Up to the 1930s the Austrian Capital Theory Was an Important School, But It Fell into Oblivion after the Great Capital Controversies of the 1930s

During the fifties and the sixties the neoclassical concept of the production function was criticized in numerous papers. In particular, the aggregation of different capital goods into a single number was reprehended. A second essential disadvantage, namely the neglect of the time structure of the production process, found, however, relatively little attention.

While up to the thirties the Austrian capital theory which stressed the time aspect of production was an important school, it fell into oblivion after the great capital controversies of the thirties. It took over thirty years, i.e. till the beginning of the seventies before it came to a renaissance of the Austrian capital theory by various writers. We may roughly classify the different attempts to "its rebirth in modern economics" into three groups.

--Malte Faber, preface to Introduction to Modern Austrian Capital Theory, Lecture Notes in Economics and Mathematical Systems 167 (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1979), v.