This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
In 1883 Carl Menger, the founder of the Austrian School, published Investigations into the Method of the Social Sciences, arguing that economics should proceed like a science of exact laws, deriving propositions from a small set of premises about individual choice and holding them true regardless of time or place. Gustav von Schmoller, by then the dominant figure in German academic economics, reviewed the book with open hostility, and the exchange that followed, conducted largely through pamphlets and journal polemics rather than direct debate, became known as the Methodenstreit, the dispute over method.
The disagreement was not really about any single policy question. It was about what counted as economic knowledge at all. Schmoller and the German Historical School held that Menger's exact laws were empty abstractions unless grounded in the patient, comparative study of how real economies had actually developed, nation by nation, institution by institution. Menger held that without abstract theory, historical description could describe but never explain, and risked collapsing economics into undifferentiated history.
Neither side won outright. German universities remained historicist strongholds into the twentieth century, training the economists who built Bismarck's social insurance system, while Austrian and later neoclassical marginalism became the dominant theoretical language elsewhere. The Methodenstreit is remembered less as a dispute anyone settled than as the moment economics first argued, openly and at length, over whether it was a historical discipline or a deductive one, a question later schools in this atlas, from institutionalism to post-Keynesianism, kept reopening in their own terms.