Hutt Considered the Austrians to be the True Heirs of the Classical Tradition and Upholders of Pre-Keynesian Monetary Theory

Although Hutt and other critics of the Keynesian Revolution--including Arthur Marget and Henry Hazlitt--considered their work to be in the classical tradition, as the revolution's stunning popularity through the 1940s and 1950s pushed economists' memory of earlier monetary theory further into the background, Hutt and Hazlitt (Marget had left academic economics after the World War II and died in 1962) found themselves increasingly sharing perspectives with the School that had most firmly and consistently upheld pre-Keynesian monetary theory: the Austrians. Neither seems to have been attracted much to the aggregative, positivist method of the Chicago School's monetarism, a reaction to Keynesianism that to some extent shared its method. Hutt considered the Austrians to be the true heirs of the classical tradition with which, understandably, he preferred to be identified.

--John B. Egger, "William H. Hutt: The 'Classical' Austrian," in The Great Austrian Economists, ed. Randall G. Holcombe (Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 1999), 197.