survey as a foundation for discussing the subjectivist neoclassical period, which was to be the main focus of the book. Federer in particular wanted to emphasize the valuable contributions of Americans in the 19th and 20th centuries to economics, which he thought had been seriously neglected in the history of economic thought. Nevertheless, as he continued to work, the project continued to grow and expand, and he continued to work on it right up to his death in March 1949. Sadly, by this time, his ideas and those of the other American psychological economists had all been disappeared from the economic literature. However, in September 1949, a few months after Federer's death, Mises published human action, which preserved and extended the Hungarian tradition in economic theory, and thereby laid the groundwork for the revival of Austrian economics in the following decades. And it was through Mises that Federer's reputation ultimately survived. Now, the published works of Mises and Federer give no indication that they knew each other, but the archives show that Mises and Federer had been personally acquainted since at least the 1920s. Mises had visited Federer at his home in Princeton in 1926, during a visit to the United States when he was surveying economic conditions. And this was a moment when Mises' business cycle research program was really beginning to take off. And it's not a coincidence that only a few months after their meeting, Federer published his own final extensive study of the problem of interest rates, a paper that some later scholars like Gerry O'Driscoll argue is very Austrian in its approach to business cycles. In any case, in the 1930s, Mises wrote to Federer from Geneva to express his admiration of Mises within writing that the anal economy, the German language predecessor to human action, and he explained that in these last months, I have reread your contributions on the theory of interest. It is my firm opinion that they are more important than any other contribution on the subject since Bombaver. And this is high praise indeed, especially from someone like Mises who could be very parsimonious with his praise and especially given the respect that Mises had for Bombaver. In any case, Federer's influence on Mises was reflected in human action in which Mises adapted Federer's pure time preference theory of interest. And this was not the only way in which Mises drew on Federer's work in human action. He, for example, also cites him on problems relating to capital, rent, and the democracy of the marketplace. And also in some of his later public writings and speeches, he praises Federer as one of the great theorists and remarks that it's a shame that his work has been so neglected. He was in the references of human action that Federer's name was discovered by Murray Rothbard. Rothbard took an immediate interest in Federer and drew on his work extensively in man economy and state. And in fact, Federer, excuse me, Rothbard regarded his work in man economy and state as filling a 50-year gap since the publication of earlier systematic treatises by Federer and the other American psychological economists. And for his part, in addition to carrying forward the pure time preference theory of interest, Justice Mises had done, Rothbard also thoroughly integrated Federer's theory of rent into his general analysis of production and distribution. So it's not an exaggeration to say that Rothbard recognized Federer's importance more than any other economist besides Mises. And it was for that reason that Rothbard undertook to rehabilitate Federer's reputation by making his work more widely available. For Rothbard, integrating Federer's ideas wasn't enough. He thought that work deserved a serious, nude attention in its own right. And the most effective way to do that, naturally enough, was to collect Federer's papers together, especially his papers on distribution here, into one convenient volume that would represent a kind of treatise in its own right and that would enable current and future generations of scholars to once again draw inspiration from the body of Federer's work. As Rothbard explained to a friend, Federer's contributions to interest theory were enormous. He being the first all-out time preference economist. And he also contributed a great deal to rent theory. His rent theory, I believe, to be superior to Mises, who is still under classical influence in this respect. And Federer's rent theory permeates my book. Federer died several years ago and needs to be resurrected. His journal articles attacking all forms of productivity theory of interest are brilliant. To resurrect Federer would be a particularly effective part of the neo-Austrian revival underway. Note here, especially Rothbard's mention of an ongoing Austrian revival. This, in turn, helps to undermine a different misconception about the history of Austrian economics, namely that its revival only really began in 1974. In any case, what Rothbard did not know was that this exact idea, right down to the table of contents, had already been proposed many times in the past, including by other Austrian economists. Furthermore, this book was not just some insignificant side project for Rothbard. When it eventually appeared, it was the fruit of more than 20 years of effort on Rothbard's part. His archives revealed that he had had this idea, and nearly the exact title, even, way back in 1955 or even before. In other words, only a few years after Federer's death, and when he was right in the middle of some of the most difficult work in drafting man economy in state. He had first proposed this idea to Richard Cornell, who was then helping to support Rothbard financially through his work at the Volcker Fund. Although, unfortunately, nothing came of this project during the time of the writing of man economy in state. Nevertheless, it was an important project for Rothbard, and so he continued to shop the book proposal around to publishers for many years going forward. Just as in one example, Augustus M. Kelly was at one point considering publishing the book, but for some reason Rothbard decided to withdraw the proposal at the last minute. But in any case, it was eventually published as Rothbard desired through the support of the Institute for Human Studies. The official publisher, Sheed Andrews and McNeill, was a Catholic publisher and was actually far more at home printing the works of Ronald Knox and G.K. Chesterton than the economic theories of an American Quaker. Nevertheless, the job was done thanks to Rothbard's efforts. And just as both Federer and Rothbard and many others had hoped, Federer's work was at last once again in a position to influence new generations of economists. And slowly, but surely, that is exactly what it has done for the past 40 years. Federer's work is now prominent in several strands of research in and around the Austrian tradition. These include modern debates about some familiar topics like price theory and the theory of interest. However, there are also new studies on topics like land, rent, entrepreneurship, the theory of the firm, business cycles, monopoly and others. Outside the Austrian tradition, we see Federer's work on capital taking on new significance, as well as his work on specific topics like consumer sovereignty. Still, other scholars are investigating Federer's political progressivism, which is one thing that actually sets him apart for many modern Austrians. In any case, the opening of the Federer Archives makes this new work in these and many other fields both possible and highly valuable. And so I hope it will continue to inspire more work in the years to come, as will the continued publication of Federer's articles and books that's been made possible by the Mises Institute. I think it's appropriate to let Federer have the last word on his own rehabilitation. I've mentioned that his last major work was a book project having to do with the history of economic thought. But I didn't say what became of that work. At the time of his death, Federer had only completed about half of the intended study, namely the part dealing with classical economics. Nevertheless, even incomplete, it's an impressive work, a 500 page volume titled Development of Economic Theory from Adam Smith to John Stuart Mill. It was Federer's swan song, essentially one last broadside against the Ricardian tradition and in favor of Hungarian subjectivism. And in fact, at the time it was written, it was really the only systematic effort that had been made by an economist working in the Austrian tradition to study the history of economic thought from that perspective. And I'm beyond delighted to say that now more than 70 years after this project was initially begun, this book will finally be published in the near future by the Mises Institute and will be able to complement the supply of Federer's other writings and at last give a window into his work toward the end of his life and in particular his distinctively Austrian influenced perspective on the history of economic thought. One reason I think this book is especially notable is because it gives us a picture of Federer's broader conception of the history and development of economics. For instance, in the first chapter of the volume, he explains the history of economics as a series of reactions and revolutions among competing theories of political economy. Each generation proposes a new political economy, which eventually becomes the old political economy before being overturned by some even newer version. However, Federer was certainly no support of the wing theory of history in economics. He recognized clearly that these revolutions can and often were disastrous for the progress of knowledge. And sadly, the later decades of his life gave him ample firsthand experience of just how fleeting and incomplete was the revolution that had been inspired by Manger, Jevons, and Clark. Most economists missed this at the time, but it was Federer's dogged support for this objective theory of value that allowed him to see what so many others overlooked. And this is one area in which I believe that modern Austrians should seek to rehabilitate Federer as well. His view of economics as one of constant struggle, conflict, and replacement, and sometimes reemergence of older ideas, whether good or bad. I say this because in one sense, what this indicates is that the history of economics is, in a way, a history of rehabilitations. It is unfortunate that in his lifetime, Federer and others were unable, despite their best efforts, to preserve so much of the progress that had been made in economics when the Hungarian tradition was at its zenith. But thanks to the careful scholarship and energy of Muses Rothbard and others, it has meant that however delayed it has been, the rehabilitation of Federer was eventually completed and his work can be and is used by current generations of Austrian economists. And once more, this is important not just because it helps fill in our understanding of Federer the economist, but also because it gives us another perspective on the history of the Austrian school itself, and especially how Federer's return and rehabilitation has roughly paralleled the renaissance of Austrian economics and the rediscovery and extension of its core doctrines as well. So the potential for this rehabilitation was observed already in Federer's lifetime by his friend Wesley Claire Mitchell, who in the 1920s had somewhat overconfidently remarked that Federer's ideas provided a basis for critical evaluation which has been going on for two decades and which will doubtless continue for years to come. My hope in relating this history of Federer and encouraging others to revisit his works and to look at the work that Muses and Rothbard and so many others have done using Federer's ideas, my hope with all of this is that it will end up justifying Mitchell's optimism about Federer in the 21st century in ways that it was sadly unjustified for most of the 20th century. So with that, I will close and say thank you for your attention and there may be some questions, I don't know.