5. Carl Menger, Founder of the Austrian School
Far removed from the metropolis Vienna, in the small, nondescript Galician town of Neussundes,
today Norvysandr, Poland, Carl Menger was born on Friday, February 28, 1840, the third
of ten children. His mother, Kaolin, came from a wealthy merchant family that had purchased
and the surrounding Monovia State. His father, Anton, was the descendant of a family that
had once hailed from Bohemia and held the aristocratic title of Edler von Wolfengrün.
Carl was raised in a strict Catholic family. This must have been constricting to him and
his two brothers, Max, 1838-1911, and Anton, 1841-1906, who would also gain great prominence
as a German Liberal Member of Parliament and as a socialist university teacher, to the
extent that all three of them later distanced themselves from the Church in a drastic way,
with Anton even becoming an avowed atheist. There is no proof that the Menger brothers
were of Jewish descent, and in light of the above, it is extremely unlikely.
The scant biographical records passed down indicate a childhood overshadowed by extensive
of Misfortune and Suffering. Carl lost four siblings. In 1848 he lost his father as well.
Durth and hardship were the consequences. The fatherless child grew up partly in Biawa
and partly on his grandparents' remote country estate in the Dunajec River Valley, an area
flooded today by the Jezioro Ciorcienskiy Reservoir. It was there that he acquired his
Carl's firm knowledge of the Polish language, which he would later need as a journalist
in Lemberg.
After changing school several times, Carl graduated from high school in Krakow and in
the fall of 1859 began studying law in Vienna, often in poor health and in difficult financial
circumstances. He completed further studies in the more tranquil Prague. Traces of his
as economics teachers during that time, Leopold Hasner von Ata and Peter Mischler, 1824-1864,
can be found now and again in his first work, the Grundsätze der Volkswirtschaftslehre,
1871, Principles of Economics. Fundamentally, however, there was a great distance between
Menger and Mischler with his insistent and antiquated piety. Even as a student, Carl
Carl Menger displayed a trait that would be often evident later on. He had an assertive,
sometimes aggressive character, and was not readily prepared to back away from authority.
Two vehement arguments with professors from his time in Prague are well known. In the
course of his habilitación, he did not shy away from causing a veritable scene when challenging
In 1867 Menger obtained his doctorate of law at the University of Krakow. During the time
After some of his study, he earned his living as a journalist in Nuremberg, as co-founder
of the Wiener Tagblatt, as an editorial journalist of the Wiener Zeitung and as the author of
a serialized novel. After obtaining his doctorate, he worked for a short time in an attorney's
office and then once again as a freelance journalist for various newspapers in Vienna.
In September of 1867, he began the preliminary work on what would later be his principles.
Until 1875 he was a contributor at the press office of the Ministerratspräsidium, Ministerial
Council's chair. Menger succeeded in obtaining his Habitierung for Political Economy at
the University of Vienna in June of 1872 after his principles were published. Just a year
later he received a non-tenured professorship. He declined subsequent offers from Karlsruhe,
Basel and Zurich. In 1876 he was appointed teacher of Crown Prince Rudolf, 1858-1889,
and accompanied him in 1877 and 1878 on his travels across Europe.
Menger imparted the Crown Prince, who was as highly gifted as he was erratic, with a
liberal appreciation of economics and a great sensitivity for social problems. In 1878 he
He assisted Rudolph in writing an anonymous publication wherein the Austrian aristocracy
was reprehended for being passive politically and inept economically. Menger eventually
gave up his own aristocratic title which he had used in 1867 for book signing. The reason
for this was possibly not only civic pride but because of the impossibility of proving
Finding the origin of the title unequivocally, as is often the case with Galician aristocratic
titles.
After attaining his full professorship in 1879, Menger began training young academics,
thereby creating personnel resources for the future Austrian school. He assisted with a
total of thirteen habilitationen and was involved in five further habilitationen in related
subject areas. Menger was considered an excellent, conscientious and stimulating teacher who possessed
the didactic talent to combine simplicity and clarity with philosophical depth. He sought
to emphasise the practical relevancy of his lectures with the help of the latest numerical
data. If students showed interest, he readily made his private library available to them,
debated with them patiently, ever so often invited them to Sunday outings, and made efforts
to introduce younger students to former members of his seminar. He maintained lifelong friendships
with many of them, to which the almost complete collection of their books and special editions
in his library testifies. On committee's menger was neither a leader nor a follower.
It seems he was able to make an impression with his generally complex and analytically
astute contributions, but was by no means always able to persuade. He remained just
He focused as much in the minority with his suggestions regarding university reform as
he did on the Inquiry Commission on Currency for the preparation of a currency reform,
in which he, as one of thirty-seven experts, delivered a well-heeded statement. In 1903
he found himself in a minority position again when he, as a member of the Inquiry Commission
on Housing Tax, voiced his scepticism about the State and criticised social affairs. Perhaps
Perhaps this was one of the reasons why Menger, who from 1900 on was a member of the Herrenhaus,
did not take part in the debates there. The Herrenhaus is the House of Lords of the Austrian
Parliament. In the 1890s, after the re-publication of
his principles had been postponed yet again, Menger began once more to pursue extensive
studies in adjacent subject areas. He devoted himself to biology, physiology, mathematics
and Ethnology, which resulted in his adding about 1,100 books on ethnology, anthropology
and various research expeditions to his library. As he unexpectedly took an early retirement,
the aim of these endeavours, his plan to publish a work on sociology, was never achieved. A
fateful turn had led to a considerable change in Menger's life. His affair with the Galician-born
German feature writer Hermine Andermann, 1869-1924, twenty-nine years his junior, had produced
an illegitimate son, the future mathematician Carl Menger, 1902-1985. Social conventions
forced him to go into early retirement in 1903 and subsequently to withdraw to a great
extent from public life. Menger, now well advanced in years, remained committed to his
and Marriage.
He lived with his family at Fuchsthaler Gasse 12 in the 9th Municipal District of Vienna
until his death on February 26, 1921.
He was surrounded by his books, which in the end constituted a library of 25,000 volumes.
His own publications were now only sporadic.
He kept in frequent touch with his students well into old age, as if they wished to demonstrate
With the esprit de corps of the school with this true Viennese secret, which everyone
in Vienna knew but did not talk about in public, his students adhered adamantly to the version
of his taking voluntary retirement for the sake of further studies.