Franz Xaver Weiss, “Zur zweiten Auflage von Carl Mengers „Grundsätzen“” (1924)

Franz Xaver Weiss’s review examines the posthumous second edition of Carl Menger’s Grundsätze der Volkswirtschaftslehre, published by Karl Menger in 1923. It combines recognition of Menger’s foundational achievement with scrutiny of the revisions reconstructed from his manuscripts. Its commemorative opening establishes the respect within which the criticism proceeds:

Es war nur eine Selbstverständlichkeit, daß das erste Blatt der neuen Folge seinem Andenken gewidmet war.

English translation: It was only a matter of course that the first number of the new series was dedicated to his memory.

The edition restores access to a long-unavailable work whose influence had spread substantially through Böhm-Bawerk and Wieser. Weiss appreciates the editor’s reconstruction but does not assume that every later formulation improves upon the original. His chapter-by-chapter assessment distinguishes clarification from conceptual instability and unfinished argument.

The treatment of needs introduces this critical pattern:

Das erste Kapitel, welches „die Lehre von den Bedürfnissen“ enthält, ist neu.

English translation: The first chapter, which contains "the doctrine of wants," is new.

Weiss questions whether psychological and biological knowledge supplies a foundation for economic theory rather than supplementary information. The distinction between genuine and imaginary needs also risks introducing evaluative judgments into an explanatory category. Collective and associative needs warrant conceptual differentiation, but such distinctions do not by themselves settle economic questions.

The account of goods raises a methodological issue. Weiss considers Menger’s formulation of their relationship to human purposes:

Wir dagegen haben die Güter als Mittel für menschliche Zwecke zu erfassen, ihren Zusammenhang im Zweckbewußtsein der wirtschaftenden Menschen (ihren teleologischen Zusammenhang) zu erforschen und die Gesetze derselben festzustellen.

English translation: We, by contrast, have to grasp goods as means for human ends, to investigate their connection within the purposive consciousness of economizing men (their teleological connection), and to establish the laws thereof.

Weiss accepts the importance of understanding goods through agents’ purposes but resists opposing this procedure to causal explanation. Understanding the meaning of action helps explain economic events; it does not require abandoning causality. He similarly welcomes the distinction between subjective economic activity and the objective movement of goods. In delimiting the category of goods, however, he favors Böhm-Bawerk’s attention to useful services. Rights, institutions, and relationships should not be counted independently when their benefits already consist in identifiable goods or personal services.

The discussion of requirements, available quantities, and economizing emphasizes time, scarcity, and alternative arrangements of means. Weiss distinguishes the organizational characteristics of market and socialist economies from inequalities of purchasing power: neither form of organization abolishes scarcity. On this basis he rejects an independent “technical-economic” direction alongside economizing. Where resources satisfy every need regardless of arrangement, the remaining question is technical; where satisfactory provision depends on rational allocation, the economic problem is already present. He nevertheless approves the revised recognition that scarcity can support common as well as private ownership.

Capital and interest receive the most sustained criticism. Weiss traces shifts both in the definition of capital and in the meaning of its use, from availability or command over goods toward their useful services. Neither formulation, he argues, overcomes Böhm-Bawerk’s objection that the value of a good’s uses is already included in the value of the good itself. Treating use as an additional productive contribution risks double counting rather than explaining interest. Nor does separating gross from net uses resolve the issue: deducting maintenance or depreciation describes a residual without explaining its existence. Weiss thus cautions against treating incomplete posthumous formulations as an established new theory of interest.

The concluding discussion treats revisions to value, monopoly pricing, marketability, and money more briefly. Weiss then asks why Menger engaged so little with developments extending his own principles, including Wieser’s treatment of costs, Böhm-Bawerk’s criticisms, and utility-based explanations of money’s value. He recalls Menger acknowledging that an explanation through money’s exchange function followed from his principles while remaining unwilling to accept it. Weiss interprets this resistance against the magnitude of Menger’s original departure from classical economics. His review makes critical fidelity its governing stance: preserving Menger’s achievement requires testing its later formulations and pursuing implications that its author did not fully embrace.