ABSTRACT
In tracing their intellectual origins to Menger’s work, modern Austrians are also recognizing, at least implicitly, a distant connection to the so-called marginal ‘revolution’ in economic theory beginning in the 1870s, to which Menger, Wieser and Böhm-Bawerk were significant contributors.4 Moreover, in capsule summaries of the Austrian contributions to economic thought from the 1870s up to the 1890s, both Wieser (1891) and Böhm-Bawerk (1891) communicated to English-speaking audiences their conviction that the Austrians were a part of an international movement towards marginalist economics which took place from the 1870s. As Peter Boettke (1994:1) argued, Wieser’s and Böhm-Bawerk’s ‘self-image’ positioned all the Austrians in the ‘mainstream of neoclassicism’. The marginalist economics of the 1870s and beyond eventually gave rise to a full-fledged neoclassical movement in economic theorizing which was to dominate economic thought in the twentieth century. However, while the founding Austrians may have contributed much to marginalism understood as a fledgling form of neoclassicism, it is by no means obvious precisely in what respects Menger, Wieser and Böhm-Bawerk may be considered neoclassical economists. The term ‘neoclassical’ was initially applied retrospectively and rather loosely to a wide body of literature; the Austrians were only one among several groups of economists of different nationalities to have contributed to that literature.5 The foundations of Austrian microeconomics were developed by Austrians in Austria. However, even lately, a leading historian of twentieth-century Austrian economics has not yet been persuaded that the foregoing ‘national distinction reflected any sharp doctrinal differences with neoclassical economics’ where the latter remained very broadly defined (Vaughn 1994: 10). It is absolutely critical for our purposes to distinguish between neoclassical microeconomic theory as it might now be conceived and the history of the development of that theory. In terms of the history of the neoclassical movement in economic theory we can
safely state that there was nothing monolithic about its incipient developmental phase. The early neoclassical movement had included many prominent economists, and one modern neoclassicist was quite prepared to include among these leaders such diverse theorists as ‘Böhm-Bawerk, Edgeworth, Gossen, Jevons, Marshall, Menger, Wieser and Wicksell’ (Bliss 1987:883).
