austrian economist, founder of the Austrian school, one of the founders of marginal utility theory
Background
Menger was born in Nowy Sącz in Austrian Galicia, now in Poland. He was the son of a wealthy family of minor nobility;his father, Anton, was a lawyer. His mother, Caroline, was the daughter of a wealthy Bohemian merchant. He had two brothers, Anton and Max, both prominent as lawyers.
Education
After attending gymnasium he studied law at the universities of Prague and Vienna. In 1867, Menger began a study of political economy and then received a doctorate at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków.
Career
In 1870, Menger obtained a civil service appointment in the press department of the Austrian cabinet (the Ministerratspraesidium), which was then composed of members of the Liberal Party.
In 1871he published "The Principles of Economics" (German Grundsätze der Volkswirtschaftslehre) - a book that brought him fame and became the foundation of the Austrian school of economic thought. It was in this work that he challenged the classical labor theory of value with his theory of marginality.
With a published work in hand and the successful completion of his Habilitation examination in 1872, Menger fulfilled the requirements for an appointment as a Privat-Dozent--basically an unpaid lecturer with complete professorial privileges--in the Faculty of Law and Political Science at the University of Vienna. In 1873 he received the university's chair of economic theory at the very young age of 33.
In 1876, Menger won an appointment as one of the tutors of the eighteen-year old Crown Prince, Rudolph von Hapsburg, then Menger was appointed by the Emperor Franz Joseph, Rudolph's father, to the Chair of Political Economy in Vienna's Law Faculty, where he took up his duties in 1879 as a Professor Ordinarius or Full Professor.
In 1883 Menger published "Investigations into the Method of the Social Sciences with Special Reference to Economics". The book caused a firestorm of debate, during which members of the Historical School of economics began to derisively call Menger and his students the "Austrian School" to emphasize their departure from mainstream economic thought in Germany. In 1884 Menger responded with the pamphlet "The Errors of Historicism in German Economics" and launched the infamous "Methodenstreit," or methodological debate, between the Historical School and the Austrian School.
In the late 1880s Menger was appointed to head a commission to reform the Austrian monetary system. Over the course of the next decade he authored a plethora of articles which would revolutionize monetary theory, including "The Theory of Capital" (1888) and "Money" (1892).
Views
methodological individualism, libertarianism, anarchism
Quotations:
“People - the Communists, wherever possible, depending on the existing natural environmen” (Люди — коммунисты везде, где это возможно, в зависимости от существующих естественных условий)