Carl Menger

Carl Menger was a Viennese journalist-turned-economist whose 1871 *Principles of Economics* launched the marginalist revolution and, with it, the school that bears his city's name. Working in parallel with William Stanley Jevons in Britain and Léon Walras in Switzerland, Menger broke decisively with the classical labour-theory of value and replaced it with the subjective-marginalist theory that still anchors mainstream price theory today.

What set Menger apart from his fellow marginalists was the methodological depth of his argument. Where Walras went mathematical, Menger went philosophical: value lives in the minds of acting individuals, not in mathematical aggregates. This insight — and his subsequent *Methodenstreit* (method dispute) with the German Historical School — established the methodological commitments that the Austrian tradition would carry forward through Mises, Hayek, and beyond.

“Value is therefore nothing inherent in goods, no property of them, nor an independent thing existing by itself.”

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