The archive.

What happens to marginal-utility calculation if people pursue ends other than their own well-being? In this 1961 editorial introduction, Emil Kauder finds that unresolved question in Carl Menger’s annotated copy of the Grundsätze, preserved at Hitotsubashi University. He reads its unfinished additions as evidence of a phase of Menger’s thinking not adequately represented by the posthumous 1923 edition. His account brings value-free economic theory into contact with Menger’s concern for the moral conditions of economic agency, without turning tentative reflections into a completed system. Kauder also explains how interleaved pages, pasted sheets and nested marginal notes were made readable. The result offers both a less settled picture of Menger’s economics and a concrete account of the editorial decisions on which that picture depends.

How can economic conduct obey regular laws if individuals are free—and what does freedom mean for people constrained by poverty? Emil Kauder finds these tensions in Carl Menger’s annotations and unfinished revisions, preserved in his library at Hitotsubashi University. This research report reads those materials against the published economist’s more settled positions. Kauder reconstructs a liberalism that accommodates social reform without abandoning private production, and an economic theory whose formation involved repeated revisions rather than a single breakthrough. His archival perspective also brings less familiar intellectual debts into view. Attentive to missing documents and incomplete arguments, the report lets readers distinguish Menger’s exploratory thinking from his published conclusions—and see why analytical individualism need not entail an unconditional defence of laissez-faire.

The annotated books Menger left at his death—his own Grundsätze, his copy of Rau, his Mill—traveled to Tokyo, where they entered the library of Hitotsubashi University and preserved a Menger the published works conceal. From these marginalia Kauder reconstructs an Aristotelian realist rather than a Kantian, a theorist of rational freedom, and a social liberal far from Manchester dogma. The Rau notes of 1867 already reject labor value, assert individual and immeasurable value, and sketch imputation, dismantling the charge that Menger plagiarized Gossen, whom he read only later and rejected. Menger emerges as a critic of luxury and aristocratic idleness who treated poverty itself as a form of bondage, and whose unfinished program—reaching into capital, money, overproduction, and price—passed to Böhm-Bawerk, Wieser, Mises, and Hayek. The Nachlass, Kauder insists, bequeathed far more than a value theory.

Aber die Armen sind durch die Ungunst der Verhältnisse bedrückt, sie sind noch nicht vollständig frei, sie sind »halbe Sklaven, ihre Kette ist länger«.

English translation: “But the poor are oppressed by the adversity of circumstances; they are not yet fully free, they are "half-slaves, their chain is only longer.”

Value is not lodged in goods, in labor, or in cost—it is the significance of a marginal satisfaction within an ordered plan of wants. That claim anchors Kauder's sweeping history, first published in 1965, which recovers marginal utility as a long and uneven effort rather than a sudden revolution of the 1870s. Its prehistory runs from Aristotle's value-in-use through the scholastics, Galiani, Turgot, and Condillac, past Bernoulli's mathematics of risk to Gossen's neglected system of diminishing and equalized utility. Menger, Jevons, and Walras succeed less by class interest than by the internal breakdown of classical value theory—and Menger sharpens the doctrine into its purest causal form. The later Austrians—Böhm-Bawerk, Wieser, Mayer, Mises, Morgenstern—then extend it to cost, imputation, complementarity, and uncertainty, exposing as much as they resolve.

The architects of marginal utility took their building stones from philosophy, psychology, religion, mathematics, and morals.

Labor-market statistics and the recognition of trade unions belong to the same scholarly portrait in Emil Kauder’s brief Neue Deutsche Biographie entry on Ignaz Jastrow. Kauder emphasizes how this historically trained economist joined empirical inquiry to social reform: measuring labor supply, demand, and food costs while seeking to place social policy within administrative science. His assessment gives particular interest to Jastrow’s unfinished project and identifies his economic reporting as a precursor of business-cycle reporting. Yet Kauder reserves his highest praise for Jastrow’s late world history. The entry offers a compact account of the practical commitments and historical breadth by which Kauder judges this scholar’s achievement.