I
Franz Xaver Weiss was born on April 18, 1885 as the only child of a Hungarian merchant family in Vienna. He attended elementary school there, grew up in fin-de-siècle Vienna and graduated from high school in the spring of 1903. Effectively supported by his parents and likely also driven by his expectation of attaining a respected career in the grand Habsburg Empire, in the fall of 1903 he enrolled in the eminent Faculty of Law and Political Science at University of Vienna. After Carl Menger‘s official retirement, the leading scholars there, besides Eugen von Boehm-Bawerk (1851-1914) and his brother-in-law Friedrich von Wieser (1851-1926), were also Eugen von Philippovich (1858-1917) or the lecturer Richard Schueller (1870-1972). After barely two years of intense studying and mostly due to his talent, acquired knowledge and enthusiasm, Weiss was personally invited to join Boehm-Bawerk’s famous seminar. Introduced by his mentor, Weiss met among others, his contemporaries Ludwig von Mises (1881–1973), J.A. Schumpeter (1883–1950), Richard von Strigl (1891–1942), and Alfred Amonn (1883–1962). He also befriended figures such as Otto Bauer (1881–1938, who later became the leading Austro-Marxist), Felix Somary (1881–1956, an economist and successful banker who later became an influential political advisor), or Nikolai Bukharin (1888–1938, who became the foremost theorist of the Bolsheviks and Stalin’s tragic opponent). During his studies, Weiss developed a deep reverence for Böhm-Bawerk’s work and heavily immersed himself in his mentor’s seminal Theory of Interest and Theory of Capital. Böhm-Bawerk exerted a formative influence not only on Weiss’ way of economic thinking, but also on his teaching style and manners. In 1909, Boehm-Bawerk awarded his student his doctorate with distinction for his dissertation on ‘The Modern Tendency in the Theory of Monetary Value’, which was published in 1910. Following his graduation and doctorate, Weiss completed the then-customary legal traineeship at one of Vienna’s Regional Legal Courts, while simultaneously working at Boehm-Bawerk’s chair at the University of Vienna. In 1913, he joined the Vienna Chamber of Commerce where he briefly held the position of a secretary. Like many thousands of his generation, Weiss also volunteered for the Austro-Hungarian Army in August 1914 and served on various hard contested war zones. At the end of WWI he served in northern Italy until the armistice was signed on November 3, 1918. Although G. von Haberler (1900-1995) conversationally described him once as a sort of straightforward figure, that was somewhat reminiscent of an officer, nothing is known about him having attained any higher military honors.
II
During the chaotic and in many places violent repercussions of WWI, after some 5 million dead and wounded, the catastrophic collapse of the mighty Austro-Hungarian Monarchy and reduced to an insignificant landlocked country, the once familiar social institutions of the Habsburg Empire began to crumble before the very eyes of the retreating and disheartened soldiers. The emerging new German-Austrian Republic could not offer the kind of opportunities to which Weiss and his contemporaries were accustomed. The disarray following the breakdown of the administrative institutions dramatically accelerated the decline of the Austrian Crown through the stock market crash and drove the persistent and crushing national debt. And when, from 1921 onward, the inflation spiraled completely out of control (partly due to the financing of food imports and government spending) and reached hyperinflation in 1922, paying jobs were scarce in starving Vienna. Only after a long search did Weiss manage to obtain the position of editor of the Journal for Economics and Social Policy between 1921 and 1925. This scholarly journal succeeded the Zeitschrift für Volkswirtschaft, Sozialpolitik und Verwaltung (Journal for Economics, Social Policy, and Administration, 1892–1918), that was jointly edited by Boehm-Bawerk, Wieser, Philippovich, and Inama-Sternegg. Between 1924 and 1925, with the support of various sponsors and colleagues, Weiss published the important and decisive two volumes of ‘Gesammelte Schriften von Eugen von Boehm-Bawerk’ ‘(Collected Writings of Eugen von Boehm-Bawerk) in Vienna. The first volume is introduced with a comprehensive and to date most accurate biographical appreciation of his mentor. While it contains Boehm-Bawerk’s groundbreaking, theoretical and economic-historical academic essays, volume II is primarily devoted to his numerous shorter, more factual works that were intended for a general readership.
