Was Carl Menger a process theorist? An assessment of his theory of wants and goods

Abstract We examine the widespread presumption that Carl Menger was a process theorist, with special reference to his theory of consumption. His theory is based upon postulates about wants and goods rather than utility. He builds a theory of consumption around the idea of a wants–goods nexus in which economizing agency, wants, combinatorial structures of goods-complementarity, volition, time, change, learning and discovery have important roles. We demonstrate that this theory also incorporates emergent patterns in consumption. A descriptive ontological assessment of Menger’s primary units of analysis—wants, goods and persons—reveals that at first, they present as static things or substances. When decomposed they also have processual modes of existence evident during different phases of consumption. Wants, goods and persons are intrinsically temporal and thus embody certain types of processes and a penumbra of related subprocesses occurring in social contexts: wants-recognition, goods-evaluation, exchange, life cycles and human development. There is a network of mutual interdependency between things and processes in the wants–goods nexus. By contrast with his neoclassical contemporaries, Menger deserves commendation for giving prominence to the processual nature of wants and goods.