person
Carl Menger
Austrian economist (1840–1921). Founder of the Austrian school. *Principles of Economics* (1871) is one of the three founding texts of the marginalist revolution, alongside Jevons and Walras.
Stub.
Carl Menger’s Grundsätze der Volkswirthschaftslehre (Principles of Economics, 1871) initiated the marginalist revolution in its specifically Austrian form, alongside W. S. Jevons and Léon Walras working independently. The Austrian distinguishing commitments — methodological individualism, the subjective theory of value, the imputation theory of factor pricing, and a deductive rather than historical methodology — are present in mature form in this single text. The Methodenstreit with Gustav Schmoller and the German Historical School (1883–1885) was the foundational methodological battle that established the Austrian commitment to deductive theory over historical induction; the dispute reverberates in subsequent Austrian methodological commitments through Mises and beyond.
Menger’s chair at the University of Vienna trained the second generation — Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, Friedrich von Wieser — and through them the third (Mises, Schumpeter), giving the Austrian tradition an unbroken Vienna-centred lineage from 1871 through the 1930s.