Ben Brisson, 2025-26 HOPE Center Visiting Scholar

The Great Depression. The rise of National Socialism. And another catastrophic world war. It’s no wonder that the major events of the 1930s and 1940s led many people to seriously reconsider capitalism, socialism, and democracy and their potential merits and dangers.

Among the intellectuals attempting to come to terms with the dislocations and destruction of these two decades were members of two “schools” of thought usually considered to have little in common: the Austrian School of economics and the Frankfurt School of critical theory. 

“But the two schools are in many ways actually quite similar,” says Ben Brisson, a 2025–26 HOPE Center Visiting Scholar. 

Ben is looking at the unexplored history and theoretical connections between two schools in the mid-twentieth century, developing the material into a book.

“Both dealt with big questions such as the effects of industrialism, the future of capitalism, and concerns over socialism and totalitarianism. And although neither abandoned the core ideas around which they were founded”—liberalism, in the case of the Austrian School; Marxism, in the case of the Frankfurt School—“they both questioned those ideas and tried to push them in new directions.”

As Ben explains, it’s hard to define each school in simple terms. The Austrian School, founded by Carl Menger in the 1870s, was one of the first to regard value as subjective—in essence, value is in the eye of the beholder—rather than as a function of the amount of labor needed to produce a good. And rather than focusing on markets per se, the Austrians focused on what one of their members, Ludwig von Mises, called “human action,” or “purposeful behavior.”  Subsequent Austrian scholars like F.  A. Hayek built on these theories to defend individual freedom and constitutionalism in response to growing challenges to liberal government in the twentieth century.

The Frankfurt School—members included Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer—was rooted in a European Marxist tradition. They combined descriptive analysis, normative commitments, and practical action—elements that make their theory “critical”—in an attempt to advance human emancipation. In their view, orthodox Marxism had become inept and even dangerous, and new social theories were needed to explain contemporary menaces to freedom like the rise of Nazi Germany. 

“Of course, the notion of a school itself and how to define one are contested,” says Ben, who completed his PhD in political science in 2025 at UC Irvine. “It’s important to take the members of each school on their own terms and not force them into received notions of what this or that school supposedly believed.”

As part of the book, Ben is tracking down the interactions between one of the most prominent members of the Austrian School, Friedrich Hayek, and a German Marxist theorist named Franz Neumann. 

“Neumann and Hayek were at the London School of Economics at the same time, and both wrote about the relationship between capitalism and socialism and also how to rebuild Germany after the war. As far as I know, no one has looked at the connection between the two, although Hayek cites Neumann no less than nine times in his 1960 book, The Constitution of Liberty.”

While at Duke, Ben has been carefully going through the Hayek Papers in the Rubenstein Library and benefiting from consultations with the HOPE Center faculty and his fellow visiting scholars.

A native of Vermont, Ben will begin a one-year postdoc at the Free University of Berlin in April. While in Germany, he plans to make the short trip to Frankfurt, where the records of the Institute for Social Research, the institution founded by the members of the Frankfurt School, are kept.

“This last year couldn’t have been more perfect, with the opportunity to spend a year at the HOPE Center and get the Austrian economics side of the picture, and then to go on to Germany and gain further insight into the Frankfurt School.”