Economics as a life-science: The enduring significance of Carl Menger's individualist-evolutionary research program

Historians of economic thought commonly emphasize three aspects of Carl Menger's work: his quarrel with the German Historical School, the contrast between his theoretical outlook and that of his co-marginalists, Leon Walras and William Stanley Jevons, and his role in pioneering an evolutionary economics. The paper argues that these aspects of Menger's work have their common root in his understanding of economics as - in modern language - a life science.