Marginalism, Classicism and Socialism in Germanspeaking Countries, 1871–1932 *

In this chapter an attempt will be made to summarize the debate between authors advocating some form of marginal utility theory and those advocating some form of labour theory of value or cost of production theory in German-speaking countries in the period after the inception of what may be called marginal theory proper, i.e. subsequent to the publication of Menger’s Grundsätze (1871), Jevons’s Theory (1871) and Walras’s Eléments (1874), and up to the 1932 conference of the Verein für Socialpolitik on Probleme der Werttheorie (Problems of value theory). Emphasis will be on the debates in Germany (Deutsches Reich) and Austria. ¹ For the purpose of this paper, German-speaking economists include all those who used the German language for their writings. Since in those days German was still a main language in economics, many contributions came from authors who were subjects of neither the German Reich nor the Hapsburg Empire. The discussion will focus attention on the controversy between marginalist economists on the one hand and ‘socialists’ of various orientations on the other, with exponents of ‘classical’ economics playing an important side role. The main concern will be with alternative theories of value and distribution.