Born in Vienna, the son of Privy Councillor Leopold von Wieser, a high official in the war ministry, he first trained in sociology and law.

In 1872, the year he took his degree, he encountered Austrian-school founder Carl Menger's Grundsätze and switched his interest to economic theory.

Wieser is renowned for two main works, Natural Value,[2] which carefully details the alternative-cost doctrine and the theory of imputation; and his Social Economics (1914), an ambitious attempt to apply it to the real world.

Unlike most other Austrian School economists, Wieser rejected classical liberalism, writing that "freedom has to be superseded by a system of order".

This vision and his general solution to the role of the individual in history is best expressed in his final book The Law of Power, a sociological examination of political order published in his last year of life.

[5] His lifelong passion for political economy was first ignited when he read Herbert Spencer's Einleitung in das Studium der Soziologie (Introduction to the Study of Sociology).

[5] After ten years[4] of public service as a government employee, Wieser was awarded in 1875 a scholarship to the Heidelberg University in order to study political economy with Eugen Böhm von Bawerk, a friend from his youth who later became his brother-in-law.

[6] After a successful postdoctoral habilitation in 1884, Über den Ursprung und die Hauptgesetze des wirthschaftlichen Werthes (On the Origin and the Main Laws of the Value of the Factors),[5] a prelude to his value theory, Wieser was named that same year as an associate professor at Charles University in Prague,[5] where he stayed until 1903 when he succeeded Menger at the University of Vienna.

In 1903, Wieser was awarded a chair as a full professor at his alma mater, the University of Vienna, where he taught a new generation of economists, including Ludwig von Mises, Joseph Schumpeter and his most faithful disciple Friedrich Hayek.

[7] Also attributed to him is the creation of the term "marginal utility" (Grenznutzen)[8] due largely to the influence of Léon Walras and Vilfredo Pareto,[9] both of the Lausanne School.

In 1914, Eugen Böhm von Bawerk died, thus marking the end of a lifelong friendship and striking a hard blow to Wieser.

However, his activity was hindered by Richard Riedl, Energy Minister and clear proponent of economic interventionism, leaving only matters of secondary importance to Wieser's jurisdiction.

Two of his hitherto unpublished works were published posthumously, namely Geld (Money) in 1927, which summarizes his monetary theory; and Gesammelte Abhandlungen (Collected Papers) in 1929.

This latter book included a tribute resulting from the collaboration of renowned economists like Knut Wicksell,[13] but it was censored during World War II.

[7] Based on the work of Vilfredo Pareto, Wieser created the concepts of marginal utility[8] and opportunity cost, which led economists to the study and analysis of scarcity and the allocation of scarce resources.

Wieser said that idealized classical and neoclassical models neglect basic concepts such as the possibility of monopolies and the existence of economies of scale.

[15] Wieser claimed that idealized refined and self-contained models may not be useful tools for economic policy, resulting therefore in a suboptimal solution.

Aware of the idealized assumptions of this economy, he seeks to define with pinpoint accuracy the conditions under which resources would be allocated to ensure the highest possible utility.

Social economics should therefore serve as the benchmark for evaluating the efficacy of administrative intervention in the market economy: Most theorists, especially those of the Austrian School, have tacitly made the same abstraction.

It is therefore the distribution of wealth that decides what will be produced, and leads to a consumer of a more anti-economic variety: a consumer wastes on unnecessary, guilty enjoyment that which could have served to heal the wounds of poverty.Some economists of the Austrian School maintained that the value of the factors of production is not the individual contribution of each factor in the final product, but rather the value of the most valuable use that can be made of the last good (the marginal utility before reaching the Pareto optimal point).

Thus, Wieser identified a flaw in the theory of imputation as expounded by his teacher Carl Menger as overvaluation may occur if one is confronted with economies where profits jump (maximums and minimums in his utility function, where its second derivative equals 0).

However, his disciple Ludwig von Mises studied Wieser's theory and fleshed it out, creating the complex upon which he built the German concept of Geld (money).

Das Gesetz der Macht (The Law of Power), published in 1926, was his latest publication, a great sociological study from which we draw the following conclusions.

This director foresees ends, weighs them without error or passion and maintains a discipline which ensures that all directions are executed with the utmost precision and skill and without loss of energy.

The reflection of these findings in political economy is apparent in actions such as:[15] These conditions, under which resources would be allocated to ensure the greatest value, describe his model of an ideal economy, which he calls social economics in the first part of his treatise entitled Theorie der gesellschaftlichen Wirtschaft (Theory of Social Economics).

Thus Wieser's Social Economics is, in effect, a socialist economy[9] in which, to achieve greater productivity, scarce resources are assigned by an omnipresent, benevolent planner with direct and accurate insight sufficient to know the intensities of satisfactions and needs experienced by individual members of society, which all have exactly the same tastes and the same scales of utility and receive the same incomes.

Also in his later book Socialism, he applies the neoliberal label to liberal supporters of the then new[clarification needed] subjective theory of value, including Carl Menger and Wieser.

[citation needed] When Carl Menger, Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk and Wieser began their careers in science, they were not focused on economic policy issues, much less in the rejection of intervention promoted by classical liberalism.