Life
Carl Menger was born on 28 February 1840, second of three brothers, in Neu-Sandesz, Western Galicia - then Austro-Hungarian, now partly Polish and partly Ukrainian - the offspring of a family of imperial civil servants and army officers.
The Mengers can be traced back to the early seventeenth century in Bohemia. Carl’s grandfather bought land in Galicia during the Napoleonic wars. Menger’s father died in 1848, when Carl was 8 years old. The three brothers were raised by their mother. All three continued the family tradition by serving the Emperor - Carl would be a tutor to Crown Prince Rudolf - while attempting to contribute to the modernization of the outdated imperial structures they had experienced particularly strongly in the Eastern provinces. Max, the elder, became a successful entrepreneur and a representative at the Imperial Parliament for the national-liberal party. Anton Menger, the younger brother, would become a famous Law Professor at Vienna University. He tended towards socialism, contributed the first Austrian codex of consumer laws and, though opposing Karl Marx and Johann Karl Rodbertus, authored a treatise on the claim by workers to the full produce of their labour (Menger 1886 [1962]). Anton’s approach was close to that of the Historicists as well. As to Carl, he was to take a completely opposite direction resulting in major changes in the whole field of what was then called political economy (“Volkswirtschaftslehre”).Carl started studying law in Prague (1859-63), became a Doctor in Law at Krakow University and began his career as a journalist in Lemberg (today Lviv, Ukraine). Menger’s formative years (Yagi 1993) were in the city gazette, but he quickly quit to enter the Civil Service. In 1873 he became Extraordinarius (professor without a tenure) at Vienna University and was made Ordinarius (full professor) in 1879.
He worked there until he retired in 1903; his notebooks show he was active until 1911.Carl Menger also acted as a columnist and a high civil servant, closely related to the media world (Menger at times had a column in the Neue Freie Presse, whose founder and director was his friend Moritz Szeps), and in touch with ministerial offices: he was a major adviser in the monetary “Valutareform” of the early 1890s. From 1876 to 1878, he had tutored Crown Prince Rudolf in a trip over Western Europe giving him temporary relief from the Court world and, at the age of 62, he himself had a son, Karl, who became a famous mathematician.
Menger died in 1921. He had worked half a century on a revised edition of his 1871 Grundsatze der Volkswirthschaftslehre (Principles of Political Economy). In 1923 his son re-edited the masterwork, whose first version had never been republished by his father. As the 1923 modified version bears witness to a different epoch and to the son’s philosophical background, the 1871 version remained the founding stone of Austrian economics. The 1923 edition could have brought some confusion, despite the dearest faithfulness claimed by the son, but the 1871 version remained the most widespread. One reason is that, in the 1930s, Friedrich von Hayek re-edited the 1871 version. Now, the changes that Menger wanted can be precisely described by exploring his archives. So, while his son did not publish exactly what his father wished, Hayek, since conversely he did not use the archives at all, may also be said to have “ignored” partly what Menger had to say.
In order to know Menger’s own final wording, it is necessary to consult the archives at Hitotsubashi University, Tokyo, to which Menger’s widow sold her late husband’s private collection (Campagnolo 2012), and at Duke University (North Carolina, USA), where the Perkins Library hosts mostly notebooks brought to the USA by his son as he fled the Anschluss in 1938, together with von Neumann, Morgenstern and many German and Austrian scholars.
Carl Menger was also a bibliophile. He had collected more than 20 000 volumes, many of which contain annotations that bear witness to Menger’s deep knowledge in all fields of the social sciences and the history of political economy. The collection in Japan was mainly studied by Kauder, Yagi and Campagnolo, while the archives at Duke University were studied by Caldwell, Yagi and Campagnolo.
Archives are particularly helpful in retracing Menger’s sources: the Ancients, especially Aristotle, British seventeenth-century political philosophers, French writers of the Enlightenment and French Liberals of the nineteenth century, such as Jean-Baptiste Say and Pellegrino Rossi. Menger fought against Classical economists and their historicist opponents, the German Historical School, alike. Menger also stands apart from German authors sometimes labeled “proto-neoclassical” (Streissler 1990), like Karl Heinrich Rau, whose textbook Menger annotated heavily, almost using it as a draft for his own ideas. Today Menger’s archives can no longer be ignored: although still partly unpublished, they are indispensable to supplement published texts gathered by Hayek in Carl Menger Gesammelte Werke.