Research Interests: Economic history, modern Europe, planning, coordination and control, neoliberalism, epistemology.

Max Ehrenfreund is a Ph.D. candidate in history of science. His research concerns the many uses of knowledge and information in economic life, with an emphasis on the economic and intellectual history of the interwar period. His dissertation, entitled “Knowledge, Calculation, and Economic Rationality in Central Europe, 1871–1945,” will be submitted in May 2024.

The subject of this dissertation is what is known as “the socialist calculation debate,” a controversy in the early 20th century about the feasibility of a socialist utopia. As the dissertation shows, this debate resulted in a change in the interpretation of economic rationality. Understood as objective, analytic, quantifiable, and impersonal in the late 19th century, economic rationality had been reimagined as subjective, holistic, unquantifiable, and ultimately personal by the middle of the 20th. The dissertation describes this shift from calculability to incalculability as a reenchantment of economic reason.

The first chapter’s topic is the pedagogy of accounting and the dissemination of accounting techniques among firms and households in imperial Germany and Austro-Hungary. The second chapter examines the theme of calculability in the writings of Max Weber and Werner Sombart. The third chapter concerns Otto Neurath’s career and the transformation of the Central European economy during the First World War. The fourth and fifth chapters narrate economic rationality’s reenchantment in the work of Ludwig von Mises and his student F.A. Hayek. A sixth (projected) chapter deals with Joseph Schumpeter, his reactionary economic and political thought, and his liberal Jewish student, Cläre Tisch."

Publications:

“Essential Business: The Flu, the War, and the Economy.” The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, forthcoming. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1537781423000014.

“Laws and Models at the League of Nations: Econometrics and World Order, 1930-1939.” Modern Intellectual History, forthcoming. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1479244322000518.

Presentations:

“Keeping the Books, Knowing the World: The Philosophy and Politics of Accounting in Central Europe, 1871–1945.” History of Science Society Annual Meeting, Portland, Oregon, November 2023 (scheduled).

“Wages and Sugar Beets: Max Weber Surveys Agriculture East of the Elbe.” 50th Annual Meeting of the History of Economics Society. Vancouver, British Columbia, June 23, 2023.

Previous Degrees:
BA., English, Yale University, 2012