Carl Menger, Author of a Research Programme

Abstract

In the development of the science of economics, two periods of major importance can be distinguished — the middle of the eighteenth century and the last 30 years of the nineteenth century. In the former period, the heyday of the Enlightenment, it was recognised that the domain of production, distribution and market exchange should be studied as an important aspect of the social order. In that short period the foundations were laid for a more or less autonomous science of economics. It took about a century, however, to establish economics as a separate science with its own institutions: its own departments in the universities, its own language, its own journals, its own congresses, its own standards to distinguish the initiates from the laymen. That tour de force was accomplished in the last three decades of the nineteenth century. It was the introduction of marginalism that gave economics its special modern flavour. Carl Menger can justly be seen as one of the founding fathers of economics in its twentieth‐century garb.

Citation

Zuidema, J.R. (1988), "Carl Menger, Author of a Research Programme", Journal of Economic Studies, Vol. 15 No. 3/4, pp. 13-35. https://doi.org/10.1108/eb002668