Carl Menger, Nationalökonomische Literatur in Oesterreich. I–II. (1889)

Carl Menger’s two-part newspaper literature report presents recent Austrian economics as an internationally recognized research movement whose domestic reception remains contested. Its organizing claim is that economic theory must explain complex social phenomena through the judgments and efforts of economic actors, while extending that explanation to public institutions, law, and diverse forms of economic organization. The reviews combine advocacy with discriminating criticism: shared theoretical ambitions do not make every proposed solution an established result.

Part I moves from Friedrich von Wieser’s theory of value through Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk’s theory of capital and interest to Emil Sax’s theoretical treatment of public economics. For Menger, classical economics falters less because of the historical school’s objections than because its unempirical axioms contradict ordinary experience and yield merely apparent solutions. Wieser’s Der natürliche Werth instead develops subjective value into a psychological foundation for economic theory. Its test is neither logical consistency alone nor agreement with superficially observed phenomena, but correspondence with the guiding considerations of economic agents.

Böhm-Bawerk’s completed Capital und Capitalzins exemplifies a complementary methodological openness:

Die Methoden der Forschung sind auf allen Gebieten der Wissenschaft durch die Natur der Erkenntnißziele bedingt.

English translation: In every field of science, the methods of research are conditioned by the nature of the aims of inquiry.

This principle makes history, statistics, ordinary experience, and psychological investigation mutually serviceable rather than rival monopolies on knowledge. Menger praises Böhm-Bawerk’s historical criticism, originality, and systematic achievement, including his independence from Jevons despite partial anticipations. Yet he explicitly leaves the adequacy of the interest theory to scientific debate. International prominence is evidence of intellectual importance, not proof of theoretical correctness.

Sax carries the theoretical movement into economic policy and public finance. Menger frames his achievement through the distinction between practical precepts and scientifically grounded practice:

Jede praktische Disciplin befindet sich gleichsam in einem vorwissenschaftlichen Zustande, so lange sie ihre theoretischen Grundlagen noch nicht gefunden hat, so lange sie eben nur eine Kunstlehre ist.

English translation: Every practical discipline is, as it were, in a prescientific state as long as it has not yet found its theoretical foundations, as long as it remains merely a body of practical precepts.

Sax’s project transfers revised economic categories to states and subordinate autonomous bodies, developing a theory appropriate to their distinctive activity. Public enterprises, fees, taxation, and the distribution of tax burdens thereby become objects of systematic explanation. Menger regards this as substantial progress without claiming that such extensive problems have been settled at one stroke.

Part II tests the movement’s reach through four further reviews. Victor Mataja’s study of damages joins economics to jurisprudence: concepts of wealth, subjective attachment, indirect loss, and compensation require economic analysis, while civil legislation must also be assessed through its social-policy effects. Robert Zuckerkandl’s history and theory of prices supplies the critical reconstruction of inherited doctrines necessary for theoretical revision. Menger particularly values its explanation of actual prices through agents’ subjective considerations, but regards its specifically empirical orientation as both an achievement and a limitation: it develops only part of price theory.

Gustav Groß’s study of economic forms broadens the account of the actors themselves:

Was wir die Volkswirthschaft nennen, ist kein bloßes Aggregat von Wirthschaften physischer Personen, sondern eine verschiedenartig verknüpfte und mannigfach abgestufte Organisation von solchen.

English translation: What we call the national economy is no mere aggregate of the economies of individual persons, but an organization of them interconnected in various ways and arranged at many levels.

Individual, family, and public economies differ in subjects, purposes, and means. Treating them indiscriminately as private economies therefore misleads. This passage qualifies any reading of Menger’s subjectivism as an account restricted to isolated individuals.

The concluding review of Rudolph Auspitz and Richard Lieben sharpens the report’s methodological stakes. Menger welcomes their attention to real price determinants but distinguishes analysis into elementary components and their isolating recombination from reasoning under potentially contradictory suppositions. He also questions using graphs as instruments of discovery: correct mathematical presentation cannot redeem an untenable doctrine. Nevertheless, their observations, examples, and classifications retain value. The report thus documents an Austrian research program united by explanatory foundations, yet internally differentiated over empirical scope, institutional organization, and the evidential force of formal methods.