Schams’s article is a single-author memorial and intellectual biography. It surveys Wieser’s whole career—as economist, sociologist, teacher, and Austrian public figure—and argues for the unity of an oeuvre whose centre is theoretical economics but whose late sociology of power completes rather than abandons that centre.
Die große Leistung seines Lebenswerkes liegt auf dem Gebiete der theoretischen Oekonomie.
English translation: The great achievement of his life's work lies in the field of theoretical economics.
The narrative begins with Wieser’s legal and historical formation, then places him beside Carl Menger and Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk at the decisive moment when German-language economics had turned against theory. Menger supplied the foundation; Böhm-Bawerk became the fighter for the new theory; Wieser, for Schams, became its constructive architect. His core move was to turn the apparently simple proposition that goods are valued because they are needed into a systematic account of value, price, and the social economic process.
Der wirtschaftliche Wert ist Grenzwert.
English translation: Economic value is marginal value.
Schams presents marginal utility not as a slogan but as the analytical device that fixes value within a moving field of wants and scarcity. Wieser’s originality lies in clarifying the limiting point at which utility becomes economically decisive, and then extending this logic beyond consumption goods. In Der natürliche Wert, the theory acquires vertical depth: productive goods receive their value from the goods of enjoyment to which they lead. Schams therefore treats the imputation theory as a decisive scientific breakthrough.
Hier hat er das Höchste geleistet, was ein Gelehrter leisten kann, er hat seiner Wissenschaft neue Bahnen gewiesen.
English translation: Here he accomplished the highest thing a scholar can accomplish: he pointed out new paths for his science.
The middle of the essay broadens into a compressed bibliography: studies of currency, taxation, constitutional questions, Bohemia, rent, money, and the history of doctrine. These are not digressions but evidence of the breadth from which the Theorie der gesellschaftlichen Wirtschaft emerged. Schams calls that 1914 work the mature textbook of the Austrian School, marked by pedagogical clarity, realism, and a refusal to detach economy from society. His account of Wieser’s method is correspondingly careful: it is “psychological,” but not a surrender of economics to psychology as a natural science.
Er selbst nennt seine Methode die psychologische.
English translation: He himself calls his method the psychological one.
For Schams, this means that Wieser begins from the consciousness and experience of economic actors while preserving the specifically economic object. The charge of atomistic individualism is rejected: Wieser’s value and price theory already contains social use-value, group valuation, and the “gesellschaftliche” form of economic life.
The essay’s strongest interpretive intervention is its insistence that Wieser’s later sociology is continuous with his economics. Das Gesetz der Macht is presented as a society-theory, not a narrow study of coercion. Its central structural distinction is between leaders and led, through which the amorphous mass becomes an articulated social order.
Für ihn ist die Scheidung in Führer und Geführte der Begriff, der diese Durchgliederung schafft.
English translation: For him, the division into leaders and led is the concept that produces this articulation.
Power, in this account, is not merely external force. Schams emphasizes Wieser’s idea of an inward development of authority: coercion begins history, but law and inner conviction complete it. The sociology of power thus supplies the broader grounding for social action that economic theory had always presupposed.
Das Gesetz der Macht fordert es, daß die Zwangsform die Entwicklung beginnt, die nach und nach zur Rechtsform und von dieser zur inneren Rechtsmacht hinüberleitet.
English translation: The law of power requires that the coercive form begins the development, which gradually leads over to the legal form and from this to inner legal authority.
The closing sections turn to Wieser’s prose, public service, old-Austrian identity, ministerial role, and final years. Their function is commemorative, but also historiographical: Schams makes Wieser a monument of the Austrian School and of a vanished Austrian intellectual culture. The article remains relevant as an early, internally informed interpretation of marginal utility theory, its method disputes, and its sociological extension into a theory of power and order.
Unübertrefflich ist die Darstellungsform seiner Arbeit.
English translation: The form of presentation of his work is unsurpassable.
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