Menger the Revolutionary "There never lived at the same time,"
wrote Ludwig von Mises, "more than a score of men whose work
contributed anything essential to economics." One of those men
was Carl Menger (1840–1921), Professor of Political Economy at
the Menger's path-breaking Grundsätze der Volkswirtschaftslehre
[Principles of Economics], published in 1871, not only
introduced the concept of marginal analysis, it presented a
radically new approach to economic analysis, one that still
forms the core of the Austrian theory of value and price. Unlike
his contemporaries William Stanley Jevons and Léon Walras, who
independently developed concepts of marginal utility during the
1870s, Menger favored an approach that was deductive,
teleological, and, in a fundamental sense, humanistic. While
Menger shared his contemporaries' preference for abstract
reasoning, he was primarily interested in explaining the real-
world actions of real people, not in creating artificial,
stylized representations of reality. Economics, fo