<blockquote>'It has become a popular trick among people who are unprepared to grapple with the actual economic arguments of the Austrian School to try to short-circuit the debate by groaning, zombie-like, "unscientific!" with hardly any familiarity, outside of what they were taught in grade school, of even the epistemological issues concerning the natural sciences, let alone the even more neglected epistemological issues concerning the social sciences.'
- Daniel James Sanchez (
Context)</blockquote>
'In short, the core concepts of contemporary Austrian economics—human action, means and ends, subjective value, marginal analysis, methodological individualism, the time structure of production, and so on—along with the Austrian theory of value and price, which forms the heart of Austrian analysis, all flow from Menger’s pathbreaking work. As Joseph Salerno has written, “Austrian economics always was and will forever remain Mengerian economics.” '<blockquote>'Unlike his contemporaries William Stanley Jevons and Léon Walras, who independently developed their own concepts of marginal utility during the 1870s, Menger favored an approach that was deductive, teleological, and, in a primary sense,
humanistic. While Menger shared his contemporaries’ preference for abstract reasoning, he was primarily interested in explaining the real-world actions of real people, not in creating artificial, stylized representations of reality. Economics, for Menger, is the study of purposeful human choice, the relationship between means and ends. “All things are subject to the law of cause and effect,” he begins his treatise. “This great principle knows no exception.”2 Jevons and Walras rejected cause and effect in favor of simultaneous determination, the technique of modeling complex relations as systems of simultaneous equations in which no variable “causes” another. Theirs has become the standard approach in contemporary economics, accepted by nearly all economists but the followers of Carl Menger.
..
..Indeed, Menger emphasizes the passage of time throughout his analysis, an emphasis that has not yet made its way into mainstream economic theorizing.
While most contemporary economics treatises are turgid and dull, Menger’s book is remarkably easy to read, even today. His prose is lucid, his analysis is logical and systematic, his examples clear and informative. The
Principles remains an excellent introduction to economic reasoning and, for the specialist, the classic statement of the core principles of the Austrian School.
..
In short, the core concepts of contemporary Austrian economics—human action, means and ends, subjective value, marginal analysis, methodological individualism, the time structure of production, and so on—along with the Austrian theory of value and price, which forms the heart of Austrian analysis, all flow from Menger’s pathbreaking work. As Joseph Salerno has written, “Austrian economics always was and will forever remain Mengerian economics.”8 '
- Peter G. Klein, Foreword (
Principles of Economics by Carl Menger [<a href="[
mises.org] guide pdf</a>])
<font size="-1">2. This volume, p. 51.
..
8. Joseph T. Salerno, “Carl Menger: The Founder of the Austrian School,” in Randall G.
Holcombe, ed., Fifteen Great Austrian Economists (Auburn, Ala.: Ludwig von Mises
Institute, 1999), p. 71.</font></blockquote>
'Mathematician Karl Menger, the son of the School’s founder, would provide evidence that his father’s verbally formulated, logically constructed concept of marginal utility was indeed more comprehensive than that which Walras had formulated mathematically (cf. K. Menger 1973, p. 40).'<blockquote>'This return to the roots led to a complete reevaluation of Carl Menger. The voluminous literary tradition of the Austrian School had not infrequently obscured a direct view of Menger’s original mindset. Menger, along with Léon Walras and William Stanley Jevons, was counted among economic theory’s “marginalist revolutionaries,” with Menger’s distinguishing characteristic, his strict rejection of the mathematical approach, being mainly attributed to his mathematical inexperience (cf. Vaughn 1994/1998, pp. 12–13). Mathematician Karl Menger, the son of the School’s founder, would provide evidence that his father’s verbally formulated, logically constructed concept of marginal utility was indeed more comprehensive than that which Walras had formulated mathematically (cf. K. Menger 1973, p. 40). The differences between the three “revolutionaries” were more clearly outlined in a notable article some years later (cf. Jaffé 1976). The effort to carve out Carl Menger’s original position within the Austrian School’s body of tradition peaked with Max Alter (1990) and Sandye Gloria-Palermo (1999), both of whom painted a very complex and sophisticated picture of Menger. Gloria-Palermo was able to point out the considerable methodological differences between Menger and Böhm-Bawerk (cf. Gloria-Palermo 1999, pp. 39–50). In the same year, Hans-Hermann Hoppe and Joseph T. Salerno, continuing Mises’s work, (cf. Mises 1978/2009, pp. 27–28), demonstrated with great detail that Friedrich von Wieser had made a crucial departure from Menger (cf. Hoppe and Salerno 1999) on fundamental questions of methodology and economic policy. The consequence was Wieser’s final expulsion from the Pantheon of Austrians.'
– Eugen-Maria Schulak and Herbert Unterköfler,
The Austrian School of Economics: A History of Its Ideas, Ambassadors, and Institutions,
Chapter 24 The Renaissance of the old ‘Viennese’
School: The New Austrian School of Economics, page 172</blockquote>
Context<blockquote>
'..the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property..''..crisis of 1900.' - 'Since the beginning of the last century..' - 'The goal is liberty.'</blockquote>