Biography
Carl Menger von Wolfensgrün was born in the city of Neu-Sandez in Galicia, Austrian Empire, which is now Nowy Sącz in Poland. He was the son of a wealthy race of minor nobility; his father, Anton Menger, was a lawyer. His mother, Caroline Gerżabek, was the daughter of a wealthy Bohemian merchant. He had two brothers, Anton and Max, both prominent as lawyers. His son, Karl Menger, was a mathematician who taught for numerous years at Illinois Institute of Technology.
After attending Gymnasium he studied law at the Universities of Prague and Vienna and later received a doctorate in jurisprudence from the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. In the 1860s Menger left school and enjoyed a stint as a journalist reporting and analyzing market news, number one at the Lemberger Zeitung in Lemberg, Austrian Galicia now Lviv, Ukraine and later at the Wiener Zeitung in Vienna.
During the course of his newspaper develope he noticed a discrepancy between what the classical economics he was taught in school said about price determination and what real world market participants believed. In 1867 Menger began a explore of political economy which culminated in 1871 with the publication of his Principles of Economics Grundsätze der Volkswirtschaftslehre, thus becoming the father of the Austrian School of economic thought. It was in this do that he challenged classical cost-based theories of improvement with his theory of marginality – that price is determined at the margin.
In 1872 Menger was enrolled into the law faculty at the University of Vienna and spent the next several years teaching finance and political economy both in seminars and lectures to a growing number of students. In 1873 he received the university's chair of economic theory at the very young age of 33.
In 1876 Menger began tutoring Archduke Rudolf von Habsburg, the Crown Prince of Austria in political economy and statistics. For two years Menger accompanied the prince in his travels, first through continental Europe and then later through the British Isles. He is also thought to have assisted the crown prince in the composition of a pamphlet, published anonymously in 1878, which was highly critical of the higher Austrian aristocracy. His connection with the prince would last until Rudolf's suicide in 1889.
In 1878 Rudolf's father, Emperor Franz Josef, appointed Menger to the chair of political economy at Vienna. The tag of Hofrat was conferred on him, and he was appointed to the Austrian Herrenhaus in 1900.
Ensconced in his professorship, he shape about refining and defending the positions he took and methods he utilized in Principles, the result of which was the 1883 publication of Investigations into the Method of the Social Sciences with Special credit to Economics Untersuchungen über die Methode der Socialwissenschaften und der politischen Oekonomie insbesondere. The book caused a firestorm of debate, during which members of the Historical school of economics began to derisively so-called Menger and his students the "Austrian School" to emphasize their departure from mainstream German economic thought – the term was specifically used in an unfavorable review by Gustav von Schmoller.
In 1884 Menger responded with the pamphlet The Errors of Historicism in German Economics and launched the infamous Methodenstreit, or methodological debate, between the Historical School and the Austrian School. During this time Menger began to attract like-minded disciples who would go on to make their own mark on the field of economics, near notably Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, and Friedrich von Wieser.
In the late 1880s Menger was appointed to head a commission to reshape the Austrian monetary system. Over the course of the next decade he authored a plethora of articles which would revolutionize monetary theory, including "The Theory of Capital" 1888 and "Money" 1892. Largely due to his pessimism approximately the state of German scholarship, Menger resigned his professorship in 1903 to concentrate on study.