page_title: Friedrich von Wieser
section_title: Biography
hierarchical_section_title: Friedrich von Wieser / Biography
context_page_description: Friedrich Freiherr von Wieser was an early economist of the Austrian School of economics. Born in Vienna, the son of Privy Councillor Leopold von Wieser, a high official in the war ministry, he first trained in sociology and law. In 1872, the year he took his degree, he encountered Austrian-school founder Carl Menger's Grundsätze and switched his interest to economic theory. Wieser held posts at the universities of Vienna and Prague until succeeding Menger in Vienna in 1903, where along with his brother-in-law Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk he shaped the next generation of Austrian economists including Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek and Joseph Schumpeter in the late 1890s and early 20th century. He was the Austrian Minister of Commerce from August 30, 1917 to November 11, 1918.
  Wieser is renowned for two main works, Natural Value, which carefully details the alternative-cost doctrine and the theory of imputation; and his Social Economics, an ambitious attempt to apply it to the real world. His explanation of marginal utility theory was decisive, at least terminologically.
context_section_description: Born in Vienna on 10 July 1851, Wieser spent his childhood and adolescence in the same city. He was interested since youth in law, history and sociology. He studied law at the University of Vienna beginning in 1868. His lifelong passion for political economy was first ignited when he read Herbert Spencer's Einleitung in das Studium der Soziologie (Introduction to the Study of Sociology).
  After ten years of public service as a government employee, Wieser was awarded in 1875 a scholarship to the Heidelberg University in order to study political economy with Eugen Böhm von Bawerk, a friend from his youth who later became his brother-in-law. Both men were disciples of Carl Menger, Wieser's senior by 11 years. Although neither Wieser nor Böhm-Bawerk studied under Menger directly, they were greatly influenced by reading
  Menger's Grundsätze der Volkswirtschaftslehre (Principles of Economics) (1871), which was the work that had initially inspired the two men to study political economy. The three are considered the first generation of the Austrian School of economics.
  After a successful postdoctoral habilitation in 1884, Über den Ursprung und die Hauptgesetze des wirthschaftlichen Werthes (On the Origin and the Main Laws of the Value of the Factors), a prelude to his value theory, Wieser was named that same year as an associate professor at Charles University in Prague, where he stayed until 1903 when he succeeded Menger at the University of Vienna.
  In 1889, Wieser was named ordentlicher Professor (ordinary professor) at the Charles University. That same year, he also published his Der natürliche Werth (Natural Value), with which he initiated the debate on the value of factors of production and from which are derived two of his major contributions: his value theory and the related imputation theory.
  Motivated by introducing the innovations of the Austrian School, he published Die österreichische Schule und die Theorie Wert (The Austrian School and the Theory of Value) in 1891 and Die Wert Theorie (The Value Theory) in 1892. Later, he collaborated in other notable works, such as Die Wiederaufnahme Barzahlungen der in Österreich-Ungarn (Resumption of payments species in Austria-Hungary) in 1893 and Die Theorie der städtische Grundrente (Theory of urban land rents) in 1909. He also served as editor for two articles in the Palgrave Dictionary of Economics: "Die österreichische Schule der Wirtschaft" ("The Austrian School of Economics") and "Böhm-Bawerk", both in 1884.
  In 1903, Wieser was awarded a chair as a full professor at his alma mater, the University of Vienna, where he taught a new generation of economists, including Ludwig von Mises, Joseph Schumpeter and his most faithful disciple Friedrich Hayek. He developed a monetary theory inspired by the research of Carl Menger and he applied himself during the following years to the problems of the quantity theory of money. In his last 25 years, he dedicated himself to sociology, which he believed must go hand-in-hand with economics for the fullest understanding of human society. By combining these disciplines, he was able to forge a new vision of economic policy.
  In 1911, he published Das Wesen und der Hauptinhalt der theoretischen Nationalokonomie (The Nature and Content of Theoretical Economics Major National) which preceded yet another major contribution, alternative cost (or opportunity cost) theory, which was drawn from his study Theorie der gesellschaftlichen Wirtschaft (Theory of Social Economy), published in 1914. It was here that he first coined the term "opportunity cost".
  Also attributed to him is the creation of the term "marginal utility" (Grenznutzen) due largely to the influence of Léon Walras and Vilfredo Pareto, both of the Lausanne School. This has led some scholars to not consider his later works as belonging to the Austrian School. Even his disciple Ludwig von Mises said in his autobiography Memoirs (1978) that Wieser had misunderstood the gist of the subjectivism of the Austrian School and was actually a member of the Lausanne School. However, in both he also pre
caption: The two most influential figures in Wieser's life were his friend and brother-in-law Eugen Böhm von Bawerk and his teacher Carl Menger
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