The Austrian Economists and the Late Hapsburg Viennese Milieu

L udwig von Mises observed, "It is customary to trace the influence that the milieu exerted upon the achievements of genius" (1969, p. 9). He goes on to suggest that, whatever the general merit of the custom, it is unsound when applied to the great thinkers of Austria. Not heeding Mises' warning, eminent philosopher and historian of science Stephen Toulmin, along with his coauthor Allan Janik, argues in Wittgenstein's Vienna that late Hapsburg Viennese intellectuals had strikingly similar philosophical backgrounds, problem sets, and ethical outlooks. The book is in part an attempt to isolate the "general philosophical framework which was the common possession of musicians, writers, lawyers and thinkers of all kinds" and to focus on "the common themes and problems . . . of writers, thinkers and artists in all fields" (pp. 29 and 30). In this article, I shall argue that there was greater diversity in the problems and philosophical backgrounds of Viennese intellectuals than Wittgenstein's Vienna suggests. Since we are to deal with a claim that applies to intellectuals in "all fields," it will be profitable to examine a field that in Wittgenstein's Vienna is disposed of in one sentence: economics. The one sentence states that: "Menger's Marginal Utility Theory—so characteristically Viennese in its emphasis upon the psychological and subjective factors which underlie value—is still a central tenet of many modern economists" (p. 53). That economics was more significant in the intellectual life of Vienna than the space devoted to it by Toulmin and Janik would indicate is attested to by historian Arthur May: "In no sphere of thought were Austrians more conspicuous than in economics" (1951, p. 318). This article will be divided into three sections. In the first, I shall seek to learn whether we find in the Austrian economists a further instance of the dominance in Vienna of Kantianism. The second section will deal with the Austrian theory of marginal utility in order to discover whether it is in fact connected more to subjectivist ethics (associated with Tolstoy and Kierke-