ABSTRACT
The British ‘modern philosophers’ (of the 1600s to the 1800s) contributed importantly to the concepts on which classical political economy would be grounded. They founded its main underlying concepts and designed its logic. Adam Smith and David Ricardo in Britain, as well as their French counterparts, such as Condillac and Say, founded the field of political economy on the fundamentals of modern philosophy. Much earlier on, Francis Bacon, in his Novum Organum, had defined a set of scientific standards which, after undergoing some changes, eventually replaced the Aristotelian creed. Introducing experimentation and the use of mathematics into science were not the only novel aspects of the modern approach to science, – and they were precisely not those on which Menger focused later on when he proposed to give economics a renewed scientific basis at the end of the nineteenth century. Menger's general views, set out in his 1871 Grundsätze der Volkswirtschaftslehre, are both theoretical and critical. They run contrary to the ideas of the German Historical School, as we have already seen and will somehow detail again in the next chapter, as well as to the tenets of classical political economy and the fundamental underlying logics thereof. Menger borrowed from the British (and, to some extent, the French) some more deep-lying traditional concepts which, as it is proposed to show here, were essential to his thinking (whether he accepted or refuted these ideas). For this purpose, we will rely as previously on first-hand material from Menger's archives, especially from his private collection of books that has ended up in Japan.
