Carl Menger’s two Meanings of ‘Economic’
Text in English to type
Only quite recently has attention turned again towards the economy of the underdeveloped and backward countries. Menger’s discussion of economic development has, however, been forgotten. The posthumous edition, where the distinction between the two directions of the economy is made, was never translated into English. No presentation of neo-classical economics—including Lionel Robbins’ (1935)—deals with the "two directions." The London School of Economics edition of the "Principles" in its rare book series (1933) chose the first edition. Hayek, in a preface to this "replica" edition helped to remove the posthumous Menger from the consciousness of economists by passing over the manuscript [of the second edition] as "fragmentary and disordered." "For the present, at any rate," Professor Hayek concluded, "the results of the work of Menger's later years must be regarded as lost." [§17]
[…]
When Neo-classical economics was born in 1871, it was developed along the lines of Menger (Grundsätze, 2nd ed. 1923; 1st ed. 1871). It started from human wants and needs which can be satisfied from scarce resources. [§35]
[…]
When Hayek became the (intellectual) leader of the London School of Economics, L. S. E. published not the second, but the first edition of Menger’s work. Hayek wrote an introduction in which he said that some papers of Menger had been left, more or less in confusion (either he did not, thus, know of the existence of the second edition, or else he was claiming that Menger got soft in the head, or else that the son did not know what he was doing in publishing the second edition).
When Menger’s classic of modern economic theory was at long last published in English the translators decided to use for that purpose the text offered by the first edition of 1871. The second revised edition of 1923, with its text expanded to twice the original length, was passed over with the briefest of explanations. It is fervently to be hoped that it will not take another seventy-nine years before the English speaking public is enabled to benefit from that posthumous edition of Menger’s ‘Grundsätze’ with its theoretical anticipations the full significance of which can perhaps be gauged only in our days.
But let me quote the translators themselves on their reasons for ignoring the text of the second edition.
"The translation presented here", they write in their Preface, "is a complete rendering of the edition of the Grundsätze which was published in Vienna in 1871. A second German edition was published in Vienna [in 1923], two years after Menger's death. We rejected the possibility of a variorum translation because it was the first edition only that influenced the development of economic doctrine, because of the posthumous character of the second edition, and because the numerous differences between the two editions make a variorum translation impractical." [§41-44]
[…]
Too much, I feel was here left unsaid. Few men, if any in the long history of human intellectual effort paralleled and none surpassed Menger in his dedication to the unremitting search for the truth, at the risk of self-obliteration. He had refused to permit either a reprint or a translation of the text of the first edition, which he deemed in need of completion; he resigned his chair at the University of Vienna in order to devote himself exclusively to that task; after an effort of fifty years during which he seems to have again and again reverted to the task, he left a manuscript behind him, which included four fully completed new chapters. At least one of these is of prime theoretical importance for the problems of definition and method that presently exercise the minds of contemporary scholars in this field. [§45]
Text Informations
Reference:
Date: Draft written probably between 1958 and 1960
KPA: 42/09
Original Posthumous Publication: in DALTON George (dir.), [1971] Studies in Economic Anthropology, Washington, American Anthropological Association, p. 16-24
Other Languages:
| Lge | Name |
|---|---|
| DE | |
| FR | « Les deux sens du mot 'économie' chez Carl Menger » |