Alfred Amonn, Grundzüge der Volkswohlstandslehre, Erster Teil (1926)

Alfred Amonn’s first part of the Grundzüge der Volkswohlstandslehre is a systematic didactic treatise on the process by which national welfare is formed. Its scope is the “Volkswirtschaft” as both a descriptive social order and a theoretical mechanism: the work moves from basic concepts to price formation, distribution, capital, labor, crises, and technical change. Amonn announces from the outset that exposition and conceptual clarification are central to the project.

Dieses Werk verfolgt einen vorzüglich didaktischen Zweck.

English translation: This work pursues a predominantly didactic purpose.

The core thesis is that “Volkswohlstand” is not an aggregate of isolated goods or private satisfactions, but the outcome of a social-economic mechanism. Amonn’s conceptual move is to treat the economy as the apparatus through which welfare is produced, circulated, valued, and distributed.

Der Volkswohlstand ist das Ergebnis der Volkswirtschaft, die Volkswirtschaft ist der Apparat oder „Mechanismus“, durch welchen der Volkswohlstand gewonnen wird.

English translation: National wealth is the result of the national economy; the national economy is the apparatus or "mechanism" by which national wealth is obtained.

This leads him to reject any simple separation between production and distribution. Distribution is not a later moral or administrative act added to production; in a market economy the two are bound together through exchange, prices, costs, wages, rents, interest, and profit.

Produktion und Verteilung vollziehen sich uno actu.

English translation: Production and distribution take place uno actu (in one and the same act).

Amonn therefore insists that the fundamental categories of economics must be understood as social exchange categories, not as merely technical or physical ones. His theory of wealth formation depends on this methodological purification: economic concepts acquire their meaning only within the social relations of exchange.

Alle Begriffe müssen hier als spezifisch gesellschaftliche Begriffe, als reine Tauschbegriffe gefaßt und aufgefaßt werden.

English translation: All concepts here must be conceived and understood as specifically social concepts, as pure exchange concepts.

From this standpoint, the price system becomes the central analytic field. Amonn presents prices as expressions of relative scarcity, not as arbitrary conventions or simple reflections of labor or production outlays. Scarcity, mediated through demand and supply, is the final explanatory ground of price formation.

Die „relative Seltenheit“ oder „Knappheit“ ist der letzte Grund der Entstehung und der Höhe der Preise.

English translation: "Relative scarcity" or "scarceness" is the ultimate ground of the emergence and the level of prices.

His treatment of costs follows from this principle. Costs do not constitute an independent law standing beside supply and demand; they operate within the same exchange nexus. This is one of the book’s key theoretical reductions, bringing cost theory under the broader law of market valuation.

Es zeigt sich weiterhin, daß das Kostengesetz kein unabhängiges, dem Gesetz von Angebot und Nachfrage selbständig gegenüberstehendes Gesetz der Preisbestimmung ist, sondern nur eine besondere Form des Gesetzes von Angebot und Nachfrage, einen Sonderfall dieses Gesetzes darstellt.

English translation: It becomes further apparent that the law of costs is not an independent law of price determination standing on its own alongside the law of supply and demand, but only represents a particular form of the law of supply and demand, a special case of that law.

The later sections extend this framework into dynamic analysis. Economic movement is not smooth: capital-goods production, credit expansion, labor-market shifts, speculation, and central-bank policy produce phases of boom, depression, and crisis. A crisis is not merely a low point in trade but a rupture in continuity.

Ein solches Abbrechen der Kontinuität der wirtschaftlichen Bewegung bezeichnen wir als eine „Krise“.

English translation: Such a break in the continuity of economic movement we designate as a "crisis".

Amonn also situates modern welfare formation within the technological transformation of the nineteenth century. Machinery is not treated only as a technical improvement but as a force reshaping labor allocation, capital structure, productivity, and social adjustment.

So kann man mit Recht die Entwicklungsperiode des 19. Jahrhunderts als das Zeitalter der Maschine bezeichnen, die ihr den Stempel aufgedrückt hat.

English translation: Thus one may rightly describe the developmental period of the 19th century as the age of the machine, which has stamped its imprint upon it.

Yet he resists a crude theory of technological unemployment. Machines displace particular employments, but in his account they release labor for other uses within a changing economic system.

Die Maschinen machten die Arbeiter im Grunde nicht überflüssig, sondern nur zu anderen Verwendungen frei.

English translation: The machines did not fundamentally render workers superfluous, but only freed them for other uses.

The relevance of Amonn’s work lies in its disciplined synthesis of descriptive institutional observation and abstract theory. It treats national welfare as a process, not a static condition; production, distribution, prices, costs, credit, crises, and technology are all interpreted as moments within one social mechanism of exchange. Its most important conceptual contribution is the insistence that economic categories must be grasped relationally: welfare is produced through the organized interdependence of persons, goods, scarcity, and valuation in the Volkswirtschaft.