Carl Menger and the Origins of Austrian Economics.

• Author: Buechner, M. Northrup

Carl Menger and the Origins of Austrian Economics. By Max Alter. Boulder, Colorado and Oxford, England: Westview Press. Inc., 1990. Pp. viii, 256 $74.00.

At last, a book-length treatment of the founding father of Austrian economics. Alter has done just what we would like him to do for an authoritative book on Menger. He has read all of Menger's works in the original German, as well as many other German works in philosophy and economics that were influential at the time Menger wrote. Many of Alter's conclusions will be surprising to those with only a passing acquaintance with Menger, and some conclusions will be surprising to those, like this reviewer, who know Menger well, but are unable to read him in German. Unfortunately, some of the most important of those conclusions are wrong.

Alter's main conclusion is not wrong: Austrian economics, as it came to be understood, was not the economics of Menger, but the economics of Weiser and Bohm-Bawerk, both of whom jettisoned most of Menger's economic foundations, as well as his philosophy and methodology. Their writings are the basis on which Menger has been interpreted as one of the three founders of marginal utility theory. In fact, Alter demonstrates that Menger's economic system was radically different from that of Jevons and Walras, and incompatible with modern marginalism.

The introduction is unusually substantial, reviewing the literature and laying out Alter's conclusions more dramatically than they appear in the main text. The book's motivating premise is that Menger's conceptual framework is rooted in 19th-century German thought, and that thought was a completely different intellectual universe than ours. Since the English translation of Menger's Principles obliterates that universe, Alter says, it "is not a reliable tool for serious work." The translators forced Menger's thought into "Walrasian English," translated away "the Aristotelian dimension" of his language, and made sense "of passages which are contradictory in the original."

Thus it was with some indignation that I encountered Alter's statement (in the next paragraph) that he would leave all quotations from Menger in the original German--"rather than to produce another inadequate translation." If the English translations of Menger are inadequate. Alter had to correct the translations, at least of the passages he quotes. Otherwise, how is the reader to follow or confirm his interpretation?

As it turns out, with the help of the...