ABSTRACT
The openness exhibited by Menger to questions which in the logicof-choice scheme of things would have been classed as noneconomic was continued, though not necessarily in a manner Menger would have countenanced, by Wieser. In Wieser’s work we find that, after some hesitation, Wieser settled on the ends of economizing behaviour summarized in his expression ‘highest possible utility’ as being wholly purified of philosophical or ethical connotations. Consistent with a concentration on the pure logic-of-choice the majority of Austrian economists from the early 1920s onwards eliminated philosophical discussion concerning welfare goals or, alternatively, the ends of economizing. Rosenstein-Rodan’s survey of marginal utility theory, first published in 1927, epitomized the prevailing view when it stated that ‘all modern economists refuse to discuss the purpose of human action’ ([1927] 1960: 79). In the furore of the Methodenstreit Menger ([1883] 1985:234-7) insisted on disjoining the domains of ethics and economics. In the Principles (especially, though not exclusively, in the 1923 edition), this interdiction was explicitly relaxed, since he distinguished between physiological, altruistical and egotistical needs (Menger 1923:4-5 n).1 Furthermore, there was no implication of the influence of Benthamite hedonism on Menger’s theory of economizing. Hedonism, broadly defined, was a philosophical doctrine that turned on the attainment of pleasure as the highest good and aim of life. Such a notion would have been anathema to Menger.2 In the second, posthumous edition of the Principles, Menger (1923:62) did not equate economizing behaviour simply with the highest pleasure resulting from the consumption of goods. According to Menger,
economizing involved ‘perform[ing] an economic action inasmuch as we provide the means necessary for satisfaction of our needs and we thereby assure the possibility of consumption at a future date, but not through the very fact that we consume’. Consumption in itself was not the be-all and end-all for Menger’s economizer; the objective of attaining the highest satisfaction from consumption was secondary to performing ‘the economic action’, which involves first perceiving, then supplying, the means of well-being.
