Carl Menger, Adolf Wagners Lehr- und Handbuch der Politischen Oekonomie (1892)

Carl Menger’s review assesses the expanded plan of Wagner’s systematic economics handbook and two newly published instalments: Wagner’s Grundlegung and A. Buchenberger’s Agrarwesen und Agrarpolitik. Its governing judgment is that the project’s comprehensiveness and prospective completion constitute an achievement whose value extends beyond agreement with Wagner’s social politics. Praise for systematic breadth and practical usefulness is nevertheless qualified by concern about the place of historical exposition.

Menger begins with the project’s publication history. After E. Nasse’s death, completion had seemed doubtful; Wagner instead enlarged the undertaking and recruited Heinrich Dietzel, Karl Bücher, and Buchenberger. The revised division of labour assigns foundational questions to Wagner, economic theory to Dietzel, and practical economics to Wagner, Bücher, and Buchenberger. Wagner retains public finance; a history of economic literature, including socialism, is planned as the concluding volume. Menger presents collaboration as the means of reconciling intellectual ambition with the limits of individual scholarly labour. His endorsement expressly exceeds partisan allegiance:

Die Sicherstellung seiner Vollendung innerhalb der nächsten drei bis vier Jahre muß nicht nur vom Standpunkte der social-politischen Auffassungen A. Wagner’s, sondern ganz im Allgemeinen als ein bedeutsames Ereigniß auf dem Gebiete der Social-Oekonomie begrüßt werden.

English translation: The assurance of its completion within the next three to four years must be welcomed, not only from the standpoint of A. Wagner's social-political conceptions but quite generally, as a significant event in the field of social economy.

The review then identifies the conceptual centre of Wagner’s revised Grundlegung. Its novelty lies neither in wholly unprecedented methods nor in restricting economics to historical and philosophical-historical accounts. Instead, Wagner reorients economic and legal questions toward the interests of the community. Private property and contractual arrangements thereby become objects of social as well as individual-rights analysis:

Er will an die Stelle der älteren, wesentlich privatökonomischen, die socialökonomische Auffassung der Volkswirthschaft und der Volkswirthschaftslehre setzen, an Stelle der üblichen individualrechtlichen die socialrechtliche Auffassung alles Rechtes, auch des Privatrechtes, des Privateigenthums und der Vertragsordnung.

English translation: He wishes to put the social-economic conception of the national economy and of economics in the place of the older, essentially private-economic one, and the social-law conception of all law — of private law as well, of private property and of the contractual order — in the place of the customary individual-law one.

Menger explains this as a movement away from economic individualism toward socialism without accepting socialism as its destination. Wagner seeks an intermediate position between their competing demands. The substantive achievement combines this shift of standpoint with abundant statistical, legislative, and intellectual-historical material and detailed systematic coverage. The published portion treats economics’ purposes, methods, classification, and elementary factors; population, economic organization, and the state are reserved for the next portion. Menger thus distinguishes a change in the perspective of inquiry from a claim to methodological revolution.

Buchenberger’s contribution supplies the practical counterpart to this foundational programme. Menger values its sober expertise, its avoidance of historicist one-sidedness, and especially its presentation of arguments for and against major policy proposals. Its intended usefulness spans farmers, politicians, and administrators. The first instalment covers agrarian emancipation, tenure and cultivation arrangements, agrarian communism, land improvement, property distribution and inheritance, migration and colonization, and rural labour. The projected continuation turns to credit, insurance, agricultural administration and support, and the effects of prices and overseas competition. Menger’s favourable judgment rests on balanced treatment of concrete alternatives, not merely on the number of subjects covered.

The closing assessment returns to the prospects for completion. Confidence in the contributors’ expertise and energy gives way to a specific reservation about Wagner’s public finance. Historical treatment, though valuable as material, can threaten a systematic work’s internal proportions:

Wagner hat im dritten Bande dieses Werkes trotz aller methodologischen Verwahrungen dem historischen Standpunkte in praxi solche Concessionen gemacht, daß man darauf gespannt sein kann, wie er von diesem die Brücke zum vierten, zum Schlußbande, finden wird, ohne die innere Oekonomie seines Werkes zu stören.

English translation: In the third volume of this work Wagner has, despite all methodological reservations, made such concessions in practice to the historical standpoint that one may be curious how he will find the bridge from it to the fourth, the concluding volume, without disturbing the inner economy of his work.

This qualification gives the review its methodological edge. Menger welcomes a comprehensive social economics and recognises scholarship across differences of political standpoint, while judging historical exposition by its contribution to a coherent analytical and practical whole. His concluding demand for the prompt completion of public finance preserves both the admiration and the critical independence that organize the review.