Selfish, Therefore Reciprocal: The Second Marginal Revolution of Mises

Akihiko Murai (a.murai@aist.go.jp)
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Akihiko Murai: Kansai University

A chapter in A Genealogy of Self-Interest in Economics, 2021, pp 167-188 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract Selfishness in economics seems to appear typically in utility-valuation theory of consumer. But it is not the case. While British moral philosophers sought to mitigate it with conscience, no integration was achieved. In the Marginal Revolution, the unconscious and passive acceptance of saturation kept the selfish agent from realizing his aim, as he made to consume undefined amount of goods at whose last unit he stops consuming for the advent of saturation, where Gossen’s second law of equal marginal utility holds. Only Menger, however, denied such an exchange. Departing from his cardinal guise, Mises improved the theory dissociating selfishness from saturation, which a rational agent should deny. Rothbard formulated this alternative as the relevant unit of defined amount of goods. When one makes exchange according to this principle, selfishness will bring reciprocity. Thus, long-awaited integration of selfishness with societal benefit is established. Morgenstern, on the other hand, took a path to re-cardinalize the theory relying on the equivalent exchange scheme and substituted utility of money for that of goods. But the validity of his Expected Utility Theory is dubious and the Misesian purely ordinal theory seems quite justifiable even now.

Keywords: Theoretical historiography; Hobbesian paradigm; Praxeology; Relevant-unit marginality; Saturationism; Bird-eye assessment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
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DOI: 10.1007/978-981-15-9395-6_10

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