The famed Methodenstreit of the late 19th century was the battle of method. It pitted the emerging Austrian School against the German Historical School over a critically important question: what is the proper way to do social science? Here, Carl Menger , the founder of the School, vindicates the importance of theory, and lays the foundation for
Written in the same year that he testified before the Currency Commission in Austria-Hungary, and published in English in 1892, Carl Menger explains that it is not government edicts that create money but instead the marketplace. Individuals decide what the most marketable good is for use as a medium of exchange. “Man himself is the beginning and
These four volumes have been selected not only for their outstanding importance in the history of economic thought, but also because of their previous inaccessibility to the majority of students in the field of
It was this book that kicked-off the Marginalist Revolution, which corrected theoretical errors of the old classical school. These errors concerned value theory, and they had sown enough confusion to make the dangerous ideology of Marxism seem more plausible than it really was. Menger set out to elucidate the precise nature of economic value, and
It is the Mises Institute’s great pleasure to introduce Carl Menger’s 1871 book Principles of Economics to an online audience. This book founded the Austrian School, and is the one that Mises himself credits with teaching him economics. This is essay is drawn from Chapter 4, in which he carefully refines Adam Smith’s theory of exchange and
In the early stages of trade, when economizing individuals are only slowly awakening to knowledge of the economic gains that can be derived from exploitation of existing exchange opportunities, their attention is, in keeping with the simplicity of all cultural beginnings, directed only to the most obvious of these opportunities. In considering the
Foreword by Doug French The public’s understanding of what money is and its origins has devolved to the point where the government monetary authorities can now inflate with impunity, with the ultimate result to be the destruction of the division of labor undoing all of mankind’s progress to date. The average Joe and Jane must trust the wise men
Among the most egregious of the fundamental errors that have had the most far-reaching consequences in the previous development of our science is the argument that goods attain value for us because goods were employed in their production that had value to us. Later, when I come to the discussion of the prices of goods of higher order, I shall show
[ On the Origins of Money (1892)] It is an error in economics, as prevalent as it is patent, that all commodities, at a definite point of time and in a given market, may be assumed to stand to each other in a definite relation of exchange, in other words, may be mutually exchanged in definite quantities at will. It is not true that in any given
What is the Mises Institute?
The Mises Institute is a non-profit organization that exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian School of economics, individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard.
Non-political, non-partisan, and non-PC, we advocate a radical shift in the intellectual climate, away from statism and toward a private property order. We believe that our foundational ideas are of permanent value, and oppose all efforts at compromise, sellout, and amalgamation of these ideas with fashionable political, cultural, and social doctrines inimical to their spirit.
