Oskar Engländer · 1929
Engländer’s monograph offers a systematic theory of price formation and price structure, moving from the psychology of wants and goods to production, transport, capital interest, spatial markets, and the limits of “objective” explanation. Its distinctive starting point is a categorical separation between economic value and measurable psychic quantity. Value is not a unit of pleasure or utility but an ordinal position within an acquisition situation.
Wir bezeichnen, wie oben angeführt, als wirtschaftlichen Wert den Rang, der einem Gute beigelegt wird, wenn es erworben werden soll.
English translation: We designate, as noted above, as economic value the rank ascribed to a good when it is to be acquired.
This definition governs the book’s critique of simple marginal-utility price theory. For Engländer, wants do not necessarily arrange themselves into a smooth, measurable continuum, and monetary bids are not direct translations of utility magnitudes. A buyer’s willingness to pay expresses the ordering of provisions within a limited monetary field, not the numerical intensity of a feeling. The same caution applies to costs: they cannot be treated as universally commensurable psychic sacrifices to be balanced against utilities in a single marginal equation. Engländer’s argument is therefore not anti-subjective, but anti-reductionist. Subjective ranking explains why goods matter; it does not by itself explain the structure of prices.
From this foundation he turns to what he calls the objective-technical price structure. Prices are examined through the material relations among goods, the technical conditions of production, the role of complementary and successive stages, and the spatial organization of markets. His treatment of transport costs and regional price relations is especially important: city size, agricultural hinterlands, freight charges, product quality, and weight loss all enter into the formation of differentiated local prices. Price theory thus becomes partly a theory of economic geography.
Engländer nevertheless refuses to identify this technical structure with a complete theory of actual market price. Capital interest, for example, can be incorporated into the objective price build-up rather than treated as a refutation of it.
Die Tatsache des Kapitalzinses macht also den objektiv-technischen Preisaufbau als solchen nicht unmöglich.
English translation: The fact of interest on capital does not therefore make the objective-technical price structure as such impossible.
Yet that inclusion also marks the boundary of the method. Objective-technical analysis can clarify durable structural relations, but it does not fully explain every concrete market movement. In classical terms, it concerns the natural price more than the fluctuating market price.
Nach dem Sprachgebrauch der klassischen Schule erklärt der objektiv-technische Preisaufbau wohl den natürlichen Preis, aber nicht den um den natürlichen Preis oszillierenden Marktpreis.
English translation: According to the usage of the Classical School, the objective-technical price structure indeed explains the natural price, but not the market price oscillating around the natural price.
The importance of the work lies in this double refusal: Engländer rejects both a purely psychologistic account that derives prices directly from wants and a purely mechanical cost theory that ignores ranked interests and monetary constraints. His analysis repeatedly insists that higher usefulness need not imply higher price.
Es fehlt jede notwendige Verbindung zwischen höherem Grenznutzen einer Güterart einerseits, höherem Preis dieser Güterart andererseits.
English translation: There is no necessary connection between a higher marginal utility of a kind of good on the one hand and a higher price of that kind of good on the other.
The result is a layered theory of price formation. Economic value, price-willingness, cost, yield, natural price, and market price are distinct concepts joined by specific relations rather than collapsed into one causal formula. Engländer’s “Preisaufbau” is therefore an architecture: subjective ordering explains the rank of goods, money mediates the entrance of wants into exchange, and technical-spatial conditions explain why prices stand in determinate relations across goods, stages of production, and places.
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