The Human Economists: How Fin-De-Siecle Visionaries Imagined a Better World

How a forgotten generation of Central European thinkers rejected capitalism's logic at the turn of the twentieth century-and offered solutions that remain urgent today

Financial panic, widening inequality, environmental crisis, authoritarian politics-a remarkable generation of Central European thinkers faced all of it, and they had answers. In the aftermath of the Panic of 1873, German-speaking intellectuals refused to accept capitalism as a natural law or economics as a value-free science. Drawing on anthropology, evolutionary biology, and sociology, they proposed sweeping alternatives: universal basic provisions, wealth and land taxes, cooperative ownership, democratic planning, and even money-less economies. Vienna was the crucible, but the influence spread across Central Europe and eventually the world.

In making the case that the insights of this forgotten tradition are needed more urgently than ever, Janek Wasserman

recovers a lost "third way" between industrial capitalism and communism, prioritizing human dignity, social welfare, and democratic decision-making;
traces how forced exile under fascism carried these ideas into the development economics practiced at the UN, World Bank, and IMF; and
connects the crises of the fin de siècle to our own, offering a "usable past" for today.

The Human Economists demonstrates that there is no reason to reinvent the wheel. These thinkers already imagined-and partly designed-the world we still need.