Among his teachers were Max Dvořák in Vienna, Georg Simmel in Berlin, Henri Bergson and Gustave Lanson in Paris.
It was in Budapest that Hauser published his first writings, between 1911 and 1918, including his doctoral dissertation about the problem of creating a systematic aesthetics, which appeared in the journal Athenaeum in 1918.
[3] His life's work, the four volume Social History of Art (1951), argued that art—which, after a paleolithic period of naturalism, began as "flat, symbolic, formalized, abstract and concerned with spiritual beings"—became more realistic and naturalistic as societies became less hierarchical and authoritarian, and more mercantile and bourgeois (Harrington).
Gombrich wrote in his review of The Social History of Art that Hauser's “theoretical prejudices may have thwarted his sympathies.
If all human beings, including ourselves, are completely conditioned by the economic and social circumstances of their existence then we really cannot understand the past by ordinary sympathy.”[4] Some scholars have argued that Gombrich saw Hauser as a typical exponent of Marxism, without appreciating his nuances and subtle critique of the most rigid forms of social determinism.