Menger’s Aristotelianism[Carl Menger and Homo Oeconomics: some thoughts on Austrian theory and methodology]

How to do economics was one of Menger’s primary interests, his point of view being distinctly Aristotelian, differing in this aspect greatly from his immediate successors, such as Wieser and Böhm-Bawerk, and also from later Austrian economists. Menger’s Aristotelian realism (or classical realism) ran against the nominalist trend of his own and subsequent time, but it may have a more sympathetic hearing now, with remarkable parallels between Aristotelian essentialism and the thesis of theory-laden facts, associated with Rorty, Feyerabend and others. The most important aspect of his Aristotelian realism was his belief that economic theory had to be abstracted from the phenomena by a rational grasp of economic phenomenal forms, Menger explicitly stating that he was not dealing with deductions from a priori axioms. Instead, he was eager to promote what he called exact science. The pursuit of exact science is simply a certain way of treating any subject matter whatever it may be, a certain direction of cognitive endeavour. An exact law provides a theoretical understanding of only one aspect of actual phenomena and neither can be nor need be verified by full empirical actuality. One can still find significance in our time in Menger’s ideas on how to do economics.