PositiveThe JC... [an] engrossing and eminently readable history of the Circle ... Edmonds clearly believes the contribution of the members of the Vienna Circle to philosophy has been benign. However, they never really offered any compelling grounds for dismissing all forms of metaphysical speculation as meaningless without any basis in fact or value. Unmentioned by Edmonds is the rigorously argued-for form of theism contemporaneously articulated in Vienna by Franz Brentano ... Brentano more permanently influenced a second eminent Viennese Jewish intellectual of the same period whose body of thought was equally at odds with Logical Positivism, but who receives only the most cursory of mentions in Edmonds’s book. This was the economist Ludwig von Mises. His small-government proclivities, shared coincidentally by Schlick, found favour with another Viennese economist, Friedrich Hayek, who in turn profoundly influenced the political thought of Karl Popper. As much as anyone, it is these three Viennese thinkers, of whom two were Jews, who have helped keep the economies of Britain and America as business-friendly as they still are.
