Principles of Economics by Carl Menger
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TRANSLATORS’
PREFACE
TO ANYONE BARELY
ACQUAINTED with the development of present-day economic theory we
need hardly explain why we undertook the task of translating Carl
Menger’s Grundsätze der Volkwirthschaftslehre. In this
work Menger first stated the central propositions that were to form the
theoretical core around which the economics of the Austrian School
developed. His work served as the basic text of successive generations
of Austrian students and scholars. That economists in Sweden and Italy
found direct inspiration in the Grundsätze (both in the
original German and in translation) goes some distance, moreover,
toward explaining the excellence of economic theorizing in these two
countries. But English-speaking economists were not so fortunate in
this respect. Relying upon second-hand expositions of Menger’s ideas,
and lacking direct contact with his treatise in a language that could
be read by more than a few, they failed to obtain the full benefit of
his innovations. From the vantage point of the present day, this fact
must be regretted. Menger’s chief contribution to economics was his
statement of marginal utility theory and his integration of it into
value and price theory, and it is readily granted that this function
was performed in England largely by the works of Jevons and Marshall.
But some of the blind spots of English economics might have been
avoided if Menger’s treatment of bilateral monopoly, of the relation of
monopoly to competition, and of the marketability of commodities as a
foundation for the theory of money had been easily available to
English-speaking scholars. As it was, imperfect competition and the
role of liquidity in monetary theory became explicit theoretical
concerns of English-speaking writers only in the 1930’s.
The fact that the Grundsätze has remained untranslated
into English for almost 80 years must therefore be considered a
mystery. While we are unable to offer a complete solution to this
mystery, we nevertheless feel (and most acutely!) that we have earned
the right to offer at least a partial solution. For Menger’s book is
more than normally difficult to translate, and it seems possible, to us
at any rate, that this fact may well have discouraged earlier attempts
to translate it.
The difficulties we have encountered may be attributed in part to the
fact that Menger was a pioneer attempting to express ideas and concepts
for which he could find no exact words in the German economic
literature of his day. He therefore coined a considerable number of new
expressions, many of which have been superseded by more modern
terms—this is not to imply that his ideas had only a transitory
influence, but merely that a more apt terminology for their expression
was later devised. In a number of instances these expressions were
untranslatable compounds or words for which no exact English
equivalents exist. A more serious difficulty was the fact that Menger’s
style is unusually cumbersome, even for German. His constructions form
complicated patterns of clauses within clauses; they are filled with
pronominal referents to these clauses; and they abound in
agglomerations of adverbial fillers. Many of his sentences run half a
page or more and expound several independent thoughts which, due to the
tight grammatical fusion, can be separated by a translator only with
the expenditure of much effort and ingenuity. It is suggested that
these peculiarities of Menger’s style may in part be attributed to his
exposure to the heavy officialese current in his day among Austrian
civil servants.
The translation presented here is a complete rendering of the first
edition of the Grundsätze which was published in Vienna in
1871. A second German edition was published in Vienna in 1923, two
years after Menger’s death. We rejected the possibility of a variorum
translation because it was the first edition only that influenced the
development of economic doctrine, because of the posthumous character
of the second edition, and because the numerous differences between the
two editions make a variorum translation impractical.
While our translation is complete, we have eliminated Menger’s
excessively long footnotes (several of which occupy from three to five
pages each) by transferring the material of these notes either to
appendices or to the text itself. All such transfers have been
indicated in notes at the appropriate points. In general, we have
placed footnotes of a bibliographical character in appendices, and have
placed in the text only material that is really an integral part of it.
There were no appendices in the original. The titles of the appendices
have been supplied by us.
Menger’s bibliographical references and citations posed a special
problem. In his time, not only was there no standardized method of
giving citations, but a quite general spirit of carelessness prevailed.
Menger was neither more nor less guilty in this respect than the bulk
of his contemporaries. If we had given his citations without
verification and without change, they would have been unreliable and to
some extent useless. Moreover, the editions of standard authors used by
Menger are now, in many instances, unavailable or extremely scarce. We
have checked all citations and references, and were successful in
verifying all but some half dozen which we have noted as they occur. We
have substituted references to modern standard editions for all
references given by Menger to inaccessible editions. Thus all
references to Adam Smith, Ricardo, and Roscher are given in terms of
the Modern Library edition of the Wealth of Nations, the Gonner
edition of Ricardo’s Principles, and the twentieth edition of
Roscher’s System.
Another problem was posed by the fact that Menger gives verbatim
quotations from other writers in several different languages,
principally German, French, and Latin. We have preferred to leave these
quotations in the original languages in which they were given, but have
supplied English translations in footnotes whenever it appeared that a
translation might prove helpful.
Translators’ footnotes have all been labeled as such in order to avoid
any possible confusion between Menger’s notes and our own. We have
attempted to keep our own notes to a minimum. Most of them record the
transfers already mentioned of material from the overlong footnotes of
the original to appendices or to the text, or explain the translations
we have given to especially troublesome words. In only a few instances
have we taken the liberty of commenting upon the text, and in these
instances we did so because we felt that some obscurity could thereby
be eliminated.
We have prepared an index which we hope may prove useful. Although we
have in general used Menger’s terms in the selection of entry headings,
there were a number of instances in which we felt that strict adherence
to this rule would unduly limit the usefulness of the index to
present-day readers. We do not, therefore, necessarily represent any
index heading as a term used by Menger himself.
We wish to thank Professor Frank H. Knight for his introduction to our
translation and Professor Friedrich A. von Hayek for his constant
encouragement. We are indebted to Mrs. Edna Dombrovsky, Mr. E.L.
Pattullo, and Miss Elizabeth Sterenberg for the typing of the
manuscript, to Miss Elizabeth Sterenberg in addition for her assistance
in the location of references, and to the Social Science Research
Committee of the University of Chicago for a grant to finance the
typing of the manuscript.
James Dingwall
Bert F. Hoselitz
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