Emil Kauder, Menger and his Library (1959)

Emil Kauder’s article examines Carl Menger’s annotated books at Hitotsubashi University to reconsider the philosophical foundations, intellectual debts, and political commitments of the Austrian school’s founder. Its premise is that private reading can illuminate connections and disagreements obscured by published doctrine.

Carl Menger, the founder of the Austrian school, developed his ideas in two works, his Principles and his Methodology.

Kauder supplements these works with annotations, underlining, acquisition dates, and uncut pages as evidence of intellectual development. He nevertheless treats the investigation as preliminary. Much of the philosophical library remained with Menger’s son, and the surviving material chiefly illuminates Menger’s thinking before 1900 rather than fully explaining the development of the second edition of the Principles.

The Hitotsubashi library has published a two volume catalogue, but a critical edition of Menger's notes does not exist.

This distinction between cataloguing and critical interpretation matters to Kauder’s method: possession alone does not establish influence, while marginal comments must be situated within an argument and chronology. The library provides evidence for revising established interpretations, but not a complete record of Menger’s intellectual formation.

Kauder’s central philosophical claim places Menger in an Aristotelian tradition.

It was as a student of Aristotle and not as a Kantian or Neo-Kantian, that Menger wrote his epistemology.

Annotations in Überweg suggest that Menger sought necessary relations within social reality, not merely relations imposed by the mind. Kauder finds stronger evidence for Aristotle’s influence on value theory in Menger’s annotated Nicomachean Ethics and his response to Oskar Kraus. Consumer valuation follows a hierarchy of purposes—life, health, comfort, and amusement—rather than an undifferentiated calculation of pleasure. Menger’s criticism of Gossen for neglecting the preservation of life reinforces the distinction between theories that resemble one another in their treatment of utility but differ in their understanding of human welfare.

The investigation of economic predecessors combines the recovery of neglected influences with a defense against accusations of copying. Joseph von Kudler’s heavily used textbook reveals a Viennese antecedent whose theory of relative value ranked goods by the intensity and urgency of their uses. Although Menger omitted Kudler from his published acknowledgments, Kauder does not infer a general intention to conceal intellectual debts. Menger’s purchase of Gossen in 1886, his critical annotations, and the absence of markings in Mangoldt’s mathematical treatment weigh against plagiarism, without conclusively establishing everything he had previously read.

Kauder also distinguishes Menger’s causal economics from mathematical equilibrium analysis. Consumer choice supplies the explanatory starting point: the valuation of consumption goods determines the value of productive factors, so costs cannot function as an independent foundation. Notes on Mill, Auspitz, and Lieben disclose objections to equilibrium, functional relations, and the ceteris paribus clause. Kauder interprets these objections as methodological commitments rather than evidence of inadequate mathematical training. Conversely, Menger’s criticisms of Böhm-Bawerk appear as disagreements within a shared undertaking, not a repudiation of the Austrian school.

The final discussion connects scientific neutrality with moral and political commitments. Reading on poverty and child mortality, together with literature opposing war, dueling, antisemitism, and ecclesiastical privilege, suggests a reform-minded concern for human welfare without establishing support for unrestricted competition. Kauder situates this outlook within the Josephinic enlightenment and Sonnenfels’s ideal of freedom from prejudice, while leaving Menger’s precise religious position unresolved. The article thus presents Menger’s economics as rooted in a historically specific conjunction of Aristotelian philosophy and Austrian reformism, demonstrating both the interpretive value and the limits of library evidence.