I wonder, why is he so obscure, even among Austrians. Did he differ a lot from Mises and Rothbard, or is it just a matter of not having much of his writings?
Thanks
"Benjamin Anderson", writes Mark Thornton in his essay about this remarkable writer, "is a rare example of an American economist who wrote in the Austrian tradition long before Ludwig von Mises emigrated to the U.S"That is the story. Benjamin Anderson worked in an intellectual isolation, because the main branches of the school were still in Vienna and elsewhere in his haydays before Mises and Hayek moved to Chicago and New York. That is why his influence was pretty limited, although he seems to be pretty productive economist.Although Rothbard preaches and uses his work on the great depression, there is some critisism about his opinions in Rothbard's America's Great Depression about Anderson's preaching of the action of bank holiday:
Dr. Anderson, supposedly an advocate of laissez-faire, sound money, and property right, went so far in the other direction as to chide the states for not going further in declaring bank holidays. He declared that bank moratoria should have applied to 100 percent, not just 95 percent, of bank deposits, and he alsoattacked the Clearing House for failing to issue large quantities of paper money during the crisis. (p. 326, footnote 5)
But one must remember that many other good economists, such as Frank Fetter (austrian), Wilhelm Röpke (austrian), Frank Taussig (quasi-austrian), Frank Knight (monetarist) and Aaron Director (monetarist and a brother-in-law of Milton Friedman) were shocked about magnitude of the depression and advocated many forms of government intervention.
Benjamin Anderson did not accept the marginal utility of value (he had his social theory of value, while he was at Harvard). But applying his theory, he was totally into the rest of Ludwig Mises' 1912 Theory, starting from chapter 3 on.