EconomistaAustriaco on Nostr: Carl Menger published Grundsätze der Volkswirtschaftslehre in 1871, and the entire ...

Carl Menger published Grundsätze der Volkswirtschaftslehre in 1871, and the entire edifice of mainstream economics cracked. No committees. No government grant. One Viennese professor working alone, insisting that value originates in the human mind, not in the hours of labor poured into production. Marx had built his entire system on labor-value theory that same decade. Menger showed it was wrong.

The German Historical School, which then dominated European economics, had rejected universal economic laws entirely. They believed every nation needed its own bespoke theory. Menger told them, politely then less politely, that this was nonsense.

What followed, the Methodenstreit of the 1880s, was a genuine intellectual war. Menger's student Böhm-Bawerk would later dismantle Marx's capital theory so thoroughly that serious socialist economists spent decades trying to patch the holes. You get to inherit that victory for free. The least you can do is understand where it started: one book, one man, 1871.