Search results

During the last years of his life, the mathematician Karl Menger worked on a biography of his father, the economist and founder of the Austrian School of Economics, Carl Menger. The younger Menger never finished the work. While working in the Menger collections at Duke University’s David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library, we discovered draft chapters of the biography, a valuable source of information given that relatively little is known about Carl Menger’s life nearly a hundred years after his death. The unfinished biography covers Carl Menger’s family background and his life through early 1889. In this chapter, the authors discuss the biography and the most valuable new insights it provides into Carl Menger’s life, including Carl Menger’s family, his childhood, his student years, his time working as a journalist and newspaper editor, his early scientific career, and his relationship with Crown Prince Rudolf.

Menger′s Grundsätze is explored; the Aristotelian background of the discourse is probed, as is the problematic image of Menger sketched in the secondary literature as soon as it is confronted with this Aristotelanism and with the subjective value theory and the motif of time, error and uncertainty. The conflicting elements of this picture are pieced together.

This is an unusual book and a striking phenomenon. It comprises a collection of thirteen essays on the German Historical School of Economics (henceforth GHSE), exclusively written by Japanese contributors who are mainly full professors at leading universities and mostly have already published on various aspects of the GHSE. The editor, Yuichi Shionoya, is well known internationally as one of the most prominent students of Joseph Schumpeter and Max Weber, whose works provide the basis for the editor’s attempt to erect the framework of the rational reconstruction of the GHSE in the opening essay. This holds in particular for economic sociology, which – besides theory, history and statistics – constitutes the fourth discipline in economics, and includes the social institutions relevant to economic behaviour and also political, legal or religious aspects. The investigation of Schumpeter’s conception of economic sociology (see, e.g. Schumpeter, 1954, pp. 20–21) is at the very heart of Shionoya’s second essay (9) in which the author concludes that Schumpeter combined two essential elements of the GHSE, a belief in the unity of social life and the inseparable relationship among its components and a concern for development, with some stimulus by Max Weber’s analysis of comparative-static social systems and Marx’s analysis of the dynamic process of capital accumulation. It is Shionoya’s belief “that Schumpeter should be regarded as one of the successors of the German Historical School because he attempted a rational reconstruction of that school, especially Schmoller’s research program, in terms of economic sociology and made his own contribution from this perspective” (p. 9). Whether and how this statement from the editor’s first essay fully fits with the one from Shionoya’s second essay, that “Schumpeter’s conception of economic sociology intended to integrate history and theory, the antitheses at the Methodenstreit between Gustav von Schmoller and Carl Menger” (p. 139), is left to the reader’s judgement. Characteristically, the contradictions involved can be found in Schumpeter’s own writings. In the very same year, 1926, in which he published the article “Gustav von Schmoller and the Problems of Today,” which forms the key basis for Shionoya’s argument, Schumpeter eliminated the seventh chapter on “The Overall View of the Economy” of the first German edition of The Theory of Economic Development from the second German one and omitted it in all later editions of the book, including the 1934 English translation. The reason was that Schumpeter believed that this chapter with its much broader perspective and its fragment of cultural sociology has sometimes distracted the reader’s attention from pure and “dry” economic reasoning. It had led to a kind of consent which was at the very opposite of his intentions in so far as the seventh chapter was misunderstood as an alternative to economic theory. For that kind of reasoning Schumpeter did not want to provide any ammunition. For Shionoya, on the other hand, Chap. 7 is not a fragment of cultural sociology but a research program for a universal social science that he has specified in an earlier article (Shionoya, 1990) in which he regrets Schumpeter’s decision to omit it.

Les premiers textes déclaratifs des droits de l'homme en Occident n'ont pas comporté immédiatement la reconnaissance de droits sociaux. Ainsi, à la suite de la Déclaration des Droits—“Bill of Rights”—imposée à la Monarchie anglaise le 13 février 1689, la Déclaration modèle adoptée en Virginie le 12 juin 1776, sous l'autorité de George Mason, comme la Déclaration d'Indépendance américaine du 4 juillet 1776, et enfin la Déclaration francaise des droits de l'homme et du citoyen, proclamée par l'Assemblée nationale le 26 août 1789, étaient consacrées à l'affirmation des droits civils et politi‐ques face aux pouvoirs dont l'emprise devait être restreinte et contenue, plutôt que confirmée et étendue par l'attribution de nouvelles fonctions, même justifiées par l'intention d'améliorer le sort des plus malheureux. Résolus à ouvrir une bràche décisive dans le système de gouvernement absolutiste, les pionniers des droits de l'homme étaient tenus d'accorder la priorité aux droits conquis de libre disposition sur les droits acquis de protection, de sorte que l'autonomie des citoyens à l'égard de l'Etat était revendiquée avec toutes ses conséquences économiques et sociales. Même l'expression neuve du droit à la vie et à la poursuite du bonheur, qui apparaît dans les déclarations américaines du XVIIIe siècle, s'entendait d'une aspiration irrépressible à la liberté et non point comme l'avers d'obligations sociales imposées à la collectivité, du moins jusqu'à ce que le Préambule de la Constitution des Etats‐Unis d'Amérique du 17 septembre 1787 inscrivît la promotion du bienêtre général—“to promote the general welfare”—au nombre de ses objectifs.

It is demonstrated that the Austrian school in economics had very different ideas about the creation and change of social institutions and especially about the relation of state and market, which is still one of the fundamental problems of economic theory. Menger′s fundamental distinction of pragmatic and organic institutions and Wieser′s contrary model are discussed, followed by the “impossibility theorem” of Mises and the contrary position of Schumpeter. Hayek′s liberation model of society is presented and criticised, and finally Menger′s position is interpreted as one of moderate liberal interventionism.

Nobody concerned with political economy can neglect the history of economic doctrines. Structural changes in the economy and society influence economic thinking and, conversely, innovative thought structures and attitudes have almost always forced economic institutions and modes of behaviour to adjust. We learn from the history of economic doctrines how a particular theory emerged and whether, and in which environment, it could take root. We can see how a school evolves out of a common methodological perception and similar techniques of analysis, and how it has to establish itself. The interaction between unresolved problems on the one hand, and the search for better solutions or explanations on the other, leads to a change in paradigma and to the formation of new lines of reasoning. As long as the real world is subject to progress and change scientific search for explanation must out of necessity continue.

The Austrian school developed a specific kind of economic analysis. Mises′ place in this school of thought and his praxeological point of view is discussed. His philosophical stance and its methodological implications are then considered.

Today, there is no academic or sociocultural context in which Austrian Economics (AE) is described as being dominant. AE is and remains, for better or for worse, a heterodox current. In the United States, however, but probably nowhere else in the world, AE is heterodox without being invisible or inconsequential. American scholars for whom AE is their preferred paradigm have been able to participate actively in the sort of “discussions” that Arjo Klamer (2007, p. 4) wishes to encourage. They are taken seriously by fellow economists. The vitality of American AE has no equivalent in the rest of the world.¹ Obvious constraints of time and space prevent us from offering supporting evidence for this sweeping statement, but in this paper we propose to take a close look at the French case. AE has made few inroads in France. There was a brief period in the 1980s when it was the object of some short-lived enthusiasm; since then interest has waned, although there are indications that the tide might yet again be turning, and in fact, as compared to many other western European countries, France may turn out to be, all things being relative, a less infertile ground than might a priori be thought.

Elaborates on dialogue between Laureates Ragnar Frisch and Jon Tinbergen with regard to an evaluation of their judicious contributions to the science of economics (the two were first recipients of the economic science prize in 1969). Investigates the open conflict between classical and modern modes in reasoning in economics. Gives an in‐depth summation of the lecture by Frisch.