Carl Menger, Wilhelm Roscher (1875)

Carl Menger’s newspaper article reviews Wilhelm Roscher’s newly published, 1,080-page history of German economics. It moves from recognition of an exceptional scholarly achievement through criticism of its national scope and documentary gaps to a methodological challenge: historical research cannot legitimately claim to complete economic science or reduce analytical theory to a merely preparatory role. Menger’s admiration for Roscher’s historical scholarship makes his objection to its disciplinary authority especially pointed.

The opening establishes the magnitude of Roscher’s accomplishment. Working with few adequate predecessors, he assembled thousands of writings and laws, recovered neglected material, and connected economic thought with Germany’s political and economic development. Menger stresses the invisible labour behind the published references: unsuccessful searches, the acquisition of sources, and the verification of individual dates and relationships. Germany now possesses a connected history where previously it had fragments. The book also answers a wider intellectual demand for economic history as economic interests become increasingly prominent in public life. For his readers, Menger singles out discussions of Austrian economics under Leopold I, Sonnenfels, the Zollverein, and List.

Yet the national framework obstructs the reconstruction of intellectual development. Earlier scholarship circulated through a shared learned language, foreign reprints, and scholars moving between European universities. Birthplace cannot adequately delimit this interconnected literature:

Wer will aus diesem Organismus diejenigen Werke ausscheiden, deren Verfasser auf deutschem Boden geboren wurden?

English translation: Who would single out from this organism those works whose authors were born on German soil?

The metaphor of an organism makes national selection appear as an interruption of substantive connections. Roscher’s account succeeds most fully where its subject is specifically German and can be understood without extensive reference to foreign literature. Elsewhere, its programme makes the organic development of ideas difficult to show.

Menger distinguishes this structural limitation from the incomplete evidence available to a pioneering researcher. He identifies consequential omissions: the economic significance of medieval Aristotelian scholarship and commentators on Roman law, political aphorism literature, manuscripts, and early printed works not preserved through later republication. The transmission of ancient culture into modern learning consequently remains obscure at its beginnings. These objections define further research rather than cancel Roscher’s achievement: a foundational work reveals the scale of what remains unknown.

The review becomes more sharply critical when Roscher extends his history into the contemporary profession. Menger welcomes an account of divergent tendencies but rejects definitive verdicts on living scholars:

Auch verträgt das Werdende nicht das abschließende Urtheil der Geschichte, — eine Geschichte des Werdenden ist unhistorisch, auch dann, wenn der Beurtheiler, wie in unserem Falle, ein billiger und wohlmeinender Gelehrter ist.

English translation: Nor does what is still developing admit the final judgment of history—a history of what is still developing is unhistorical, even when the judge, as in our case, is a fair-minded and well-intentioned scholar.

The objection concerns both historical understanding and professional consequences. Brief notices and qualified praise can damage reputations when readers treat them as settled historical judgments. More fundamentally, Roscher writes as a leader of the moderate historical school: his account risks presenting earlier economics as scaffolding for his own school’s completed edifice. Benevolence toward rival approaches does not ensure objectivity when their independent scientific standing has already been denied.

Menger counters that the investigation of peoples’ laws of development constitutes only one part of economics. He recalls Roscher’s earlier recognition of English analytical methods and contrasts economics with historical jurisprudence. In the latter, sustained opposition helped distinguish lasting discoveries from methodological exclusiveness:

Ihre nützlichen Errungenschaften sind Gemeingut aller Juristen geworden, die Einseitigkeit aber gehört der Vergangenheit an.

English translation: Its useful achievements have become the common property of all jurists, while its one-sidedness belongs to the past.

Historical economics, lacking an equally strong theoretical opposition, has moved in the opposite direction, extending its claims from historically variable economic policy into the entire domain of theory. Menger ends by anticipating a reversal: a future historian might regard the historical school itself as preparation for a clarified theoretical economics. The article’s enduring conceptual move is thus to separate the value of historical inquiry from its claim to methodological supremacy, while exposing how a school’s history of its discipline can turn current ascendancy into an apparent culmination.