It Is Seldom Recognized that by 1888 Menger Had Changed His View on Capital Theory; He Turned Against All Capital Theories, Including His Own, If They Disregarded the Everyday Language Use of “Capital”

Carl Menger changed his point of view on capital theory considerably between 1871 and 1888 (Schumpeter 1997, p. 187; Braun 2014). He did not discuss capital very deeply in his Principles (Stigler 1937, p. 248), but to the extent he did, he advocated a capital theory that is concerned with production. His capital theory was connected to his vision of the production process as divided into several successive stages, where consumer goods result from the successive processing of combinations of higher-order goods to lower-order goods. Menger (1871, p. 155) says that one possesses capital if one “already has command of quantities of economic goods of higher order … in the present for future periods of time.” By adding this aspect to production theory and associating it with capital theory, he laid the groundwork for Austrian capital theory as developed by Böhm-Bawerk (1930), Friedrich von Hayek (1941), and Ludwig Lachmann (1978).

It is seldom recognized that by 1888 Menger had changed his view. In a long article on the subject — Zur Theorie des Kapitals (A Contribution to the theory of capital) — Menger proposed a radically different vision of the scope of capital theory. Streissler (2008, p. 371) is of the opinion that, by writing his article, Menger only made a prepublication attempt to refute the theory of Böhm-Bawerk. However, it seems more probable that Menger turned against all capital theories — including his own one — which have been developed by economists in disregard of everyday language use and established business practices. At the very outset, he declares that it is

a mistake that cannot be disapproved of enough when a science … denotes completely new concepts by words that, in common parlance, already describe a fundamentally different category of phenomena — a category that is also important for the respective discipline — correctly and properly (Menger 1888, 2).

It could be suggested that he was referring mainly to Böhm-Bawerk’s theory in this quote. However, there is every indication that Menger also implicitly revoked his earlier point of view. For the common parlance concept of capital is not identical with his own one from the Principles at all. In Menger’s (1888, p. 37; emphasis added) words, the common parlance view has nothing to do with the production process or the different orders of goods:

When businessmen and lawyers speak about capital, they do mean neither raw materials, nor auxiliary materials, nor articles of commerce, machines, buildings and other goods like this. Wherever the terminology of the Smithian school has not already penetrated common parlance, only sums of money are denoted by the above word.

He hastens to add that capital only embraces sums of money that are dedicated to the acquisition of income, and that “sums of money” not only refers to plain money, but to the monetary value of all kinds of business assets in economic calculation.

Menger thus switched sides in a debate that seems to be as old as economics itself. Does the term “capital” refer to a production factor or does it refer to the organization of the market economy by calculating entrepreneurs who maximize the monetary yield on their financial capital? At a first glance, the distinction between these two viewpoints does not seem to create a great problem. . . . the two sides of the term capital do not fit together harmoniously; rather they roughly correspond to the two sides of the Methodenstreit between the Austrian and the Historical school of economics. Menger’s earlier concept was elaborated to Austrian capital theory, whereas his concept of 1888 turns out to be the one endorsed by the Historical school.

--Eduard Braun, “Unsuspected Origins of Modern Austrian Economics: The Historical School of Economics on Capital and Economic Calculation,” in The Next Generation of Austrian Economics: Essays in Honor of Joseph T. Salerno, ed. Per Bylund and David Howden (Auburn, AL: Mises Institute, 2015), 76-78.