Carl Menger would surely occupy a secure place in anyone’s pantheon of influential economists.

Along with William Stanley Jevons and Leon Walras, his work in the early 1870s initiated the neoclassical or marginal utility approach to economics. This approach continues to dominate economics even today. Menger was also one of the three founders of what came to be known as the Austrian school of economics, the other two being Eugen von Bohm-Bawerk and Friedrich Freiherr von Wieser. Recognition of a distinc­tive Austrian school emerged in the 1880s, flourished until the 1930s, then entered a period of quiescence, though it has shown some signs of revival, primarily in the United States, over the past two or three decades.