Gustav Gross

The son of a railway director received his habilitation, after studying law in Vienna and Berlin and a period of work at the Lower Austrian governor's office (Statthalterei), with a study of the economist Johann Heinrich von Thünen (1783–1850). Gustav Gross, who among other things published a treatise on entrepreneurial profit (1884) and the first scholarly biographies of Karl Marx (1884 and 1885), devoted himself in later years chiefly to social and tax questions. From 1889 he was a deputy of the German Progressive Party. Gross, who counted himself in the tradition of Albert Friedrich Eberhard Schäffle and Adolph Wagner, was not mentioned by Menger when the latter listed those he had guided to habilitation on the occasion of his retirement. In the state economy, which he called the 'communal economy' (Gemeinwirtschaft), Gross saw fundamentally different laws at work than in the private economy, and he espoused Wagner's thesis of the steady expansion of state functions, to which in the long run only the family would set any limits. Of Gross it is true what Richard S. Howey otherwise said unjustly of the less well-known 'Austrians', namely that they wrote little or nothing about marginal utility theory. As a Privatdozent, Gross taught at the University of Vienna until 1897, latterly as associate professor. Towards the end of the First World War, when the war economy had reached its full central-bureaucratic and planned development, he was elected the last President of the Chamber of Deputies of the monarchy.