Although Leland Yeager calls himself a fellow traveler of the
Austrian School (p. 100), rather than a full-fledged member of it — he
is a fellow traveler of the
Chicago School
as well — no reader of his essays can fail to note one respect in which
he resembles two quintessential Austrian economists, Ludwig von Mises
and Murray Rothbard. Like them, Yeager is a scholar of enormous
learning, a fact in evidence in each of the 28 essays of his collected
here. As an example, few of his colleagues, one suspects, would know
that "Thomas Hobbes … suggested that one might test whether a piece of
abstract philosophizing means anything by seeing how readily it could be
translated from the original language into another" (p. 267, n. 2).
Often, his own views emerge from the critical comments he makes on
other writers. Yeager insists, against Robert Clower and Axel
Leijonhufvud, that Keynes was a Keynesian. The writers whom Yeager
opposes take Keynes to be an advocate of monetary-disequilibrium theory,
stressing especially the difficulties in adjusting prices to changes in
the demand to hold money.
Yeager mordantly comments,
