Life and work
The basic facts of Menger’s life are simple and few. He was born in Galicia, which now lies mainly across Poland and the Ukraine, on what normally would be the last day of February, save that his birth year, 1840, was a leap year.
His life as a university student commenced in 1859 with a year in Vienna, followed by three years in Prague, and then Krakow where he wrote his dissertation. In 1873, he was appointed to the University of Vienna where he remained until his retirement in 1903, save for the 1876-78 period which he spent tutoring and travelling with Crown Prince Rudolph. Menger retired from his teaching duties at the early age of 63 so that he could devote more time to his scholarship. While his post-retirement life lasted 18 years, and while from all reports he kept busily engaged with reading and note-taking, he wrote little after his retirement. Menger’s reputation is almost wholly based on work he published between 1871 and 1892. Had Menger published nothing after 1892, his intellectual standing would have been little affected, if, indeed, it would have been affected at all.The vast preponderance of Menger’s works were collected in four volumes by F.A. Hayek and published by the London School of Economics between 1934 and 1936, as part of a ‘Series of Reprints of Scarce Tracts in Economics and Political Science’. Most of the excluded writings can be ascertained by consulting the bibliography appended to Volume IV, though there are some writings, particularly anonymous journalistic offerings, that have not been included. A second edition of this collection was issued by J.C.B. Mohr between 1968 and 1970, unchanged from the first edition save that Hayek’s original English introduction was translated into German. (There was also a brief, amusing note in which Hayek retracts the statement in his original introduction that Menger was a tall figure, and notes instead that Menger was barely of average size.)
Volume I contains the first of Menger’s two books (1871), which appeared in English as Principles of Economics (1950). Among other things, this book shifts the explanation of prices from cost of production to consumer marginal valuation, a shift that is generally regarded as the key distinction between classical and neoclassical economics.
Volume II contains the second of Menger’s books (1883). This was published in English as Problems of Economics and Sociology (1963). This book is best known for its initiation of what came to be called the ‘methodenstreif between Austrian and German economists, a clash that in turn helped to solidify the impression of a distinctive Austrian school of economics. Beyond this, an important accomplishment of Problems is its elaboration of the theme that there are many beneficial social institutions that arise not through plan or intention but as unintentional byproducts of people pursuing their individual interests and plans. While Menger mentioned a number of examples briefly, most of his effort in this regard focused on money. In this respect, Volume IV of his collected works contains Menger’s monetary writings, and opens with the third edition of his famous (1892) monograph ‘Geld’ which appeared in the Handworterbuch der Staatswissenschaften, a few glimpses of which were also published in English as ‘On the origins of money’ (1892). Volume III of Menger’s collected works mostly contains further writings of methodological disputation, comprising his contribution to the methodenstreit. It also contains five biographical essays, two of them in commemoration of hundredth anniversaries of births (Friedrich List and John Stuart Mill), and three of them obituaries (Lorenz von Stein, Wilhelm Roscher and Eugen von Bohm-Bawerk).