The first English translation of Carl Menger’s masterpiece, one of the key pillars of the marginal revolution alongside Jevons and Walras, and the fountainhead of the methodological individualism of the Austrian school of economics - an unusually difficult book to find in any kind of acceptable condition.
Menger’s Principles of Economics ‘sets forth the views of one of the pioneers of the use of psychological concepts to explain the nature and determinations of value’ (Batson). It was ‘the work on which his fame mainly rests. It provided a more thorough account of the relations between utility, value, and price than is found in any of the works by Jevons and Walras, who at about the same time laid the foundation of the ‘marginal revolution’ in economics’ (Friedrich von Hayek in IESS).
Menger was distinct from Jevons and Walras in terms of the emphasis placed on mathematics their works. ‘Menger saw mathematics as a method for illustration and representation, for exposition and demonstration at best, not as a heuristic or research tool. Therefore, if any economic law could be ‘clothed’ in formulas and expressed through graphics, its usefulness still stopped short of affecting the essence of conceptual research. Menger rejected equilibrium-oriented marginalism, be it Jevons’s partial equilibrium or Walras’s general equilibrium. Nowadays, such a gap still exists between Austrians and the so-called ‘mainstream’, despite the widespread use of differentials to mimic dynamics in equations’ (History of Economic Analysis).
The present English translation presents the complete translation of the original 1871 edition, rather than the posthumously-published second edition of 1932, and the translators Dingwall and Hoselitz ‘rejected the possibility of a variorum translation because it was the first edition only that influenced the development of economic doctrine’ (Preface, p. 39).
