Neoliberalism originated in political-economic theories formed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, especially in scholarly debates between German and Austrian economists. In Germany, a historical school of economics had long been critical of the abstract nature of marginalist neoclassical economics, with its unrealistic concepts, especially the notion of economies being in “equilibrium.” Economists such as Wilhelm Roscher (1817–1894) and Gustav Schmoller (1838–1917) thought that it was difficult to keep supply and demand “balanced” in advanced capitalist economies. Crises were probable, particularly when caused by lack of demand (underconsumption by underpaid workers). Other German economists influenced by the historical school stressed the instabilities in capitalist development arising from the uneven growth experienced in the various sectors of an economy. The German historical school was empirical rather than abstract, looked at the very long term, and tended to be somewhat critical of capitalism. In the 1880s a bitter debate between the German Schmoller and the Austrian Menger (discussed in Chapter 2) split German-speaking economics into antagonistic camps for decades. Schmoller thought that classical and neoclassical economics erred in postulating universal laws, preferred induction to mathematical deduction, and found naive the notion that people were motivated entirely by self-interest. By comparison, the Austrian school of economics, led by Menger and his students Friedrich von Wieser (1851–1926) and Eugen von Bohm-Bawerk (1851–1914), was abstract (mathematical) and antihistorical in method and more politically conventional than the German historical school. Here the most interesting ideas came from theorists exposed to the broader context of the social theory flourishing in Germany in the late 19th and early 20th centuries—Max Weber’s economic sociology, for instance (discussed in Chapter 4). Perhaps the most brilliant of the second-generation Austrian economists was Ludwig von Mises (1881–1973), the true founder of neoliberalism.