Engländer’s treatise rebuilds price theory from monetary exchange rather than from an imagined equivalence between value and price. Its philosophical point of departure is explicitly Brentano’s psychology of preference, mediated by Marty and Kraus, but its economic purpose is critical: it preserves subjective ordering while denying that marginal utility can directly determine money prices.
Die philosophische Grundlage des Werkes bildet die Lehre Franz Brentanos, wie sie mir durch Marty und Kraus überliefert wurde.
English translation: The philosophical foundation of the work is formed by the doctrine of Franz Brentano, as it was transmitted to me through Marty and Kraus.
The decisive premise is that the buyer is not a Robinsonian chooser but an agent already situated in a money economy. Price is therefore not barter value expressed in another medium; it is a specifically monetary social relation formed through buying and selling.
Unter Preis verstehen wir dabei einen Geldpreis
English translation: By price we here understand a money price.
Engländer’s buyer ranks needs ordinally, and goods receive value from the satisfactions dependent on them. But money cannot be estimated like a consumption good, because no determinate satisfaction depends immediately on holding a given sum. This is why the theory turns from “value of money” to a residual calculation of possible expenditure.
Der Käufer hat keine Möglichkeit einer unmittelbaren Schätzung des Geldes in der Art, wie er eine unmittelbare Schätzung eines Gutes erster Ordnung nach der von diesem Gute abhängigen Bedürfnisbefriedigung vornimmt.
English translation: The buyer has no possibility of directly appraising money in the way in which he directly appraises a first-order good according to the satisfaction of needs that depends on that good.
The buyer’s maximum bid is what remains after higher-ranking needs have been provided for at their prices. Thus demand depends on disposable wealth, the rank of the need, and the prices of more important goods. This explains both the force and the limit of buyer-side theory: it can specify ceilings of willingness to pay, but not the actual market price. Engländer’s critique of marginal utility follows from this. The price of a quantity is not simply a multiple of the marginal unit’s utility, because needs are discontinuous, goods substitute for one another, and intervening claims on income constrain willingness to pay. Equal unit prices are therefore not deduced from the buyer’s consciousness; they arise through market and seller-side conditions.
Buyer competition turns these individual limits into price intervals. A final price cannot leave unsatisfied buyers who would pay more, but competition normally establishes bounds rather than a unique “equilibrium” point. Engländer consequently prefers the language of a resting price to that of equilibrium, since no equality between the value of money and the value of the good is implied. The first part therefore deliberately ends in incompleteness: subjective valuation is indispensable, but it gives only one side of price determination.
The second part rejects a simple symmetry between buyer and seller. Sellers do not usually value their wares as consumption goods; they seek monetary return. In monopoly or fixed-supply cases, buyer ceilings and bargaining strength may dominate. But the central case of modern exchange is the reproducible cost product. Here price is governed not by the buyer’s maximum willingness to pay, but by the seller’s money costs plus the normal profit obtainable in alternative uses.
Der Preis der hier in Betracht kommenden Güter ist gleich ihren Geldkosten für den Verkäufer mehr dem mit diesen Kosten vom Verkäufer sonst erzielbaren Gewinn.
English translation: The price of the goods in question here equals their money costs to the seller plus the profit otherwise obtainable by the seller with those costs.
Engländer then confronts the apparent regress of cost explanation. If costs are themselves prices, price theory cannot merely push determination backward indefinitely. Labor is the key limiting case: wages are not explained by the costs of producing labor, nor by a monetary measure of labor pain, but by labor as a given usable quantity confronting demand. More generally, the cost law rests on higher-order goods whose quantities are given, while competitive production equalizes returns across uses.
This yields Engländer’s mature simultaneous view. Subjective valuations and incomes determine which goods can be sold and in what quantities; costs and alternative profits impose relative price relations; monopoly, scarcity, land, mines, capital, and entrepreneurial activity modify the result. Cost is not a temporal chain in which earlier prices mechanically cause later ones.
Die Kostenreihe ist keine Kausalreihe, bei der das vorhergehende Glied das nachfolgende bedingt
English translation: The cost series is not a causal series in which the preceding member conditions the one that follows.
The work’s originality lies in this synthesis: ordinal subjectivism without marginal-utility price reduction, cost theory without infinite regress, and supply-demand analysis without equilibrium metaphysics. Price is not value measured in money, but a social result bounded by buyer valuations and completed by market structure, reproducibility, scarcity, and the monetary organization of production.
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