Carl Menger
Economist · founder of the Austrian School
Carl Menger was born on 23 February 1840 in Neu-Sandez, Galicia (today’s Nowy Sącz in Poland). He studied law and political science at the universities of Vienna and Prague and worked as a journalist, first in Lemberg and then in Vienna, where he analyzed market movements for the Wiener Zeitung. In 1867 he received his doctorate in law from the Jagiellonian University in Kraków.
He worked in the press office of the Austrian Council of Ministers. On the strength of his Principles he became a Privatdozent in political economy at the University of Vienna in 1872 and an associate professor in 1873. From 1876 he was one of the tutors of the heir to the throne, Archduke Rudolf, whom he accompanied in 1877 and 1878 on journeys through much of Europe, Britain included. In 1879 he became a full professor and taught until 1903, when he resigned. In 1892 he sat on the Currency Commission of Inquiry (Währungs-Enquête-Kommission) that prepared Austria-Hungary’s move to the gold standard; in 1900 he became a life member of the House of Lords (Herrenhaus).
In his Principles of Economics (Grundsätze der Volkswirtschaftslehre, 1871) he set out, alongside William Stanley Jevons and Léon Walras, the theory of marginal utility and a subjective theory of value, opening the marginal revolution. The book was ignored in Germany, where the Younger Historical School of Gustav Schmoller dominated. In his Investigations into the Method of the Social Sciences with Special Reference to Economics (Untersuchungen über die Methode der Socialwissenschaften und der politischen Oekonomie insbesondere, 1883) he defended the theoretical method, and with the polemic The Errors of Historicism in German Economics (Die Irrthümer des Historismus in der deutschen Nationalökonomie, 1884) he replied to Schmoller; so began the dispute over method (Methodenstreit). Later he returned to the theory of money: in 1892 he published the study Geld and, in English, “On the Origin of Money”, in which he explains that money emerges from market exchange and not from state decree.
He died in Vienna on 26 February 1921. He is regarded as the founder of the Austrian School: his first and most important successors were Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk and Friedrich von Wieser, and at the beginning of the twentieth century his Principles turned a young Viennese student, Ludwig von Mises, toward Austrian economics.
Sources: Encyclopaedia Britannica — Carl Menger · Mises Institute — Carl Menger (Joseph T. Salerno) · Neue Deutsche Biographie — Menger, Carl · Österreichisches Biographisches Lexikon — Menger, Karl · Meyers Großes Konversations-Lexikon (1905) — Menger · Austria-Forum — Menger, Carl · Wikipedia — Carl Menger
