Peter Milford-Hilferding

Peter Milford-Hilferding 2006

Peter Milford-Hilferding (born January 13, 1908 in Vienna ; † November 27, 2007 there ) was an Austrian economist .

Life

Peter Hilferding was a son of the economist Rudolf Hilferding , author of the standard Marxist work " Das Finanzkapital " (1910) and German finance minister during the Weimar Republic , and of the doctor Margarete Hilferding , one of the first women doctors who were allowed to do a doctorate at the University of Vienna. Milford's family belonged to the prominence of the German-speaking social democracy - the parents, however, were estranged from each other.

After a varied school career, Peter Hilferding succeeded in completing his law degree in 1934 with a doctorate. According to his own testimony, he already rejected the austerity policy of his father as finance minister in the Heinrich Brüning cabinet during the global economic crisis and had a corresponding dispute with him.

Margarete Hilferding & Rudolf Hilferding (1904)

From 1934 to 1938 Peter Hilferding ran a bookshop in Vienna. In 1938 his mentor Karl Popper made it possible for him to emigrate to New Zealand , where he acquired citizenship and took the name Milford.

Although both parents and his brother Karl (the latter as a Catholic monk) were murdered by the Nazi regime, Milford-Hilferding returned to his hometown Vienna after the end of the war. He worked at the WIFO Institute ( Austrian Institute for Economic Research ) and in the Vienna Chamber of Labor ( Chamber for Workers and Salaried Employees ), member of the Dr. Benedikt Kautsky and worked in various social partnership institutions . Milford-Hilferding's previously unpublished memoirs (2005), which are available in the documentation of biographical records at the Institute for Economic and Social History at the University of Vienna, are remarkable in their openness to criticism and self-criticism .

literature

• Detailed obituary in Economy and Society No. 1/2008