Carl Menger’s Review of Pierson’s Leerboek der Staathuishoudkunde (1890)

Carl Menger’s review considers the first installment of the second volume of N. G. Pierson’s economics textbook, published in 1889. Combining an appeal for the reception of Dutch scholarship with a concise account of five chapters, Menger presents Pierson as an exemplary guide through contemporary economic controversies. His central evaluative claim is that Pierson joins theoretical openness, practical knowledge, and impartial judgment at a moment when economics needs both continuity and reform.

The review begins with the linguistic barriers that have kept Dutch economic scholarship from German readers. Menger describes Pierson’s writings as instrumental in overcoming Austrian economists’ reluctance to learn Dutch: their intellectual contribution made neglect increasingly untenable. This account of reception becomes a methodological argument. Against the antagonisms dividing historical and theoretical, empirical and rationalist, social-policy and individualist schools, Pierson offers critical mediation without either doctrinaire conservatism or indiscriminate enthusiasm for innovation.

Sie vermitteln der Gegenwart die Errungenschaften der Vergangenheit und tragen dazu bei, eine neue Epoche unserer Wissenschaft vorzubereiten.

English translation: They convey to the present the achievements of the past and help to prepare a new epoch of our science.

Menger thus values Pierson’s work for preserving established achievements while preparing disciplinary change. His praise concerns a manner of inquiry as much as particular conclusions: proposals should be tested with expertise and without allegiance to a faction.

Turning to the installment under review, Menger notes its accessibility to educated readers alongside its scholarly rigor. He questions the aptness of its heading, “Production und Consumption,” because consumption receives little attention. Production as an instrument of social reform supplies the real organizing principle, opposing the purported remedies of socialism, protectionism, and agrarian policy.

The first chapter explains production and disputes the danger of general overproduction. The second establishes a crucial qualification to market coordination:

In einem zweiten Kapitel wird der Eigennutz als unentbehrliche, aber auch als unzulängliche Triebfeder der Volkswirtschaft gekennzeichnet.

English translation: In a second chapter self-interest is characterized as an indispensable, but also as an insufficient, mainspring of the national economy.

As Menger reports Pierson’s argument, private self-interest cannot adequately secure every condition of public welfare. Unrestricted competition may produce crises and damage workers; exploitation can benefit an individual employer even when it harms employers collectively. The distinction between individual incentives and collective interests explains the attraction of a social state, whose merits Pierson nevertheless subjects to critical scrutiny.

The third chapter addresses population through Malthus. Rather than relying on the contested American doubling period, Pierson extrapolates from European population growth between 1800 and 1886. Skeptical of moral restraint, he looks to neo-Malthusian measures and a substantial increase in production, preferably together, supported by worker-friendly institutions and legislation. Menger’s account places demographic pressure within the book’s larger concern with improving workers’ material circumstances.

The fourth chapter defends free trade from the standpoint of the Netherlands, where Menger considers its effects still practically observable. Pierson acknowledges the motives behind protectionism but rejects tariffs, export subsidies, and shipping protection. Errors in selecting the objects, degree, and duration of protection combine with declining exports and distorted production to undermine their intended benefits.

The final chapter extends this productivity criterion to agrarian institutions. Comparative histories of England, France, Holland, Germany, and Austria inform Pierson’s skepticism toward land nationalization, impartible inheritance, and the Russian village commune. English-Irish tenant legislation receives a more favorable assessment because it encourages intensive cultivation. The argument culminates in a conditional justification of property:

Selbst das Eigentum müsse in unserer Zeit, um geachtet zu werden, sich erst diese Achtung verdienen, indem es bei der Hebung der Production redlich mitwirke.

English translation: Even property must in our time, in order to be respected, first earn this respect by honestly co-operating in the raising of production.

Property earns respect through its contribution to productive improvement, rather than commanding unconditional deference. This passage crystallizes the reform-minded orientation that Menger admires: institutions are judged by their economic consequences, while increased production remains Pierson’s recurring answer to social distress. Menger closes by recommending the work to specialists and educated readers alike. The review’s significance lies in its endorsement of an economics that combines free trade and productive expansion with attention to workers’ welfare and the critical assessment of established rights.