Kauder’s article is an archival reinterpretation of Carl Menger built from the marginalia and manuscript fragments preserved in Menger’s library at Hitotsubashi University. Its premise is that the unpublished papers clarify why Menger was so persistently misread—as plagiarist, Kantian, Manchester liberal, or merely obscure philosopher rather than economist.
Vierzig Jahre nach seinem Tode ist Mengers Bedeutung noch immer umstritten.
English translation: Forty years after his death, Menger's significance is still disputed.
The study proceeds through Menger’s library, methodology, social philosophy, and unfinished economic theory. Kauder’s central thesis is that the Nachlass reveals a broader and more coherent Menger: an Aristotelian realist rather than a Kantian, a theorist of rational freedom rather than mechanical causality, a social liberal rather than strict laissez-faire advocate, and an original value theorist whose development can be traced before 1871.
Against Kantian interpretations, Kauder argues that Menger’s exact theory rests on an ontology of real economic forms. The economist does not construct categories out of pure reason but discovers enduring structures of economic life. Menger’s own marginal note gives Kauder the key evidence:
Es giebt in der theoretischen Nationalökonomie keine reine Vernunft
English translation: In theoretical economics there is no pure reason.
This methodological realism is joined to a theory of free but regular action. Economic laws are possible not because humans are unfree, but because rational agents, facing similar situations, act in patterned ways. Kauder shows that Menger gradually replaced causal language with teleological language: economics concerns goods as ordered in human purposes.
The unpublished notes also disclose a political philosophy centered on freedom. Menger insists that the individual is not merely a means, yet poverty prevents full freedom. The poor are described as
halbe Sklaven, ihre Kette ist länger
English translation: half-slaves, their chain is longer
This is why Kauder rejects the image of Menger as a simple Manchester liberal. Methodological individualism, for Menger, is an analytical principle, not an automatic policy creed. He distrusts socialism, but also condemns luxury, aristocratic idleness, and the unchecked “Individualegoismus” of private interest. His youthful attack on luxury condenses the social diagnosis:
Luxus ist die Anwendung von mehr Mitteln als der Zweck erfordert
English translation: Luxury is the application of more means than the purpose requires.
Kauder’s reconstruction of Menger’s value theory is especially important. The Rau marginalia of 1867 already show Menger rejecting labor-value theory, treating value as individual and immeasurable, and developing elements of imputation. The value of productive goods derives from the value of final goods, and complementarity is already central:
Bei der Produktion kann der Mangel eines Elementes die Wertlosigkeit oder Entwertung aller andern zur Folge haben
English translation: In production, the lack of a single element can result in the worthlessness or depreciation of all the others.
Kauder uses this evidence to refute plagiarism accusations. Menger had predecessors, especially Kudler, but the decisive theory was his own. Gossen, often invoked against him, was read later and rejected; Menger’s system was not mathematically modeled and remained sharply distinct from Jevons and Walras.
The later sections show how far the fragments extend beyond value theory. Menger sketched bilateral exchange, monopoly price, price interdependence, capital productivity, diminishing returns, national income, general overproduction, and money. In price theory he saw the circularity of explaining prices by costs, since costs themselves are prices; the proper foundation must be individual valuation. In distribution and crises he sided against Say’s simple law of markets, stressing that overproduction cannot be dismissed as tautology:
Der Kauf ist in Wahrheit nur ein Austausch der Produkte.
English translation: Purchase is in truth only an exchange of products.
His monetary notes are, for Kauder, more suggestive than the later published article on money. The young Menger was a metallist influenced by Hume, but also observed sluggish commodity-price adjustment under paper money. One marginal remark captures his attention to convention and nominal calculation:
Das dumme Volk rechnet nur nach Kreuzern
English translation: The stupid populace reckons only in kreuzers.
The final section turns from doctrine to intellectual fate. Kauder argues that Menger’s decisive achievements came early; later he was diverted by teaching, excessive citation, historical-school habits, and juristic distinctions. Yet this incompletion became productive for the Austrian school. Böhm-Bawerk, Wieser, Mayer, Mises, Hayek, and even Spann developed different elements latent in the Nachlass. The article’s relevance lies in showing that Menger’s legacy was not only marginal utility and method, but a larger unfinished program linking value, freedom, social reform, and exact theory.
Der Nachlaß beweist, daß Menger seinen Schülern vielmehr als seine Wertlehre und eine Methodenlehre hinterlassen hat.
English translation: The Nachlass proves that Menger bequeathed to his students rather more than his theory of value and a methodology.
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