scholarium has brought together the theory and practice of the Austrian school for twenty years. The thinking remains bound to its own risk and responsibility: tested in financial crises, in its own companies and in the building of real places.
This workshop serves people who build companies and families, steward wealth and want to preserve their capacity to act across generations.
Scholien. Monthly marginal notes by Rahim Taghizadegan on the present, written in the mode of the Viennese school. Originally small booklets, today digital distillations of theory and practice. Free, yet valuable. Ripened from two decades of Scholien: the book Win-Win.
Monthly. Unsubscribe with every issue.
§ IIWhat scholarium does
The Austrian school is Vienna's concentration of an older European experience: the practice of trade preceded its theory by millennia. From Salamanca through the Scottish Enlightenment to Vienna, entrepreneurial experience found theoretical form. Economics, psychology, law, money and culture became one reality in which decisions have consequences and knowledge is dispersed.
Today the applications lie open. A choice of location begins with Hayek's question of who knows what, and where. Handover or new venture: Mises' praxeology tests every situation against its actual conditions. What to make of money and Bitcoin is settled by Menger's theory of the origin of money. And what entrepreneurs do, Kirzner described as a process of discovery and Mises as the shouldering of uncertainty.
Theory worth anything matures through real decisions: we have tested it in our own companies, our own wealth, publishing and the building of enduring places. Technology is capital in this view: a productive detour that binds knowledge into tools and extends the reach of human action. The salon carries this conversation further; it presumes one's own judgement and responsibility.
Information today is abundant and therefore cheap. What counts is selection and compression, connection and sequence: understanding reality without ideology or utopia, then acting on it soberly and entrepreneurially. scholarium has done this work for two decades: monthly and free in the Scholien, deepened in the salon.
Culture from entrepreneurial strength.
This house carries the Austrian school forward where it began: in the conversation between scholars and entrepreneurs. Its last Austrian representative in direct tradition teaches here as an entrepreneur; its judgement on money carries its own wealth at risk. The house collects, publishes and endows, because capital without culture loses its direction; it runs enterprises, because culture needs capital.
Those who love culture often despise the commerce that pays for it; those in commerce often treat culture as decoration. Conservatives wear the past as a costume, history is told as a sequence of battles and states, and the academy no longer tests its ideas against anything. The great cultural achievements of Europe arose elsewhere: in the kontors of the Hanse, the city republics of northern Italy, the trading houses of Holland, in Scottish academies and Viennese salons, financed by merchants and patrons, tested under real stakes.
In this line stands the house: purely self-financed for twenty years, out of entrepreneurial success, its own investments and the contributions of its participants, without a single subsidy. Its seat is in Zug, at the centre of alpine entrepreneurship: water power drove an early industrial revolution here, trade ran across passes and bridges, and remnants of old Europe's small scale, decentralisation and diversity remain tangible to this day. It works in Vienna, in Istria between Venice and Habsburg, on Madeira in Portugal's seafaring tradition; in Scotland, it is taking on responsibility for a school rich in tradition. How this union becomes a world history is shown by Win-Win across 375 pages; how it continues is decided in the salon and the kontor.
The shared salon.
In the Viennese tradition, the salon is an intimate room where theory, practice and culture meet: a conversation among people who have something to say and can listen to one another. This intimacy is a precondition of insight, which can take no account of sensitivities; trust rests on reciprocity.
Many want to study the Austrian school at a university, but that misjudges the university: academicised or ideologised lecturing, purely abstract or enthusiastically one-sided, is useless. The place of truly useful study, in the original sense of an eagerness for insight, is the salon: the intimate setting in which theory and practice, scholarship and society come together under the protection of privacy, where friendly dispute and the critical exchange of experience have their place.
The seminars of the Studium Generale take place primarily live online. Physical gatherings and shared journeys complement this continuous digital work in Vienna, Zug, Istria, Madeira and places around the world. The inscription into the salon limited to 144 seats is made once; as at the old university it is not renewed, and more seats will never be granted.
§ V · From the workshop
Thought becomes enterprise.
A kontor was a node: residence, warehouse, legal space and connection to a network larger than the place in which it stood.
From the educational work, enterprises have grown: seminars and editions, archives and a library, companies and places the house runs and answers for itself. scholarium is a learning kontor in this sense. Its work falls into four fields: preserving money, deploying capital entrepreneurially, shaping places, passing on culture.
For founders and owner families, the way leads on from the salon into concrete responsibility: a handover, a succession or a work meant to last becomes a mandate with an agreed result.
§ VIRahim Taghizadegan
Rahim Taghizadegan is an Austrian economist, physicist, author and entrepreneur based in Zug. He has taught the Austrian school at universities in Austria, Germany, Switzerland and Liechtenstein and has worked on Bitcoin in teaching and publishing since 2011.
What is unusual is the alignment of teaching and practice: he teaches entrepreneurship as an entrepreneur, allocates his own capital and helps build the companies and places about which others merely speak.
Full profile →