Commentary on Menger’s ‘Austrian Marginalism and Mathematical Economics’

This essay, one of Karl Menger’s last papers, written in much the same style and spirit as his ‘Reminiscences’ (Menger, 1994), may be viewed as a return to his roots. It is a somewhat expanded version of a paper he had published in the ‘Zeitschrift für Nationalökonomie’ (Menger, 1972), after having spent a sabbatical in Vienna at his friend Oskar Morgenstern’s ‘Institut für höhere Studien’. The fact of finding himself back in Vienna and together with Morgenstern, some three decades after the political upheaval which had driven them both away, must have evoked poignant memories. In his paper, Menger not only offers a fascinating glimpse at some of the finest achievements of his ‘Mathematisches Kolloquium’, the group of highly gifted young mathematicians who had met under his guidance, but also analyses some aspects of the work of the school founded by his father Carl Menger. Anyone born into Freud’s Vienna cannot fail to be sensitive to the tensions of such a return to the sources, and in fact Menger strikes an appropriate note by quoting, right at the start, Goethe’s dictum that ‘two souls reside within my breast’. But after that briefest of subjective confidences, the utmost objectivity is summoned forth throughout the paper.