Menger, Anton (1841–1905)

Friedrich von Wieser, Menger, Anton (1841–1905)

Friedrich von Wieser’s dictionary entry presents Anton Menger as a jurist whose principal significance lay in bringing the circumstances of the propertyless into legal criticism and socialist thought. Moving from a brief professional biography to two major works and then to Menger’s final constructive writings, Wieser combines admiration for his legal scholarship and social commitment with a pointed reservation about his economic theory.

The first substantial discussion concerns Menger’s criticism of the draft German Civil Code, Das bürgerliche Recht und die besitzlosen Volksklassen. Wieser credits this intervention with decisive influence on the code’s provisions affecting social policy. Its critical force came from exposing inequalities within the accepted legal framework:

The author takes private property and inheritance for granted without troubling to examine whether they are justifiable or not.

Menger’s achievement, on this account, was to show that the draft’s authors misunderstood the economic circumstances of the non-propertied even where accommodating them would not threaten private property. Wage contracts supplied an especially revealing case, but Wieser stresses the breadth of Menger’s analysis across contract and family law. Social reform here proceeds through attention to the practical consequences of legal rules, without requiring the prior rejection of property rights.

The entry then turns to The Right to the Whole Produce of Labour, interpreting it as a history of socialism’s effort to replace a bourgeois philosophy of law with a proletarian one. The conceptual hinge is the inadequacy of formal legal capacity for those without the resources to exercise it:

The fact that every man is capable of acquiring legal rights, and that the law protects justly acquired rights, does no good to the worker without possessions, who has acquired no important rights of property, and is without means to take advantage of the fact that he is capable of acquiring them.

Against this discrepancy, Menger identifies rights to work, to existence, and to the full produce of labour. Wieser reports that Menger treats the last as decisive and connects it to surplus value, attributing that doctrine to William Thompson and accusing Marx of plagiarism. Yet the entry sharply distinguishes Menger’s command of socialist literature from his competence in economics:

Menger's history of the development of the doctrine though very concise shows a complete and penetrating knowledge of socialist literature, but also a lack of a sufficient understanding of economic theory.

The comparison with his brother Carl reinforces this qualified judgment, although Wieser does not develop the theoretical objections. The closing account of Neue Staatslehre, Neue Sittenlehre, and Volkspolitik presents Menger’s final move from criticism toward positive formulations of socialist claims. The entry’s enduring interest lies in its treatment of law as economically situated: equal legal rights can leave material inequalities untouched, while legal scholarship can make those inequalities visible without, in Wieser’s estimation, supplying an adequate economic theory.