This paper examines how some of the main exponents of the Austrian school of economics addressed the issues related to the measurability of utility. The first part is devoted to the period before World War I. During this period, Menger and Wieser treated de facto utilities as if they were...

Carl Menger’s Principles of Economics, published in 1871, is usually regarded as the founding document of the Austrian School of economics. Many of the School’s prominent representatives, including Friedrich Wieser, Eugen Böhm-Bawerk, Ludwig Mises, Hans Mayer, Friedrich August Hayek, Fritz...

Critical reflection concerning the tension existing between developing the body of economic knowledge in the image of mathematics led to discovering a double epistemological rupture in developing economic theory. The first, in the mid nineteenth century, recognised mathematics as being the...

This essay is a response to five essays that collectively constituted a symposium sponsored by Studies in Emergent Order on my 2010 book, Mind, Society, and Human Action: Time and Knowledge in a Theory of Social Economy. This essay offers individual reactions to each of the five contributors...

This paper constitutes the start of a project dedicated to Austrian economist and economic sociologist Friedrich von Wieser (1851-1926). Its central claim is that especially in recent decades, Wieser has become a disproportionately underresearched scholar, and the paper provides a set of...

Although Cournot's mathematical economics was generally neglected until the mid- 1870s, he was taken up and carefully studied by the Scientific Club of Cambridge, Massachusetts even before his "discovery" by Walras and Jevons. The episode is reconstructed from fragmentary manuscripts of the...

Paolo Sylos Labini's Oligopoly Theory and Technical Progress (1957) is considered one of the major contributions to entry-prevention models, especially after Franco Modigliani's famous formalization. Nonetheless, Modigliani neglected Sylos Labini's major aim when reviewing his work (1958),...

Max Weber's relationship to economics in general and to the Austrian School in particular has received more attention recently. However, this literature as conducted by Weber scholars and by Austrian economists exhibits two major deficiencies. First, the studies are often either purely...

The article investigates Wicksell's change of mind about the machinery question between 1890 and 1900/1901. Wicksell at first sided with the so-called "compensation theory" that workers are not harmed by the introduction of machinery. In his lecture notes of April 1900, made available here for...

Ronald Coase merged two traditions in economics, marginalism and institutionalism. Neoclassical economics in the 1930s was characterized by an abstract conception of marginalism and frictionless resource movement. Marginal analysis did not seek to uncover the source of individual human...