Carl Menger · 1961
Carl Menger’s Zusätze zu „Grundsätze der Volkswirthschaftslehre“: Transkription der handschriftlichen Notizen, published in Emil Kauder’s transcription in 1961, documents revisions and investigations undertaken after 1871. Across 292 pages, marginal arguments, proposed substitutions, reading excerpts, and inserted materials follow the annotated book’s movement from methodology through goods, value, production, exchange, and money. The transcription reveals economic concepts being tested against competing theories and historical evidence; its heterogeneous materials require distinguishing Menger’s arguments from positions he records.
The methodological annotations ask what makes an explanation economic. Menger separates causal inquiry from political advocacy and questions whether historical description itself provides a distinctive method for discovering laws. One critical assessment identifies the failure to reach the operative economic cause:
Er ist somit Analytiker von Erscheinungen deren Analyse uns mehr entscheidende Elemente giebt und übersieht überall die treibende ökonomische Kraft.
English translation: He is thus an analyst of phenomena whose analysis gives us several decisive elements, and everywhere overlooks the driving economic force.
The contrast is between assembling revealing observations and explaining the relationships that generate them. Historical, legal, and ethnographic material remains important, but does not replace analysis of needs, knowledge, scarcity, and control over means of satisfaction. The notes also resist treating statistical regularities as sufficient evidence against individual freedom.
The discussion of goods tests whether materiality, labour, or exchangeability can define their economic character. Services and the uses of land and capital complicate definitions confined to physical products. Conversely, usefulness alone does not make an abundantly available object economic. The conceptual difficulty becomes especially sharp when the means of satisfaction involve another person:
Ein Ding darf keinen eigenen Willen haben oder sein Wille muss unseren Zwecken untergeordnet sein), Liebe und Freundschaft sind aber um so wertvoller je freier sie sind.
English translation: A thing must have no will of its own or its will must be subordinated to our purposes), but love and friendship are all the more valuable the freer they are.
The passage exposes a limit of assimilating every valuable relationship to command over a thing. Availability for one person’s purposes and the freedom of another do not necessarily reinforce one another. Such difficult cases make the annotations a record of conceptual experimentation rather than a consistently finalized terminology.
Value and exchange develop from the relationship between particular goods and particular needs. General usefulness and expended labour cannot by themselves explain what a quantity means to its holder. Exchange depends on differing valuations, while subjective exchange value must be distinguished from the price actually obtained. Criticisms of cost-based explanation and aggregate supply-and-demand formulas ask whether these accounts explain their determinants or merely presuppose them.
The production notes extend this inquiry to complementary resources, time, capital, and factor prices. A technically superior process is not necessarily available to someone unable to subsist until it yields a product. Capital therefore cannot be understood simply as accumulated labour, nor can the division of product revenue independently explain wages and other factor prices. The scrutiny of wages-fund reasoning similarly challenges the assumption that the resources available for employing labour constitute an independently fixed magnitude.
The collected evidence also ranges beyond market transactions. A recorded account of administrative intervention reports:
Der Beamte empfiehlt die Ein- führung des indischen Systems, das es zu einer Schande und einem groszen Vergehen für ein Dorf macht, wenn es acht Mädchen weniger als Knaben zählt.
English translation: The official recommends introducing the Indian system, which makes it a disgrace and a grave offense for a village if it has eight fewer girls than boys.
This report should not be converted into Menger’s endorsement. Its presence illustrates the breadth of institutional and demographic material assembled alongside theoretical revision.
Later discussions distinguish gains to exchanging individuals from benefits to society, considering scarcity, famine, and luxury production. Monetary disturbances, credit contraction, and debts persisting amid falling commodity prices complicate simple accounts of market adjustment. The closing investigations of marketability, coinage, debasement, and monetary law distinguish money’s economic emergence from its legal organization. Throughout, the transcription’s significance lies in showing subjective valuation and scarcity being worked through problems of production, institutions, and collective consequences.
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