Carl Menger, Wilhelm Roscher (1894)

Menger’s 1894 essay is at once an obituary, an appraisal of Roscher’s scholarly authority, and a methodological intervention in the controversy between historical and Austrian economics. It opens by placing Roscher’s career on an unusually long arc of learned labor, from his first publication to the late completion of his systematic project.

Roscher hat seine erste Schrift im Jahre 1838 veröffentlicht; durch seinen Tod wurde ein Leben abgeschlossen, welches mehr als ein halbes Jahrhundert hingebungsvoller Gelehrtenarbeit umschloss.

English translation: Roscher published his first work in 1838; his death brought to a close a life that encompassed more than half a century of devoted scholarly labor.

Menger’s praise is real but discriminating. Roscher appears as a public teacher of political economy whose textbooks and systematic expositions reached far beyond narrow specialist circles. His achievement lay not only in erudition, but in giving German readers a historically informed, morally cautious, and politically moderate account of economic life. At the same time, Menger does not present him as an unqualified theorist. Roscher’s historical writing could become antiquarian, his philosophy of history could overstate developmental parallels among nations, and his theoretical formulations did not always match the richness of his materials. The essay’s structure therefore depends on a controlled contrast: Roscher’s immense pedagogical and institutional importance is affirmed, while the limits of his method are carefully marked.

Im Kreise der Gelehrtenwelt hat W. Roscher durch seine Auffassung der methodologischen Probleme eine tiefgehende Einwirkung geübt und den Ruhm eines Begründers der historischen Schule der deutschen National-Oekonomie gewonnen.

English translation: Within scholarly circles, W. Roscher exerted a profound influence through his conception of methodological problems and gained the renown of a founder of the historical school of German political economy.

Menger then qualifies the claim that Roscher founded historical economics. Earlier writers had already treated history as a necessary source for political economy; Roscher’s originality lay less in inventing the demand for historical inquiry than in giving it disciplinary force and prestige in Germany. He helped organize a reaction against abstract Smithian and Manchester formulas, and his example shaped a generation of university economists. Yet Menger also separates Roscher from later Roscherian excess. The master’s own scholarship, he suggests, was often wiser than the methodological absolutism later drawn from it. Roscher’s historical tact and practical judgment were stronger than a doctrine that would reduce economics to the collection of historical parallels.

This distinction enables Menger to reinterpret the Methodenstreit. The dispute is not, for him, a simple opposition between deduction and induction, or between speculative rationalism and empirical sobriety. Austrian economists do not reject experience, and historical economists cannot dispense with conceptual ordering.

Beide erkennen in der Erfahrung die nothwendige Grundlage für die Erforschung der realen Erscheinungen und ihrer Gesetze, beide — wie ich wohl annehmen darf — in der Induction und der Deduction innig zusammengehörige, sich gegenseitig stützende und ergänzende Erkenntnissmittel.

English translation: Both recognize experience as the necessary basis for the investigation of real phenomena and their laws, and both — as I may well assume — recognize induction and deduction as intimately connected, mutually supporting and complementary means of knowledge.

The real disagreement concerns the architecture of economic science: whether it should primarily discover historical regularities, or whether it must also construct exact theory by explaining complex market phenomena through individual purposes, choices, and causal relations. Menger’s defense of Austrian economics is therefore not anti-historical. It is a defense of theoretical inquiry against the claim that historical description alone can exhaust the tasks of political economy.

Was den bis auf die Gegenwart nicht völlig überbrückten Gegensatz der beiden Schulen in Wahrheit begründet, ist ein viel Wichtigeres; es betrifft die verschiedene Auffassung derselben über die Ziele der Forschung, über das System der Aufgaben, welche die Wissenschaft auf dem Gebiete der Volkswirthschaft zu lösen hat.

English translation: What truly grounds the opposition between the two schools, still not fully bridged to the present day, is something much more important; it concerns their differing conception of the aims of research, of the system of tasks which science must solve in the field of political economy.

The essay closes, in effect, by turning methodological conflict back into scholarly fairness. Menger insists that Austrian criticism of historicism never required ingratitude toward Roscher. Roscher’s importance remains: he educated readers, disciplined German economics historically, and gave the historical school much of its authority. But that authority cannot settle the scientific question of whether economics also needs abstract, causal, and theoretical analysis. The obituary thus becomes a measured act of boundary-drawing: Roscher is honored as a great German economist, while his legacy is freed from any claim to methodological monopoly.

All dieser Streit, zu so lebhaften Phasen er auch führte, hat indess die Vertreter der österreichischen Schule nie behindert, die grossen und echten Verdienste Roscher’s um die deutsche National-Oekonomie anzuerkennen; ja es haben diese Verdienste kaum irgendwo rückhaltlosere Anerkennung gefunden, als in Oesterreich.

English translation: All this dispute, however lively the phases to which it led, has never hindered the representatives of the Austrian School from acknowledging Roscher's great and genuine merits regarding German political economy; indeed, these merits have scarcely anywhere found more unreserved recognition than in Austria.