Carl Menger, Die Fortschritte der wissenschaftlichen Nationalökonomie seit Adam Smith (1890)

Carl Menger’s newspaper review of Maurice Block’s two-volume survey of economic doctrine uses an appreciative assessment of the French scholar to argue for theoretical reconstruction across national intellectual divisions. Its central claim is that economics advances neither through unquestioning fidelity to classical doctrine nor through the abandonment of theory for historical particulars. Block’s achievement, as Menger presents it, is to preserve the valid elements of classical economics while revising them through international criticism.

Was uns Block bietet, ist die classische National-Oekonomie im Lichte der Kritik, welche die ausgezeichnetsten gelehrten Volkswirthe des letzten Jahrhunderts an dieselbe gelegt haben.

English translation: What Block offers us is classical political economy in the light of the criticism which the most distinguished learned economists of the last century have applied to it.

The review begins by distinguishing Block’s critical revision from conventional French textbooks. His starting point remains the doctrine prevailing in France, but his exceptional familiarity with foreign scholarship enables him to examine reform proposals and assimilate their strongest results. Menger then grounds this intellectual openness in Block’s career: decades of publications and literature reports had made him a mediator between French economists and foreign, especially German, research. His authority rests on sustained critical engagement, not merely on accumulated learning. Having personally witnessed much of the development he describes, Block offers a presentation of classical theory refined through a working scholarly lifetime.

The review’s argumentative centre shifts from these credentials to a diagnosis of economics itself. Menger first attacks the postclassical conviction that the science was already complete, which made dissent appear ignorant rather than potentially productive. Yet the erosion of this orthodoxy has produced an opposite danger:

An die Stelle des einstigen Glaubens an die Unfehlbarkeit der Smith’schen Lehre ist indeß eine Skepsis getreten, welche, zumal in der wissenschaftlichen National-Oekonomie Deutschlands, geradezu in eine Art theoretischen Nihilismus ausgeartet ist.

English translation: In place of the former belief in the infallibility of Smith's doctrine, however, there has appeared a scepticism which, especially in the scientific political economy of Germany, has positively degenerated into a kind of theoretical nihilism.

Menger distinguishes the attention Roscher, Knies, and Hildebrand gave to differences of time and place from the newer historical economists’ dismissal of theory altogether. Recognizing exceptions to Smithian principles does not, in his account, justify treating economic life as nothing but exceptions. Archival publication, inquiry reports, and descriptions of institutions remain useful scholarly activities; his objection is to elevating them into the highest form of inquiry while disparaging investigation of the nature and internal connections of economic phenomena. The conceptual distinction is therefore between empirical contributions to knowledge and their mistaken promotion into substitutes for theoretical explanation.

This criticism is deliberately paired with a rebuke to French economics. Where German historical scholarship risks denying theory, French defenders of Smith and Say too often resist even justified theoretical reform. Block matters because his work challenges both positions:

Es bedeutet ebensowol einen energischen Protest gegen den einseitigen theoretischen Nihilismus in der deutschen, als gegen den einseitigen Conservativismus in der französischen Wirthschaftstheorie. Es ist der Versuch eines Neubaues derselben aus den berechtigten Elementen der älteren, indeß auch der neueren Doctrin.

English translation: It signifies an energetic protest as much against the one-sided theoretical nihilism in German economic theory as against the one-sided conservatism in French economic theory. It is the attempt at a rebuilding of that theory out of the justified elements of the older, but also of the more recent doctrine.

“Reconstruction” is the decisive move: Menger endorses neither restoration of an untouched classical system nor novelty for its own sake, but the critical integration of defensible old and new insights. The review does not substantiate this judgment through particular economic doctrines. Its emphasis is on Block’s scholarly orientation and the methodological significance Menger assigns to it.

The closing paragraphs explain Block’s accomplishment through a fusion of German scholarly comprehensiveness and French clarity of exposition. Although expressed through national characterizations, this praise leads to a broader claim about intellectual exchange: a discipline prone to one-sidedness benefits from seeing itself through foreign judgments. Menger thus concludes by recommending Block especially to Germany’s contending schools. The review’s lasting relevance lies in its account of scientific progress as theoretically ambitious, critically selective, and sustained by international engagement rather than national or methodological self-sufficiency.