Ludwig Lachmann
German economist who became a member of and important contributor to the Austrian School of economics.
He grew to believe that the Austrian School had deviated from Carl Menger's original vision of an entirely subjective economics. To Lachmann, Austrian Theory was to be characterized as an evolutionary, or "genetic-causal", approach against the equilibrium and perfect knowledge found in mainstream Neoclassical economics.
Lachmann's "fundamentalist Austrianism" was rare—few living Austrian economists saw their work as departing from the mainstream. He underscored what he viewed as distinctive from that mainstream: economic subjectivism, imperfect knowledge, the heterogeneity of capital, the business cycle, methodological individualism, alternative cost and "market process". His brand of Austrianism now forms the basis for the "radical subjectivist" strand of Austrian Economics.
His work was highly influential upon later, American developments of the Austrian School.
He was also a strong advocate of using hermeneutic methods in the study of economic phenomena.
“Both, business expectation and scientific hypothesis serve the same purpose; both reflect an attempt at cognition and orientation in an imperfectly known world, both embody imperfect knowledge to be tested and improved by later experience. Each expectation does not stand by itself but is the cumulative result of a series of former expectations which have been revised in the light of later experience, and these past revisions are the source of whatever present knowledge we have”