Mengerian Microeconomics: The Forgotten Anglo-American Contribution to the Austrian School

“This is not the book on the Economics of Menger, Bohm-Bawerk, Mises, Hayek and Schumpeter, the creators of this school of thought. Instead, it offers us an analysis of their mainly American followers, such as Fetter, Wicksteed, Clark and Knight. As such, it makes a unique contribution. Jankovic brings a fresh voice and a very erudite one to this task. I have been an Austrian economist for over 50 years, now, and thought I knew all about this subject. I did not.”
–-Walter Block –- Professor of Economics Loyola University, New Orleans.

“Ivan Jankovic has written a careful scholarly examination of the Psychological school of early neoclassical economics, which built upon the ideas of Carl Menger and Eugen Bohm-Bawerk to further develop and refine theoretical concepts from marginal utility, opportunity cost, marginal productivity of factor pricing, and applied these ideas to develop bold theory of the market process of price formation through bargaining, and the role of entrepreneur in the operation of a market society. The names of economists such as Davenport, Clark, and Fetter are too often forgotten in the economics literature today. Jankovic's work is a useful corrective to that error."

–- Peter Boettke –- Professor of Economics, George Mason University.

This book explores the neglected contribution of the American and English “psychological” school to economic theory, especially to the development and refinement of the Austrian school of economics. It argues that Frank Knight, Frank Fetter, Herbert Davenport, Philip Wicksteed and J.B. Clark among others improved on the original Austrian theory by Menger and Bohm-Bawerk by providing a coherent subjectivist foundation for the theories of production and distribution. They succeeded where economic theory before them failed – to develop the theories of interest, profit, wages and rents based solely on the principles of subjective value and marginal utility, eschewing the last remnants of the old cost of production models. This book represents a look at what mainstream economic theory might have looked like had the erasure of Mengerian Austrian price theory by Marshallian and Walrasian thoeries not taken place, and had the improvements and refinements of the Mengerian tradition, itself done by the Anglo-Saxon followers of Menger, been fully appropriated.
Ivan Jankovic is Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Mary in Bismarck, North Dakota, USA. His background is in economic theory and the history of political and economic ideas. His previous book “The American Counter-revolution in Favor of Liberty – How Americans Resisted the Modern State 1765-1850” was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2018.