Richard Kerschagl, Einführung in die Finanzwissenschaft (1963)

Richard Kerschagl’s Einführung in die Finanzwissenschaft is a public-finance textbook with a broad comparative scope: it introduces the theory of state revenue and taxation, then extends that framework to the tax systems of major contemporary powers and economic blocs, including the USA, the Soviet sphere, the EWG, EFTA, and Austria. Its central claim is that taxation cannot be understood as a merely technical instrument of revenue collection. For Kerschagl, every tax system expresses a theory of the state, a social order, and a distributional settlement.

Die Geschichte der Steuern ist eng verknüpft mit der Geschichte der jeweiligen Staaten und ihrer sozialen und wirtschaftlichen Konstruktion.

English translation: The history of taxes is closely bound up with the history of the respective states and their social and economic construction.

This historical premise governs the work’s method. Kerschagl treats fiscal science as an inquiry into the public economy of organized society: why the state needs resources, how it obtains them, how fiscal burdens are distributed, and how taxation changes economic and social relations. The book therefore begins from first principles rather than from administrative detail. Its most compressed formulation makes the problem of taxation inseparable from political legitimacy itself.

Die Frage nach dem Warum der Steuern ist in Wirklichkeit die Frage nach dem Warum des Staates.

English translation: The question of the Why of taxes is in reality the question of the Why of the state.

From this standpoint, the modern tax state is not an accidental growth of bureaucracy but a consequence of the expansion of public functions. Kerschagl’s account is especially marked by the postwar welfare-state context. He sees twentieth-century finance as organized around large-scale redistribution, in which the state mediates between original market incomes and socially revised disposable incomes.

Der Wohlfahrtsstaat des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts ist eben ein riesiger Ausgleichsmechanismus, durch den etwa die Hälfte aller originären Einkommen einem Prozeß der Neuverteilung unterzogen wird.

English translation: The welfare state of the twentieth century is nothing other than a gigantic equalization mechanism, through which roughly half of all originary incomes is subjected to a process of redistribution.

The conceptual movement of the book is thus from the fiscal needs of the state to the distributive and institutional effects of taxation. Taxes are classified and compared not only by legal form, but by the kinds of state they presuppose: centralized or federal, capitalist or socialist, nationally bounded or increasingly integrated. In the comparative closing chapters, Kerschagl uses tax systems as indicators of constitutional and economic structure. Federal arrangements appear as fiscal compromises between levels of government, while centralized socialist systems reveal a different relation between plan, enterprise, budget, and tax.

Die Einkommen- und Körperschaftsteuer ist somit sowohl Bundes- als auch Ländersteuer.

English translation: The income tax and the corporation tax are thus both federal and state (Länder) taxes.

Such observations are not isolated administrative facts; they show how revenue authority maps political authority. Kerschagl’s treatment of Germany, for example, contrasts federal fiscal sharing with the centralized organization of the Soviet occupation zone, making fiscal form a sign of deeper constitutional divergence.

Das Finanz- und Steuersystem der sowjetischen Besatzungszone Deutschlands ist im Gegensatz zu dem Steuersystem der Bundesrepublik Deutschland stark zentralistisch.

English translation: The financial and tax system of the Soviet occupation zone of Germany is, in contrast to the tax system of the Federal Republic of Germany, strongly centralist.

The later comparative material also gives the book contemporary relevance beyond national tax law. Written amid European integration, it recognizes that fiscal systems could become obstacles to economic unification. Kerschagl’s discussion of EWG and EFTA anticipates the practical difficulty of harmonizing taxes across states with divergent legal traditions, revenue needs, and social policies.

Es gibt dies überdies auch einen Ausblick auf die Schwierigkeiten, welche bei der Fortsetzung der Integrierung im Raum der EWG und EFTA aus der völligen Divergenz der Steuersysteme zu erwarten sind.

English translation: It also affords, moreover, a preview of the difficulties which, in the continuation of integration within the sphere of the EEC and EFTA, are to be expected from the complete divergence of the tax systems.

The work’s structure is therefore cumulative: foundational theory of public finance, analysis of taxation as social and economic mechanism, and comparative exposition of major fiscal systems. Its scholarly value lies in joining tax technique to political economy. Kerschagl’s core move is to make “Finanzwissenschaft” a discipline of institutional interpretation: taxes reveal how states define their purposes, allocate burdens, redistribute income, and negotiate the tension between sovereignty and integration.