The Contrasting Views of Menger and Böhm-Bawerk on Capital and Production

This paper proposes a reassessment of the well-known opposition between Menger and Böhm-Bawerk, generally presented as an opposition between a "subjectivist" view and a "materialist" view on capital and production. Using textual evidence, we argue that Böhm- Bawerk was a quasi-dogmatic follower of Menger in the description of capitalist economy as well as in the theory of value. In fact, Böhm-Bawerk tried to reconcile a pure theory of capital founded on a realistic vision of the time structure of production, with the theory of imputation of subjective values of consumer goods to capital goods. We show that, in doing so, Böhm-Bawerk reveals the basic contradictions of the Austrian methodology