Wieser sur l'égoïsme

The Austrian school does not constitute a homogeneous corpus. Thus, if Friedrich von Wieser can be regarded as a continuator of Carl Menger, they was also dissociated some on important questions. Whereas Menger was the subject of a relatively significant number of works, the approach of Wieser comparatively retained less often, in any case in a less systematic and deepened way, the attention of the historians of the economic thinking. Thus, in subjectivist perspective characteristic of the Austrian school, Wieser, in "Social Economics" (1927), adopts a design of the behaviors less restrictive than that which was going to be essential later in the theory of the choices. At the same time, in contradiction with what an author like von Mises can support for example, Wieser considers in particular that the individual action has a double dimension, conscious and unconscious. If, within the framework of its theory of the needs, Wieser thus does not hesitate, from the same point of view as Menger, to integrate elements of psychology, its approach of competition is relatively original within the Austrian school. This characteristic approach is based on the distinction between a "socially controlled egoism" (1927, p.185), constrained by norms and social conventions, and a "unbridled personal egoism" (ibid.:) which leads to the conflict and the status quo.