Publisher's Synopsis
In this work of intellectual history, Max Alter places Menger in his proper intellectual setting - the romanticism/historicism of 19th-century German thought. Menger emerges as an economic theorist whose theoretical work is tied to 19th-century German political economy in a way that his later interpreters never realized. The resulting reassessment leaves Menger's status as a pioneer of neo-classical economies secure and it illuminates the important differences among Menger, Walras, and Jevons. But it challenges the accepted notion that Austrian economics developed relatively continuously from 1871 onward. By laying bare the foundations of Menger's thought. Alter makes clear just how far the Austrian school has departed from the inspiration of its founder.
