The Modernity of Carl Menger: Austrian Economics and Complexity Economics

Sandye Gloria

A chapter in Research in the History of Economic Thought and Methodology: Including A Symposium on Carl Menger at the Centenary of His Death, 2021, vol. 39B, pp 57-73 from Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Abstract: The objective of this paper is to show the modernity of the approach developed by Carl Menger. The author argues that the Mengerian approach is part of a conceptual pattern composed of four interdependent, hierarchical and coherent parts (ontology, epistemology, methodology and key concepts) and that this conceptual pattern in all its originality and consistency fits perfectly within the approach of complexity. Ontologically (Section 1), the starting point is different from that of Léon Walras and William Stanley Jevons, the economy being apprehended as an open system; from an epistemological point of view (Section 2), Menger adopts a distinct conception of what constitutes a good scientific explanation, which contrasts with the Walrasian conception; methodologically (Section 3), his rejection of mathematics can therefore be understood as a consequence of his ontological and epistemological position: it is not mathematics as such that the author rejects but the functionalist tools then available, which are not adapted to his conception of economic reality; and finally the key concept (Section 4) of the author’s analysis is not that of equilibrium but an analysis of theprocessof exchange and production, with the emphasis placed on the emergence of organic phenomena.

Keywords: Menger; complexity economics; generativism; emergence; genetic-causal explanation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eme:rhetzz:s0743-41542021000039b005

DOI: 10.1108/S0743-41542021000039B005

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