The School That Did Not Yet Exist

Among the earliest uses of writing were accounts and inventories: the oldest tablets of Uruk record grain, livestock and obligations, centuries before anyone wrote down verse; Phoenician trade networks carried the alphabet across the Mediterranean. Greek philosophy asked how a household is to be led well. Rome gave commerce contract, liability and permanence. The monasteries added ordered time and accountability, and in the Italian trading centres double-entry bookkeeping emerged, letting a family know precisely, for the first time, what it held and risked across generations. In the sixteenth century, scholars began to learn from merchants: the School of Salamanca read off the markets that the value of things arises in the judgement of those who act; later, the Scottish Enlightenment understood order as the result of human action without human design; Vienna turned all of it into a research programme.

This line was rarely carried by palaces or chairs. Its places were counting houses, monasteries, workshops and family libraries: places where knowledge was liable, because one's own capital, one's own children and one's own name were at stake. The scholarium was founded to carry this connection forward. That its founder first encountered it in his own family history is where the following chapters begin.

What connected Europe across centuries first met the founder as family history. His biography began with two very different legacies which, as it turned out, belonged together remarkably well. His father, an Iranian Azeri, came from a family of merchants. His mother, a Viennese, came from a family of scholars and printers. From one side came an entrepreneurial spirit, agility, and the desire for economic independence. From the other came books, culture, mountains, and an almost insatiable curiosity about how things connect.

While still at school, he worked at the Institute of Astronomy, founded a student newspaper, and became politically active. He was interested in the big questions, but opinions about them were not enough for him. That is why he chose technical physics. It seemed to offer the most rigorous equipment for moving from conjecture to reliable knowledge.

He specialised as an atomic physicist and worked on risk research, complex systems, and the philosophy of science. Physics taught him something that would remain crucial in every field he later entered: a model is not reality. The more complex a system, the more cautious we should be about imagining that we can control it from outside. That insight leads directly to questions far beyond physics. What happens when the elements of a system are people who learn, err, hope, fear, and change their plans?

“A model is not reality.”

The Vienna of his student years was intellectually impoverished, but by no means empty. Those who searched could still find living traces of great traditions. At the Atomic Institute, he encountered Helmut Rauch's world. Erhard Oeser and Franz Wuketits opened paths towards the philosophy of science and evolutionary theory; Harald Mori opened a path towards Viennese psychotherapy and Viktor Frankl's circle. Systems analysis was present in Laxenburg near Vienna. In Altenberg near Vienna stands the house of Konrad Lorenz, where scholarly exchange still took place at the lunch table in those days. The film documentaries of his student Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt had inspired the founder's first career aspiration. In Baden near Vienna, Karl Hermann Spitzy, the last representative of the Viennese School of Medicine, held his salon. In an old apartment building on the Danube Canal, Rainer Ernst Schütz kept Vienna's last bourgeois-liberal salon, where the founder was a regular guest and a friend of the house. There were still people in whom the old, interdisciplinary Vienna resonated: a city where physicists, psychologists, philosophers, economists, artists, and entrepreneurs could speak with one another without first seeking permission from the boundaries of their disciplines.

There was only one tradition he could not find in the very place where it had originated: the Austrian School of Economics.

The young physicist had to travel to the United States to encounter the Austrian School as a living tradition. During his stays and studies there, particularly while on a research fellowship in Washington and later at seminars in New York, he met economists who did not treat Menger, Böhm-Bawerk, Mises, Hayek, and Kirzner as museum pieces from the history of ideas. They discussed their questions as open problems of the present.

What began as a discovery in books became a series of personal encounters. In the United States, he met, among others, Vernon L. Smith, Israel M. Kirzner, and James M. Buchanan. Kirzner's theory of entrepreneurial discovery became especially important to the young physicist's own thinking. The great names of economics suddenly became interlocutors with very different temperaments, methods, and answers.

It was both a discovery and a provocation. How could a school that had arisen in Vienna and gone on to change economic thought around the world have all but disappeared in Austria? At the Vienna University of Economics and Business, there was still scholarly knowledge of its history. Yet as an independent, contentious tradition of inquiry capable of further development, it had been severed. Its most important representatives had been driven out, had emigrated, or had died. What had survived in America was precious, but had already been detached from its Viennese context and was often reduced to a political counter-position.

Alongside physics, he began studying business and sociology. During this period, Roland Baader became his teacher and mentor. An independent scholar without a university chair, he had a rare instinct for the points at which economic theory must have consequences in one's own life. For him, the monetary order, investment, character, and independence belonged together. Later, Hans-Hermann Hoppe became the young physicist's teacher and mentor. From him he learned the rigour of systematic, realistic thought that remains unimpressed by either academic fashion or political expediency.

Baader and Hoppe represented two qualities that the scholarium would later unite: consistency in thought and consistency in action.

On 15 October 2000, a small group met for breakfast at Vienna's Votiv Kino. Out of that conversation came the idea of an F. A. von Hayek-Kreis. We wanted to find out whether Austria's forgotten tradition could be brought back into the conversation.

The first retreat took place at Schloss Drosendorf on 30 April and 1 May 2001. Together with Julian Rauchdobler, the founder moderated the inaugural gathering. Our guest was Friedhelm Frischenschlager, the former Federal Minister of Defence, a co-founder of the liberal Atterseekreis, and one of the last Austrian politicians to have studied Hayek himself. A second retreat followed in November with Detmar Döring, Gerd Habermann, and Robert Nef. Drosendorf became the birthplace of our initiative.

These were not mass events. That was precisely where their strength lay. In an old castle on the edge of Austria, people gathered to speak seriously once again about freedom, responsibility, economics, and the future of Europe. Much of what would later define the scholarium was already present in embryo: the conversation within a small circle, the connection between history and the present, the hospitality of a real place, and the courage to take up an almost severed tradition.

At the time, the internet seemed the ideal place for this new beginning. It was an open field, not yet cultivated by a handful of dominant platforms. Small initiatives could build something of their own with modest means.

With liberalismus.at, we created the first Austrian website to introduce the thinkers of the Austrian School to a general German-speaking audience in such breadth. For many readers, it was their first encounter in German with Menger, Böhm-Bawerk, Mises, and Hayek. The site grew into a large archive of biographies, texts, news, and commentary. At times, it reached 5,000 readers a day.

But the name itself already exposed a limit. Liberalism had become a politically charged term. It attracted people in search of a camp and repelled others before the real questions could even begin. liberalismus.at became liberty.li. The move from a German political label to an internationally understood term was also an intellectual move. Freedom became an open question that could be explored only in conjunction with responsibility, experience, and concrete action.

liberty.li was social networking before anyone spoke of social media. The platform combined profiles, groups, forums, comments, weblogs, and the funding of shared projects. It was translated into English and French, with a Slovak version under development. The platform supported itself through advertising revenue.

The family of platforms even included a digital gold system. Balances were denominated in grams of gold; deposits, withdrawals, redemption, and transfers between participants were possible. It was a centrally managed, database-based ledger of accounts and transactions, akin to early digital gold systems such as e-gold, not a blockchain. Yet it existed years before the Bitcoin white paper. We called the unit of account the Gulden. The system was technically integrated but never launched on a broad scale. This, too, belongs to the story: we recognised some developments early, sometimes too early to draw all the consequences ourselves.

With choices.li, we took the next step in that learning process. Group identity gave way to the question of a person's real choices. How can one build an independent life? What roles do place of residence, business, wealth, education, health, and personal relationships play? How can risks be distributed across several countries and jurisdictions?

This gave rise, very early on, to a practical laboratory for international life choices, flag theory, and geoarbitrage. We offered advice on emigration, entrepreneurship, wealth structuring, and alternative ways of life long before they became an industry of their own. Christoph Heuermann entered this milieu as a young student and later colleague. With Staatenlos, he went on to develop the subject of flag theory further.

The most important result of these years, however, was a correction. Digital reach is not yet a community. Networks can connect people, but they can also gather them into filter bubbles, deepen their alienation, and heighten their sense of political impotence. At the height of its reach, the founder took the platform offline. He remained committed to freedom. What he abandoned was the idea that it could be marketed as an ideology.

“Digital reach is not yet a community.”

In 2006, Rahim Taghizadegan founded the Institut für Wertewirtschaft out of the initiative. Its unwieldy name was deliberate. It was meant to resist conventional political categories while also recalling that economic life begins with values: with what matters to people, what they are willing to take responsibility for, and how they can serve others.

The Institute was not a think tank disseminating ready-made answers with the money of a political sponsor. It was privately funded by its clients and received no subsidies. From the outset, it operated as an enterprise; its founder bore the responsibility. People were to receive something of real value in return for their support: better decisions, deeper insight, and, where wealth was concerned, concrete protection from avoidable mistakes.

From 2006 onwards, we held seminars for investors. We recognised the fragility of the financial system, the distortions created by cheap money, and the danger of a major correction. No one could seriously predict the precise day of a market crash. The mechanisms of the coming crisis, however, could be understood. When the correction arrived in 2007 and 2008, many of our participants were prepared. Their feedback showed that the seminars had been more than intellectually stimulating: they had helped people preserve their savings and wealth.

Education was not merely a later side issue. Families, homeschoolers, and unschoolers were invited to the club evening ‘Educational Freedom Rather Than Uniform Schooling’ on 7 September 2007; children were a natural part of the event. The question of how learning might flourish beyond a uniform model led years later to CRAFTprobe and eventually to the Studium Generale.

That experience left a lasting mark on the scholarium. Good theory does not prove itself by explaining everything after the event. It must help people, before a decision, to bear uncertainty more intelligently.

As early as July 2007, the three-day seminar “Wirtschaft wirklich verstehen” took place at WU Vienna. For three days, the seminar treated the Austrian School as a tool for understanding entrepreneurship, prices, knowledge, and human action.

The Institute led to a growing programme of teaching and public lectures. The founder taught at numerous universities and institutions of higher education in Austria and abroad, including in Vienna, Halle, Liechtenstein, and Heiligenkreuz. From 2008 to 2012, he taught the course “Der handelnde Mensch in der Wirtschaftstheorie” (“The Acting Person in Economic Theory”) at the Vienna University of Economics and Business. Teaching appointments at universities have accompanied the work to this day.

The Austrian School had returned to a place where its representatives had once taught. Some eight decades after the flowering of its original Viennese tradition, it was once again being taught as a distinct, action-oriented approach, not merely as a chapter in the history of economic doctrines. Later, our “Wirtschaft wirklich verstehen” (“Truly Understanding Economics”) seminars also took place in the building of the former Hochschule für Welthandel, Vienna's historic academy of world trade. It was there, in particular, that one could feel what was at stake: the return of an economics that takes the entrepreneur, knowledge, time, error, and uncertainty seriously.

Wirtschaft wirklich verstehen (Truly Understanding Economics) grew out of these courses and seminars. Rather than a mathematical game of glass beads or a collection of political recipes, economics was to show how people act under scarcity, how prices transmit knowledge, why good intentions can have bad consequences, and how entrepreneurship deals with uncertainty.

The teaching was never confined to the Austrian School. Psychology, law, history, technology, anthropology, monetary theory, and culture all belonged within it. That connection remains at the core today: the strength of the Austrian School lies in a realistic view of human action that makes the artificial boundaries between these fields permeable.

In 2015, the Institut für Wertewirtschaft became the scholarium. The new name was both a self-correction and a programme. The universitas magistrorum et scholarium was originally a community of teachers and learners. Modern universities had increasingly concentrated on the magistri: on titles, certificates, and institutional jurisdictions. The scholarium was to take the second part seriously again: the learners.

Rather than telling other people how to live or conduct their affairs, the scholarium itself was to be a learning enterprise. Theory without practice remains empty. Practice without theory is blind to the distortions of the present. Only by combining them can we develop the kind of judgement that can be gained neither from a textbook nor from experience alone.

For many years, the scholarium was preceded by an ampersand, the commercial & that gave this idea a sign of its own. It is an old ligature of the Latin et, meaning “and”. It connected the world of scholars with the world of merchants, leisure with work, books with problems, and Vienna with the world. A sentence from Roland Baader remained an apt summary: “Commerce unites, politics divides.”

This idea gave rise to CRAFTprobe, an educational programme for young people. Many young people were expected to choose an educational or vocational path without ever having experienced what different kinds of real work feel like. They knew school subjects and job descriptions, but rarely workshops, businesses, projects, or people who practised something with genuine mastery.

An early precursor was the Academy for Personal Responsibility in Hittisau, Vorarlberg. From 16 to 23 September 2012, young people aged 17 to 25 spent an intensive week there bringing together economic, philosophical, and practical questions about an independent life.

CRAFTprobe started precisely there. Young people could try their hand at different professions, take responsibility for projects of their own, and acquire basic entrepreneurial skills. Digital and analogue tools, culture, nature, technology, art, the market, and personal development all belonged together. Entrepreneurs, craftspeople, artists, and specialists became direct examples. Good theory remained indispensable. It helped turn experience into more than a collection of anecdotes.

The programme was conceived as a Kraftprobe in the best sense of the word: a protected but real passage into an independent life, a test of one's strength. Fifteen young people took part in the second intensive programme in August 2016. The pandemic interrupted this physical form. Its basic idea, however, was not lost. It lives on within the scholarium: learning begins when people try something, accept responsibility for the consequences, and reflect together on what they have experienced.

On 3 December 2016, we celebrated our tenth anniversary at the Austrian National Library. Companions from many countries gathered in the State Hall, the Augustinian Reading Room, and the Oratory, among them Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Jörg Guido Hülsmann, Robert Nef, and Daniel Model. The small initiative had grown into a privately funded institution of higher learning with students and guests from around the world.

The anniversary also looked far back into the past. One project was devoted to Johannes Nider's De Contractibus Mercatorum, a fifteenth-century treatise on merchants' contracts. It contains remarkably early reflections on needs and prices, the value of money, time, entrepreneurial profit, property, and contract. The original was expertly restored and is preserved at the National Library for research.

This, too, is a typical scholarium story: a problem of the future led to an almost forgotten manuscript, and the ancient manuscript proved strikingly contemporary.

What emerged from seminars and conversations grew over the years into a large body of written work. More than fifteen books appeared under the founder's name or in co-authorship, among them Vom Systemtrottel zum Wutbürger, Österreichische Schule für Anleger, Alles, was Sie über die Österreichische Schule wissen müssen, Wirtschaft wirklich verstehen, Die Nullzinsfalle, Geld her oder es kracht, and Europa auf der Intensivstation.

There were also translations, introductions, and edited volumes. Of particular importance was his complete German edition of Mises's Human Action, published in four volumes in 2019 as Menschliches Handeln. Other projects made texts available that had become all but inaccessible in the German-speaking world. Translation here meant more than carrying words from one language into another: it meant taking up a broken thread of thought.

The written work repeatedly led back into international conversation. On 7 October 2022, the founder spoke at the Mises Institute's fortieth-anniversary summit in Phoenix about the legacy of the Austrian School in Vienna. More than twenty years after his own discovery in America, the astonished visitor had become a speaker from Vienna who could now bring something of that tradition back.

The Scholien began appearing in 2009: printed marginalia on a great, invisible text, with observations, questions, essays, book recommendations, encounters, and insights. For many years, they arrived by post as journals and booklets, a deliberately slow medium in an age of growing digital distraction. They later continued digitally without abandoning the demand for concentration and density.

The founder also engaged with Bitcoin at an early stage. He began observing the experiment in 2009; from 2011 onwards, he introduced it into university teaching at a time when it was virtually unknown even among economists. Years would pass before the subject became common in university curricula. In 2012, he published an early economic essay about it in German; in 2018, Bitcoin received a chapter of its own in the expanded edition of Wirtschaft wirklich verstehen. For him, Bitcoin was a real-world experiment in money, property, trust, technology, and institutional evolution. Once again, an abstract subject was joined to a practical decision.

Meanwhile, Vienna became home to one of the largest private libraries devoted to the Austrian School and liberalism. Parts of the collections of Roland Baader, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, and Rainer Ernst Schütz found a new home at the scholarium. They were joined by rare editions and further estates.

This library was a working tool and a store of memory, not an ornamental piece of furniture. Salons, seminars, and long conversations took place between its shelves. Books that disappeared into closed stacks elsewhere lay open on the table and once again became part of a living discourse. At the same time, the place was a reminder that knowledge has a material dimension: someone must collect, preserve, arrange, and read books, and make them available to future readers.

The Studium Generale grew out of the physical salons and seminars held in this library. Its first session took place on 6 March 2020. The programme was conceived as an interdisciplinary course of study for adults: demanding and discursive, without the rituals of examinations or the compulsion to issue certificates.

It had barely begun when the pandemic made a physical continuation impossible. On 27 March, we ventured into an experiment in distance learning. What elsewhere might have been planned as a multi-year digitisation project emerged within weeks out of necessity. The conversations continued, were recorded, and gradually formed an extensive archive.

Since 2022, the AlpenSalon has regularly carried the Studium back into a shared physical experience. Multi-day seminars in Obergurgl, Salzburg, Neustift, and at Lake Ägeri combined lectures and conversations with hiking, mountain practice, and life in a common place. In this way, the digitally grown course of study remained rooted in real landscapes and encounters.

Since 2024, the Studium has taken place almost entirely online. The distance format is now giving rise to an educational library in which video, audio, text, and structured knowledge models are brought together. The digital realm preserves and distils personal conversation, opening it to people spread across countries and time zones without replacing it.

This brought the story full circle. The internet that had made liberalismus.at, liberty.li, and choices.li possible became a tool once again. This time, a body of thought and experience accumulated over many years stood at the centre. Reach was secondary to it.

The scholarium was never merely an educational offering. Out of its circle grew business formations, its own investment decisions, and holdings. In 2024, out of the operational educational work of scholarium GmbH in Vienna arose a group and capital layer with scholarium AG in Zug. Here, too, the same principle applied: anyone who speaks about entrepreneurship, money, and uncertainty must be prepared to commit their own capital and assume their own responsibility.

Today, the connection between education, community, wealth, and entrepreneurial practice is becoming visible in physical form as well. In Istria, the first events and a family week have already taken place at a site of our own, while its formal development is still being completed. On Madeira, the land has been acquired and the next major development is taking shape. Another site exists in Nova Scotia. Further places will follow only when possibilities have become dependable places.

These places are meant to show how education can once again be embedded in an actual lifeworld: with nature, hospitality, production, investment, culture, and learning across generations. After decades of increasing abstraction, the scholarium's next step leads back into reality.

After twenty years, the scholarium is once again giving itself a simple form. Many different points of entry, tiers, and offerings had become a staircase on which the original idea was barely visible. From now on, a single threshold will once again lead into the inner circle: the Salon.

The Salon is the institution's social and educational threshold: a limited circle, a growing library, curated recordings, real places, and conversations in which insight is allowed to have consequences. Whoever takes a place here takes a place in a tradition older than any university. The institutional frame is the kontor. From the educational work grow companies, tools, and places that must prove themselves through real decisions.

Information is abundant today. What is scarce is selection and distillation, serious conversation, and a community in which knowledge is allowed to have consequences. The scholarium arose from the search for such a community. After twenty years, that search is not over. But it has places, a history, and once again a clear form.

A place that endures.