Richard von Strigl, “L’enseignement économique en Autriche: Les universités autrichiennes” (1937)

Strigl’s article is an institutional diagnosis of Austrian economic education rather than a doctrinal survey. Its central thesis is that Austrian universities possessed high-quality economists and a living intellectual tradition, but that economics long remained structurally subordinated to legal studies. The decisive question is not whether economics was taught, but where it was placed in the curriculum, under what examination pressures, and through what forms of student work.

Pendant longtemps, l'enseignement économique, rattaché exclusivement aux facultés de droit, n'occupait, dans les programmes d'enseignement juridique, qu'une place peu saillante.

English translation: For a long time, economic instruction, attached exclusively to the faculties of law, occupied only a minor place in the programs of legal education.

The essay first reconstructs the older legal curriculum: two study periods, three state examinations, and an economics component embedded in the public-law examination. In principle students received instruction in economic theory, economic policy, and public finance. In practice, Strigl argues, the timing was pedagogically damaging: economics came late, just as students were preparing for examinations, especially the judicial one. The result was pedagogically perverse: economic instruction arrived precisely when students were consumed by the preparation of their examinations:

Ce système n'est évidemment pas favorable aux études économiques, car il en place l'enseignement à une époque où les étudiants sont absorbés par la préparation de leur examen (pratiquement, leur examen judiciaire comme nous avons dit).

English translation: This system is obviously not favorable to economic studies, for it places their instruction at a time when students are absorbed in preparing for their examination (in practice, their judicial examination, as we have said).

Strigl’s most important conceptual move is to separate the quality of teaching from the institutional reach of teaching. He praises the economists of the Austrian School and insists that their tradition remained alive; the weakness lay in the curriculum’s capacity to draw ordinary students into sustained work. Thus eminent instruction could be deep without being broad:

Mais le rôle un peu effacé de l'enseignement économique dans le cadre du programme d'études n'a pas permis à l'action de ces maîtres de s'étendre autant en largeur qu'elle est allée en profondeur.

English translation: But the somewhat effaced role of economic instruction within the framework of the curriculum did not allow the influence of these masters to extend as far in breadth as it went in depth.

Against the passive lecture model, Strigl emphasizes seminars, practical exercises, written reports, and discussion. Economic education, in his view, requires students to learn how to think and argue economically, not merely to absorb material. The seminar is valuable because it draws students into live discussion:

Partant d'un exposé oral, il s'agit ici essentiellement d'amener des discussions qui donnent aux étudiants l'occasion d'exprimer clairement la pensée économique, de discerner des sophismes et de s'approprier les conditions de la science économique.

English translation: Starting from an oral presentation, what matters here essentially is to bring about discussions that give students the opportunity to express economic thought clearly, to detect sophisms, and to make the conditions of economic science their own.

The second part of the article explains the reform introduced for students beginning in 1935. Its crucial change was the division of study into three periods of three semesters, separating private-law preparation from the public-law and economics phase. Strigl regards this as a major improvement because it removes the old overlap between judicial preparation and economic study. The reform also makes exercises compulsory and introduces a first-cycle course in basic economic notions, not examined but intended to awaken curiosity. Its value, Strigl suggests, lies in a single service:

Son importance semble résider dans le fait qu'il offre aux jeunes étudiants une première vue sur le domaine des études économiques.

English translation: Its importance seems to reside in the fact that it offers young students a first overview of the field of economic studies.

The final sections place economics within Staatswissenschaft, specialized higher schools, and research institutions. Public-law studies give economics a more central role, including seminars and theses, but attract few students because they are longer and confer fewer career advantages than legal studies. Technical schools, agricultural schools, and especially the Vienna School of International Commerce provide additional economic instruction. The Austrian Institute for Business Cycle Research offers a bridge between theory and practical research.

Strigl closes by acknowledging that he has described formal arrangements rather than the content of economic science. Yet he treats the international reputation of Austrian scholarship as the strongest evidence for the universities’ intellectual vitality:

Pour se faire une idée à ce dernier égard, il n'est, au fond, que de rechercher dans quelle mesure l'enseignement réussit à former des hommes d'affaires et des savants; or, si l'activité des praticiens ne peut, en général, guère se faire remarquer en dehors du pays où elle s'exerce, les travaux scientifiques de l'École autrichienne, au contraire, sont connus dans le monde entier. C'est là, sans doute, le témoignage le plus significatif en faveur de l'enseignement dans les universités autrichiennes.

English translation: To form an idea in this last respect, one need only inquire to what extent the teaching succeeds in producing men of affairs and scholars; and while the activity of practitioners can, in general, scarcely be noticed outside the country where it is exercised, the scientific works of the Austrian School, on the contrary, are known throughout the world. That is, without doubt, the most significant testimony in favor of teaching in the Austrian universities.

The article’s relevance lies in showing how the fate of economic science depends on institutional design. For Strigl, economics flourishes when protected from exam congestion, linked but not absorbed into law, and supported by seminars that cultivate independent judgment.