Ethics and the Excluded Middle: Karl Menger and Social Science in Interwar Vienna

Abstract

For over a decade, before he fled to the United States in 1937, the Viennese mathematician Karl Menger (1902-1985) was both a participant in the discussions of the Vienna Circle, with Hahn, Schlick, Neurath, and Carnap, and an important presence in Viennese social scientific circles. His writings span pure mathematics, the philosophy of mathematics, ethics, and economics, and his work on the last two marked a turn toward abstraction in social theory at a time when mathematical modeling was foreign to most social scientists. Read by economists in Vienna and abroad, Menger was particularly influential in Morgenstern's contribution to the development of game theory with John von Neumann at Princeton during World War II. Drawing on both new and established archival material, this essay illustrates Menger's contribution to social science, placing particular emphasis on the complex manner in which it was shaped by both his participation in the debates on the foundations of mathematics and his personal reaction ...