Alexander Mahr’s memorial essay combines a biography of Hans Mayer with a reconstruction of his contribution to economic theory. Its organizing claim is that Mayer renewed the Austrian School by strengthening its foundations rather than merely applying its inherited principles. The essay moves from personal hardship, academic appointments, and institutional leadership to economic action, subjective valuation, production, and the explanatory limits of mathematical equilibrium theory. Mahr writes as a sympathetic colleague and participant in the same theoretical tradition, but occasionally identifies arguments requiring correction.
Born in Vienna in 1879, Mayer supported himself through private teaching after his father’s impoverishment and death. He chose law for practical reasons, although he initially preferred physics. Studying with Menger, Böhm-Bawerk, and Wieser redirected him toward economics; subsequent contact with Max Weber widened his intellectual formation. Mahr follows his appointments in Freiburg, Prague, Graz, and Vienna, interrupted by wartime service. Hitler’s accession ended Mayer’s proposed arrangement to alternate teaching between Vienna and Kiel. Discussing his continued teaching after Austria’s annexation, Mahr offers a defense based on the danger of resignation and Mayer’s hope of preserving independent foundational research. This passage belongs to the essay’s commemorative advocacy, rather than providing an independent assessment of his political conduct.
Mayer’s influence exceeded his published output. Mahr describes seminars whose spontaneous discussions approached publishable essays, while rigorous self-criticism restricted what Mayer actually printed. His support for younger scholars, leadership of the Nationalökonomische Gesellschaft, founding of the Zeitschrift für Nationalökonomie, and editing of Die Wirtschaftstheorie der Gegenwart made him an organizer of international theoretical exchange. These achievements establish the institutional setting for the essay’s principal concern: recovering arguments that remained insufficiently known or critically discussed.
The theoretical account begins with Mayer’s 1921–1922 investigation of economic valuation. Economics concerns the allocation of insufficient means among multiple, ranked ends. Unlike technical inquiry, which asks how an end can be achieved, economic inquiry also asks whether and to what extent it should be pursued alongside competing ends. The shared usability of means is indispensable:
Für wirtschaftliche Entscheidungen wäre nämlich gar kein Anlaß gegeben, wenn jedem einzelnen Ziele technisch jeweils nur eine spezifische Mittelart zugeordnet wäre, die gerade nur für die Realisierung dieses einen Zieles und für kein anderes brauchbar wäre.
English translation: There would be no occasion at all for economic decisions if each individual end were technically assigned only one specific kind of means, usable solely for realizing that one end and for no other.
Scarcity alone therefore does not explain economic choice: means must connect otherwise distinct purposes. Money and multipurpose production factors create this connection in developed economies, but even a stock of identical goods serving needs of unequal importance exhibits it.
Mahr next emphasizes time. Economic plans extend across recurring periods of need, not simply a single moment of consumption. Repeated intensities of satisfaction qualify the usual presentation of diminishing marginal utility and help explain the valuation of stocks. Mayer’s final publication, from 1953, develops the distinction between measuring utility and calculating with it:
Die subjektiven Nutzen- oder Wertgrößen sind Intensitätsgrößen, die keinesfalls durch Kardinalzahlen, höchstens durch Ordinalzahlen ausgedrückt werden können.
English translation: Subjective magnitudes of utility or value are magnitudes of intensity, which can never be expressed by cardinal numbers, but at most by ordinal numbers.
Recurring needs permit calculation with repeated marginal utilities without making utility itself measurable. Production factors, cost equalization, and technical substitution extend this calculable domain. The foundational problem remains how unmeasurable subjective valuations generate numerical demands, supplies, and prices; describing established market relations does not explain their emergence.
The discussion of Mayer’s encyclopedia contributions presents monopoly, production, and imputation as further foundational inquiries. His attention to intermediate market forms anticipates later classifications. His imputation theory connects factor valuation with the economy-wide interdependence of product prices, costs, and incomes. Mahr nevertheless rejects Mayer’s adoption of Aftalion’s objection that marginal-productivity shares necessarily exceed total product value, citing subsequent demonstrations of product exhaustion under perfect competition. This correction qualifies the tribute without displacing its central judgment: Mayer’s achievement lies in treating valuation within the whole economic system.
The culmination is Mayer’s 1932 critique of functional price theories. Mahr stresses that it does not amount to rejecting mathematical economics:
Hans Mayer geht jedoch in seiner Kritik keineswegs so weit, die Anwendung der mathematischen Methode auf die Wirtschaftstheorie überhaupt abzulehnen.
English translation: In his criticism, however, Hans Mayer by no means goes so far as to reject altogether the application of the mathematical method to economic theory.
Mayer admires Cournot’s monopoly analysis and Walras’s systematic conception. His objections concern explanatory assumptions: equalized weighted marginal utilities, continuously divisible goods, and excessively generalized substitution in indifference analysis. Especially important is the distinction between increasing quantities of one good and shifting toward qualitatively different goods as income rises. A fixed good-specific utility curve can obscure the changing structure of wants.
The decisive contrast is between representing simultaneous relations and explaining their formation:
Die Gleichgewichtssysteme haben die Grenzen ihrer Leistungsfähigkeit erreicht, der weitere Fortschritt der Preistheorie ist nach der Auffassung Mayers nur von der kausal-genetischen Forschungsmethode zu erhoffen.
English translation: Equilibrium systems have reached the limits of their capabilities; in Mayer’s view, further progress in price theory can be expected only from the causal-genetic method of inquiry.
Mahr thus presents Mayer’s legacy as a demand for causal explanation grounded in purposeful action, temporal processes, and differentiated needs. His conclusion calls for renewed engagement with neglected work, while his own endorsement of Mayer’s contested criticisms makes the essay both an intellectual memorial and an intervention in the future direction of economic theory.
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