Engliš’s Economics, translated from the 1940 Národní hospodářství, is a systematic reconstruction of economic theory from a “purpose-oriented” standpoint. Its central claim is methodological and substantive at once: economic life cannot be understood adequately as a chain of causes, because economic conduct is action ordered toward ends. Economics must therefore interpret agents, institutions, markets, and policy teleologically, asking what purposes organize them and what means they arrange.
The practical man acts purposively, and we therefore comprehend his actions in terms of the relationship of finality (teleologically).
From this starting point Engliš treats the economy not as an aggregate of material things but as a field of purposive orders. An economic organization is intelligible only when one can identify its directing subject, its end, and the ordering of means by which that end is pursued. This gives his theory a distinctive architecture: before prices or markets can be analyzed, the analyst must know whose purpose is being served and how the relevant activity is coordinated.
Every economic organisation has therefore a single agent, a single purpose, and a single purposive order.
The capitalist economy, in this account, is not purposeless because it lacks a single comprehensive plan. Its order arises from the interaction of many purposive agents through markets. Prices are therefore not merely monetary facts; they are coordinating points at which competing plans, valuations, and scarcities are brought into relation. Engliš’s broad conception of price allows him to describe decentralized capitalism as ordered without treating it as consciously planned from above.
The entire equilibrium order of economic organisations in the capitalist system rests upon these three scales (markets) and their points of equilibrium (on prices broadly defined).
This framework also shapes Engliš’s treatment of policy. He neither absolutizes laissez-faire nor dissolves economics into social reform. Social policy is legitimate because competitive orders can distribute burdens and gains inequitably; yet it remains an intervention within an individualist productive order, not a simple replacement for it. Conversely, productivity policy cannot be treated as socially neutral. The strength of the book lies in its insistence that efficiency and equity are not isolated principles but mutually limiting purposes within a single practical order.
However each has its limitations: The limits of productivity policy are given by social concern; the limits of social policy are given by consideration of productivity.
Engliš’s analysis of controlled or planned systems follows the same logic. State direction does not eliminate allocation; it substitutes administrative allocation for market coordination. The relevant question is therefore not whether an economy allocates, but by what purposive mechanism, under whose authority, and according to which ends.
The allocative mechanism of the unplanned competitive system is replaced by the allocative system of state controls concerned with equity and social utility.
The enduring interest of Engliš’s work is this integration of methodology, market theory, and policy judgment. His purpose-oriented economics resists both mechanical determinism and moral abstraction. Markets, firms, public authorities, and reforms are all forms of ordered striving, and their evaluation depends on how they coordinate means, distribute burdens, and preserve the conditions of productive life. Economics: A Purpose-Oriented Approach is thus best read as a theory of economic order: a sustained attempt to show that economic science must begin with purposive action and must judge institutions by the practical arrangements through which purposes are made effective.
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