Emil Kauder’s editorial introduction establishes the historical significance and textual difficulties of an unfinished manuscript preserved in Carl Menger’s annotated copy of his Grundsätze der Volkswirtschaftslehre. Moving from provenance and dating through theoretical interpretation to transcription methods, Kauder argues that the Hitotsubashi fragment offers independent evidence of Menger’s intellectual development. Its value exceeds its intended function as material for a revised edition.
Das Fragment gewährt neue Einblicke in die Arbeitsweise und das Denken Mengers, die sich weder in seiner sozialwissenschaftlichen Methodologie noch in der Neuauflagen von 1923 finden.
English translation: The fragment affords new insights into Menger's manner of working and his thinking, insights to be found neither in his social-scientific methodology nor in the new editions of 1923.
The university library had held most of Menger’s personal library since 1922; its marginal annotations contained a substantial part of his scholarly remains. Kauder presents this publication as a selective opening of an underused archive. He tentatively dates most of the fragment to the 1870s and its cessation to between 1892 and 1900, drawing on cited publications, newspaper clippings, and a finder’s reward denominated in crowns. Karl Menger’s reliance on manuscripts written from 1901 onward helps explain the fragment’s absence from the posthumous edition. Kauder consequently treats it as evidence for a distinctive phase of theoretical reflection, not simply as preparatory material for the 1923 text.
Its central conceptual interest lies in the coexistence of theoretical autonomy and moral responsibility.
Zwanzig Jahre vor Max Weber wird die Wertfreiheit der theoretischen Nationalökonomie vertreten.
English translation: Twenty years before Max Weber, the freedom from value judgements of theoretical economics is here maintained.
Kauder couples this claim with Menger’s measure of social moral maturity: the freedom of the lower classes to organize consumption rationally. Value-free theory thus appears alongside an unusually explicit concern with the ethical conditions of economic agency. The fragment also unsettles the psychological foundations of marginal utility. Whereas the first edition made individual welfare the goal of economic striving, the annotations acknowledge that individuals can pursue other ends.
Wenn der Mensch noch andere Zwecke kennt ausser seinem individuellen Wohlbefinden, dann entsteht die Frage, ob auf diese Weise nicht die Anwendung der Grenznutzenrechnung, die ja nach Menger eine Berechnung der Wohlfahrtsgewinne darstellt, eingeschränkt sei.
English translation: If man knows still other ends besides his individual well-being, then the question arises whether in this way the application of marginal-utility calculation, which according to Menger represents a computation of gains in welfare, is not thereby restricted.
Kauder leaves this as an unresolved problem rather than attributing a completed solution to Menger. The importance of the passage is precisely its exposure of a possible limit within welfare-based marginal calculation, a question also discussed by Jevons and Walras.
The next section reconstructs Menger’s critical engagement with classical economics. He rejects supply-and-demand price theory and Malthusian population theory, yet approaches Malthus in criticizing Say’s law. A general overproduction is possible when monetary scarcity and excess output force sales at a loss; identifying buying with selling does not resolve the difficulty. Kauder also records Menger’s rejection of Ricardian distribution theory, the wage-fund doctrine, and differential rent, together with his support for absolute rent. Notes on national income, investment, factor productivity, machinery, trade, and conflicts between individual and national interests indicate the fragment’s breadth without constituting a finished alternative system.
That breadth rests on extensive reading, ranging from Aristotle and legal texts to travel accounts, archaeology, and chemical analyses of metals. Kauder connects this scholarly richness to the practical obstacles to publication. Interleaved pages, additional pasted sheets, marginal writing, and notes squeezed into printed lines produced a crowded manuscript whose component discussions were only partly complete. Different inks and pencils distinguish successive layers, but placement marks do not consistently establish how annotations relate to the printed text.
Um diese ineinander geschachtelten Noten zu verstehen, mussten Mengers Bemerkungen voneinander und vom Text abgelöst werden.
English translation: In order to understand these notes nested within one another, Menger's remarks had to be detached from one another and from the text.
The concluding editorial account makes this separation the basis of the provisional mimeographed edition, with a facsimile envisaged for a later publication. Page references preserve orientation; square brackets identify editorial explanations, supplements, and corrections. Kauder retains Menger’s spelling while supplying punctuation where necessary for intelligibility and correcting quotation errors that distort meaning. Citations could often be checked against Menger’s own books, whereas his original reflections sometimes required contextual reconstruction of illegible words. The introduction’s enduring relevance therefore lies both in the theoretical questions it recovers and in its explicit account of the editorial labor through which that evidence becomes readable.
This work was divided into 1 sections when it entered the library's research corpus—an apparatus for search and citation, not necessarily the author's own table of contents. Each title opens its summary.
Put a question to this work; the Librarian answers from its 1 sections and cites the passage.
Ask the Librarian