Richard Kerschagl · 1947
Kerschagl’s rectoral address presents the social Wunschbild not as escapist utopia but as an active economic factor. He chooses the term because social ideals are anticipatory images through which human willing enters economic reality. Economics cannot therefore be treated as a mechanics of things alone, since its processes are formed by persons acting within hopes, fears, interests, and normative expectations.
alle Wirtschaftsvorgänge sind keine Vorgänge an sich, sondern sie gestalten sich aus dem Wollen lebendiger Menschen.
English translation: all economic processes are not processes in themselves, but take shape out of the willing of living human beings.
The lecture first distinguishes the wish-image from romantic restoration. A social ideal is directed toward the future, even when it borrows from the past; the past itself cannot simply be reinstated. Kerschagl’s point is neither uncritically progressive nor dismissive of utopia. What seems impossible in one generation may guide partial achievements in another, and even unrealizable schemes can redirect practical reform. Hence the social wish-image is historically effective precisely because it need not be immediately attainable.
sehr häufig die Utopie von gestern die Realität von heute und die Utopie von heute die Realität von morgen zu sein vermag.
English translation: very often the utopia of yesterday is able to become the reality of today, and the utopia of today the reality of tomorrow.
This gives the address its methodological tension. Ideals matter causally, but their realization is always conditioned, incomplete, and transformed by social life. Fulfilled ideals lose their character as ideals, just as satisfied needs cease to press in the same way. Kerschagl therefore resists both positivist economics, which would exclude ideals as unreal, and ideological economics, which would treat one ideal as absolute. Economic science may clarify means, limits, and consequences, but final social aims cannot be deduced from technical analysis alone.
die Ziele selbst jenseits der reinen Nationalökonomie liegen
English translation: the aims themselves lie beyond pure economics.
Much of the address substantiates this claim through the history of economic doctrine. Kerschagl reads mercantilism, physiocracy, classical economics, utopian socialism, romanticism, Marxism, communism, and the Austrian school as formations of mixed and often contradictory wish-images. Mercantilists combine state direction with commercial liberty; physiocrats join natural order to compulsion; classical economists are not uniformly laissez-faire; Marxism contains revolutionary and evolutionary tendencies. Even the Austrian marginalist tradition, for Kerschagl, is not a single political program but a theoretical framework compatible with sharply different policy conclusions.
These contradictions are not treated merely as errors. They reveal the deep structure of social wishing, especially the recurring conflict between liberty and order. Human beings want autonomy, but also security, form, and social protection. The danger arises when a doctrine denies this plurality and converts one wish-image into a total claim. Kerschagl’s anti-totalitarian implication is clear: economic and social ideals must remain open to criticism because they contain tensions that no system can abolish.
vor allem der beiden Begriffe und der beiden Wünsche nach Freiheit und Bindung.
English translation: above all the two concepts and the two desires — freedom and binding order.
The final part applies this logic to practical policy. Trade policy wants open markets for exports and protection against imports; social policy wants welfare without constraint; monetary policy wants credit elasticity without inflation; fiscal policy wants simplicity and differentiated justice. The popular desire for low prices and high wages crystallizes the same pattern. In postwar Austria, Kerschagl insists that redistribution may be necessary but cannot replace production.
Es kann auf die Dauer nur das verteilt werden, was erarbeitet ist
English translation: In the long run only what has been produced by labor can be distributed.
The address closes by joining economic realism to ethical restraint. Most economic judgments are relative to historical conditions, but humanity and human dignity are not thereby dissolved. Kerschagl’s central contribution is this pluralist account of social ideals: Wunschbilder are indispensable motors of economic life, yet they become destructive when enforced as exclusive truths. Science must analyze their power without surrendering to them, preserving the freedom of inquiry against the coercive fantasy of a final social image.
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