Richard Kerschagl · 1938
Richard Kerschagl’s 1938 inaugural lecture surveys Austria’s contribution to modern economics as both a doctrinal history and a methodological self-portrait. Its central claim is that Austrian economics becomes scientifically decisive with marginal utility theory, not with earlier administrative or cameralist traditions.
Der Beginn der wissenschaftlichen Nationalökonomie auf österreichischem Boden ist ident mit dem Beginn der sogenannten österreichischen Schule der Nationalökonomie, der Grenznutzenschule.
English translation: The beginning of scientific economics on Austrian soil is identical with the beginning of the so-called Austrian School of economics, the marginal-utility school.
Kerschagl treats Austrian mercantilism and physiocracy as practical and selective rather than system-bound: Austrian statesmen borrowed usable doctrines without submitting to a closed school. Classical economics, by contrast, left less distinctive Austrian substance. Romantic and organic thought matter chiefly as a prehistory of later universalism, valuable when it emphasizes interdependence but dangerous when it obscures analysis in metaphysical language.
The Austrian School is presented as Austria’s decisive theoretical achievement. Menger provides the foundations of subjective value, price, goods order, and method; Böhm-Bawerk extends the analysis into capital, interest, finance, and taxation; Wieser receives special attention for giving marginal utility theory a broader social and “organic” cast. Kerschagl then places Mayer, Schumpeter, Mises, Reisch, Schüller, Hayek, Morgenstern, Haberler, Strigl, and others in an expanding Austrian field. What unites them is not uniform doctrine but a flexible analytical core.
Ihr theoretisches Gebäude ist bei aller Bestimmtheit genügend elastisch, um den verschiedensten Ansichten in Unterfragen Raum zu geben.
English translation: Its theoretical edifice is, for all its definiteness, sufficiently elastic to leave room for the most varied views on subsidiary questions.
This elasticity also shapes Kerschagl’s international account. He traces Austrian influence through Walras, Jevons, Marshall, Pigou, Edgeworth, Clark, Fisher, Pareto, Pantaleoni, Cassel, and German-language theorists, while refusing to reduce the Methodenstreit to a simple clash between Austrian deduction and German empiricism. Both camps, in his reading, overstated their differences, and sound economics requires abstraction, introspection, historical awareness, and empirical correction.
The other major Austrian current is universalist and organic, associated above all with Othmar Spann. Kerschagl acknowledges its contribution: it recalled economists to society, hierarchy, dogma history, sociology, and philosophy, and it challenged the illusion that economics can become a purely mechanical science.
Es ist gewiß ein Verdienst Spanns, den Satz: „Alle Wirtschaft meint Gesellschaft“, aufs neue betont zu haben, wenngleich zumindestens das zeitliche Primat dieser Behauptung nicht von seiner Schule in Anspruch genommen werden kann.
English translation: It is certainly a merit of Spann's to have re-emphasized the proposition "All economy implies society," even though at least the chronological priority of this claim cannot be claimed by his school.
Yet his approval is cautious. “Organism” is useful as a metaphor for social connection, not as a substitute for causal explanation. Teleological and universalist reflection may clarify reform questions and social philosophy, but it cannot dissolve individual action, price formation, money, capital, or market processes into vague totalities. Kerschagl’s preferred synthesis is therefore disciplined pluralism: economics should learn from neighboring sciences without abandoning conceptual precision.
The closing sections turn to present methodological tasks: the relation between theory and policy, the borders between economics, world economics, and business economics, the need for clear terminology, and the danger of smuggling normative commitments into descriptive analysis. Kerschagl denies that economics can offer mathematical certainty where its material is historical and experiential.
Die Ökonomie kann daher auch selbstverständlich keine größere Sicherheit bieten, als eben die beschränkte der Erfahrung selbst.
English translation: Economics can therefore of course offer no greater certainty than the limited certainty of experience itself.
The lecture ends by defining an Austrian scholarly ethos: synthetic, tolerant, historically informed, and theoretically ambitious, yet critical of both narrow formalism and vague holism. Austria’s contribution, for Kerschagl, lies not only in marginal utility theory but in the attempt to hold rigor and breadth together.
Als typisch österreichisch können wir das Streben nach Verständnis für alles und für alle bezeichnen, das Streben nach Erkenntnis von den Gründen und Zusammenhängen der verschiedensten Lehrmeinungen, sofern sie das Gebiet reiner Wissenschaft nicht verlieren.
English translation: As typically Austrian we may describe the striving for understanding of everything and of everyone, the striving for insight into the grounds and connections of the most diverse doctrinal opinions, insofar as they do not lose sight of the domain of pure science.
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