Accounting for Pleasure: Sigmund Freud, Carl Menger, and the Economically Minded Human Being

Abstract

There is a surprising coherence between the human self-understanding and worldview that underpin the theoretical program of the Austrian marginalist economist Carl Menger (1840–1921), first articulated in his 1871 Grundsätze der Volkswirthschaftslehre (Principles of Economics), and Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic project. Both are grounded in a Hobbesian-Darwinian emphasis on monadic individuals guided by egoistic drives, self-interest, and a competitive struggle for individual advantage (Birken, Consuming Desire 1–39). Both, moreover, are steeped in a kind of Malthusian pessimism that invokes increasing scarcity of resources as the underlying cause of human existential anxiety and as the defining feature of human interactions with the “real” world of commodities (Riesman 3). For the Mengerian marginalist as for the Freudian psychoanalyst, the driving forces behind human life are existential need, the instinct for self-preservation and self-improvement, and the development of successful strategies for managing and satisfying needs.