Carl Menger and His Legacy in Economics.

• Author: Heertje, Arnold

This book contains an impressive range of high quality studies on the development of the Austrian tradition in economics in general and on Carl Menger's role in particular. The articles are the result of a conference held at Duke, to commemorate the donation of Menger's papers by his granddaughter, Eve Menger. The contributions center around four topics: origins and economic policy, successors, methodology and general themes. Erich Streissler deals with die influence of German economics on the work of Menger and with Menger's vision on economic policy. The cameralist roots of Menger are discussed by Paul Silverman. Israel Kirzner underlines Menger's originality with respect to his perspective on the economic systems as a whole: "the overall vision of the economy as a system driven entirely and independently by the choices and valuations of consumers - with these valuations transmitted "upwards" through the system to "goods of higher order," determining how these scarce higher-order goods are allocated among industries and how they are valued and remunerated as part of a single consumer-driven process - was one which Menger surely (and correctly) sensed as being wholly new."

The second part starts with an essay by Roger Garrison on Austrian capital theory. The reader enjoys a fine discussion of Bohm-Bawerk's analysis against the background of Menger's subjectivism. Denis O'Brien provides us with an interesting discussion of the Austrian connection in Robbins' work. As Mark Blaug puts it in his comment: "Robbins was throughout all the interwar years the greatest and indeed the only Austrian economist outside Austria, having neither trained nor taught in Austria." Jeremy Shearmur would like to see a more powerful theory of welfare in order to do justice to Mises's and Hayek's arguments for markets, but it remains unclear what kind of welfare theory he exactly has in mind. The part on methodology contains articles by Karl...