Felix Kaufmann’s The Mises-Mayer Debate is a satirical song in two stanzas, presented in Arlene Oost-Zinner’s 2010 English translation with music by Gustav Pick. Its conceptual focus is the tension between doctrinal certainty, methodological neutrality, and avowed values.
I have a point of doctrine That you should really hear. Attempt a refutation But you will not come near.
The opening makes intellectual confidence a comic performance: the speaker invites criticism while declaring it powerless. The first stanza claims a newly formulated liberalism and locates its explanatory authority specifically in Vienna. Marginal utility becomes the refrain’s recurrent warrant, lending a single concept the force of an all-purpose answer.
I therefore keep my values At a distant stance But he who thinks without them In my view has no chance.
The second stanza introduces indispensable “ideal types,” then exposes a tension between distancing values and insisting that thought requires them. The ensuing declaration that values are stated “in black ink” turns methodological restraint into explicit commitment. Repeating the marginal-utility refrain and returning to Vienna’s privileged understanding, the song makes theoretical allegiance audible as repetition.
Its relevance lies in this compact dramatization of economic argument as both conceptual dispute and social self-assertion. Although the title names Mises and Mayer, the lyrics do not explicitly assign their positions to separate speakers; the satire works through the confident first-person voice and its unresolved claims.
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