Hans Mayer

Born and raised in Vienna, Mayer took his doctorate in law in 1907 and worked in the Austrian financial administration until 1911 (interrupted by a year of study in Heidelberg). Mayer was never habilitated. His personal file contains a terse note on the matter: "Appointed associate professor at the University of Freiburg on the basis of unpublished manuscripts (Theorie der Preisbildung, the theory of price formation) even before the habilitation could be carried out at the university." After Freiburg he went in 1914 to the German Technical University in Prague. When the war ended he served as head of the budget section in the State Office for Military Affairs in Vienna, took up a professorship in Graz in 1921 and in 1923 was appointed to Vienna as the successor to Friedrich von Wieser. Mayer was continually embroiled in running feuds with his rival Othmar Spann and likewise had a strained relationship with Mises. Despite the small number of his academic contributions (Mayer wrote scarcely more than a handful of essays and a few articles in the fourth edition of the Handwörterbuch der Staatswissenschaften, the Concise Dictionary of the Political Sciences), he was appointed dean in 1927/1928 and received calls to Frankfurt (1927), Bonn (1932) and Kiel (1933). Already in middle age he rose to the highest salary category. Friedrich von Wieser had promoted Hans Mayer by every means available. The influential mentor developed a kind of father-son relationship with Mayer. After Wieser's death, Mayer moved into the house Wieser had left behind in Vienna's 19th district. Yet the tall, slim, reddish-blond beau with the winning appearance could not live up to the scholarly expectations placed on him. He remained a loner, noticeably distant from most other members of the Austrian School. The judgements of Mayer are by and large unfavourable and not free of personal resentment. From the point of view of the émigrés, Mayer's career embodied the dark side of the country from which they had been driven out: the favouritism, the half-hearted work ethic, the vain self-satisfaction and the blatant opportunism that apparently allowed Mayer, with impunity, to swear the requisite oaths of office to the various regimes a total of five times.