The Austrian Economists

Abstract

IT has recently become generally known to English students of economics that a school of writers existed in Austria, who strenuously opposed the more extreme views of the German historical school, and devoted their attention to the study and improvement of economic theory. By enabling a larger number of English students to acquaint themselves with the writings of the Austrian economists, Mr. Smart, who is Lecturer on Political Economy in Queen Margaret College, Glasgow, has conferred on them no inconsiderable service. He has already translated the acute and instructive, though difficult and perhaps excessively polemical, treatises of Dr. Böhm Bawerk, on the nature of capital and of interest; and now, in the little volume before us, he introduces us to a theory of value “on the lines of Menger, Wieser, and Böhm Bawerk.” The theory, he states in his preface, “is that enunciated by Menger and Jevons, and worked out by Wieser and Böhm Bawerk.” It claims to give a more adequate explanation of value than that formerly supplied in economic treatises. It approaches the problem from the side of demand, rather than, like Ricardo and his followers, from that of supply. It declares that “value depends entirely on utility,” and that the kind of utility, which is all-important in determining value, is “marginal utility.” This conception, which may be found in the pages of Jevons' “Theory,” under the title of “final utility,” has certainly proved in his hands and in those of his English successors, and his Continental forerunners like Gossen, and contemporaries like Walras, to be a very suggestive and fruitful conception; and its discovery and exposition may be fairly said to have revolutionized one side of the problem of value—which is the central problem, so to say, of economic study. The conception is more fully elaborated and more scientifically expounded by the distinguished writers who compose the Austrian school, and Mr. Smart traces the outlines of their theory with care and lucidity.

An Introduction to the Theory of Value.

By William Smart. (London: Macmillan and Co., 1891.)