Menger’s New Organicism

Abstract

Carl Menger, originally von Menger, was born in 1840, at “Neu Sanden”, in what was then Austrian Galicia. He studied law in Vienna, Prague and Cracow. After serving the Austrian court and government, he was appointed to a chair at the University of Vienna, where he lectured in economics. Menger became famous as the founder of the Austrian branch of the School of Marginal Utility. Discovering a “protoneoclassical” tradition in nineteenth-century German economic thought, Streissler suggested that Menger’s ‘formulation of marginal productivity in marginal utility terms and its application to all factor remunerations in exactly the same manner’ should be placed against this background (Streissler, 1990: p. 59). Menger also became well-known as a methodologist who allowed space for organically oriented ideas. I focus on him in the last function. In this connection I use the term “new organicism”, considering it, on the one hand, a modern version of Wilhelm Roscher’s organicism, drastically transformed, and, on the other, an entirely new approach. The term is reminiscent of Francis Bacon’s Novum organum, characterized by empiricism and inductive logic. I have pointed out elsewhere, when discussing this issue (1993a), that I do not consider this problematic since Menger himself approvingly referred to this work.