Hans Mayer, a Neglected Figure in Austrian Economics, Put the Concept of Static Equilibrium on Trial

Because of the disgrace he later brought upon himself, in 1938, Hans Mayer is the neglected figure in the history of Austrian economics in the interwar period. . . .

A theorist in the tradition of Menger and von Wieser, Mayer was interested in the imputation problem. However, amongst the issues regarding which considerable discussion was devoted in his seminar in the late 1920s were those of the incorporation of time into equilibrium theory, the psychological bases of marginalist economics, and the place of mathematics in economic analysis. . . .

Mayer saw himself as an Austrian bulwark against Marginalist orthodoxy. As early as 1911, in a review of Schumpeter's Das Wesen und der Hauptinhalt der theoretischen Nationalökonomie, he criticized the use of the differential calculus in economics. He said that although the possibility of infinitesimal change was plausible in the measurement of time and space, it was inapplicable in the consideration of economic quantities: what sense did it make to speak of the satisfaction yielded by an infinitesimal portion of, say, a shoe? He stated that in the economic realm, reasoning in mathematical terms, made possible through the adoption of methods that had proven themselves in the natural sciences, marked a surrender to pure “form.” By the mid-1920s, the supposed sterility of the use of mathematics and the excessive simplification involved in reducing subjective action in time to a static, mathematical description had become essential motifs in Mayer's work. In his seminar meetings, he took his students through the early work of Cournot, the Lausanne School, and Jevons. One might say he was putting the concept of static equilibrium on trial.

—Robert Leonard, Von Neumann, Morgenstern, and the Creation of Game Theory: From Chess to Social Science, 1900-1960, Historical Perspectives on Modern Economics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 83-84.