Hans Mayer, Vorwort (1949)

Hans Mayer’s editorial preface, dated Vienna, May 1949, introduces a collaborative history of a century of Austrian economic development. Written for a book prompted by the centenary of Austria’s chambers of commerce, it explains the undertaking’s scholarly purpose, organization, institutional commitments, and intended readership. Its central claim is that economic history can illuminate the causal relationships underlying contemporary economic life—and that the chambers’ coordinating role is indispensable to understanding Austria’s development.

Mayer begins by distinguishing the commemorative occasion from the book’s intellectual purpose:

Es will die wissenschaftliche Durchleuchtung einer entwicklungsreichen Periode der österreichischen Volkswirtschaft geben und damit zu Erkenntnissen gelangen, die über den aktuellen Anlaß hinaus von dauerndem Wert sind.

English translation: It seeks to provide a scientific examination of a period rich in developments in the Austrian national economy and thereby to arrive at insights of lasting value beyond the immediate occasion.

The preface moves from this research programme through the organization of the collaboration to an extended interpretation of the chambers, before outlining coverage, sources, and audiences. Mayer identifies a serious deficiency in historical scholarship: the preceding century of Austrian economic development remains insufficiently investigated. Studying it would explain existing conditions through their formation, but would also uncover reciprocal relationships among economic processes, political changes, constitutional arrangements, distributions of social power, prevailing ideas, and influential individuals. Economic history thus supplies more than background; it can generate theoretical knowledge.

Austria’s monetary history provides Mayer’s concrete example of historical experience informing economic theory. More broadly, he compares economic history to the physicist’s experimental field. Historical inquiry offers instruction where deliberate experimentation upon a living society would be ethically and politically unacceptable. The analogy establishes the practical relevance of scholarship without reducing the past to a collection of policy precedents: understanding depends on reconstructing relationships and their particular forms.

The institutional account begins with Anton Widmann, whose initiative Mayer attributes to a combination of Austrian-school training and practical economic experience. Mayer undertook the scientific and organizational direction at the Bundeskammer’s request. The project’s breadth required collaboration among scholars and experienced administrators. His praise of an inherited Austrian administrative tradition rests on its supposed selection of senior officials for deep knowledge of their responsibilities. Expertise here bridges research and practice, explaining both the recruitment of contributors and the authority claimed for their work.

The preface’s strongest interpretive commitment concerns the chambers themselves:

Es ist nichts weniger als ein prästabilisiertes Resultat, sondern das Ergebnis objektiver wissenschaftlicher Forschungsarbeit, wenn in der Darstellung des Entwicklungsganges der letzten hundert Jahre österreichischer Wirtschaft die Handelskammern im Vordergrund stehen und ihr überragender Anteil an Richtung, Inhalt, Ausmaß und Tempo der gesamten Wirtschaftsgestaltung hierbei seinen Ausdruck findet.

English translation: It is by no means a predetermined result, but the outcome of objective scholarly research, that the chambers of commerce occupy the foreground in the account of the development of Austria’s economy over the last hundred years and that their outstanding contribution to the direction, content, extent, and pace of economic development as a whole finds expression there.

Mayer presents their prominence as a finding rather than a prescribed commemorative conclusion. Nevertheless, the preface itself advances a strongly affirmative institutional interpretation. The chambers carried freedom and progress into economic life, maintained those commitments through changing circumstances, and represented democratic principles before their establishment in politics and constitutional government. The claim of objectivity therefore accompanies, rather than removes, the editor’s explicit valuation of the sponsoring institution.

His conception of freedom is qualified by necessary social obligations. Rejecting the doctrinaire rigidity of Manchester liberalism, he treats constraints as historically variable requirements for economic functioning and collective welfare:

Mag das Maß der notwendigen Bindung nach der jeweilig historisch gegebenen Gesamtlage wechseln, nicht von ihr her, der nur regulierende Funktion zukommt, wird der Prozeß des Wirtschaftsablaufes induziert und in Gang erhalten, sondern von der primären Antriebskraft der Betätigung in Freiheit, die Lebensluft alles Schöpferischen ist.

English translation: Although the degree of necessary constraint may vary with the historically given overall situation, the economic process is initiated and sustained not by that constraint, whose function is merely regulatory, but by the primary driving force of activity in freedom, which is the air that all creative endeavour breathes.

This distinction between creative initiative and regulatory constraint grounds Mayer’s account of chamber mediation. Beginning as representatives of the rising commercial bourgeoisie, the chambers expanded their activity across the economy. Their proximity to economic life supposedly gives them knowledge unavailable to administrative authorities. They reconcile specialized interests with collective requirements, exemplifying what Mayer calls progressive differentiation and integration. Organic language turns their coordinating function into a general principle of development, supporting his confidence in their future as well as their past.

The proposed coverage includes crafts and trades, industry, domestic and foreign commerce, transport, money, credit, currency, public finance, and social policy. Connections between sectors justify some overlap between contributions. Agriculture receives less specialized treatment: Mayer acknowledges its vital functions but argues that, following peasant emancipation and the removal of feudal burdens, it was less of a driving force than industry and commerce. Existing agrarian histories and attention to intersectoral relationships partly compensate for this limitation.

The evidence comprises legislation and explanatory reports, archives, inquiries, expert opinions, chamber proceedings, statistics, memoranda, and political speeches, alongside scholarly literature. Their purpose is to recover motives as well as events:

Das äußere Geschehen im historischen Ablauf erhält durch diese dokumentarischen Quellen gleichsam seinen Motivenbericht, sie geben einen Einblick in die Werkstatt der Geschichte.

English translation: Through these documentary sources, the outward course of historical events acquires, as it were, an explanatory account of its motives; they provide an insight into the workshop of history.

Addressing economists, historians, sociologists, policymakers, and economic practitioners, Mayer makes historical understanding a foundation for informed action. His closing acknowledgments identify the institutional support behind the undertaking. The preface’s relevance lies in this conjunction of documentary ambition, collaboration between scholarship and administration, and a historically adaptive liberalism whose privileged institutional expression is the chamber organization.