Ewald Schams: Die »zweite« Nationalökonomie

Schams’ essay is a methodological intervention prompted by Werner Sombarts Die drei Nationalökonomien. It opens generously: Sombart’s book matters because it provokes serious disagreement, and Schams insists that loyal criticism must first enter the author’s conceptual world. Yet the essay’s thesis is sharply critical: Sombart is right to attack the natural-scientific deformation of economics, but he misidentifies where that deformation lies. Mathematical “relationist” economics need not be rejected; it must be purified of imported physical analogies.

Diskussion bedeutet Erfolg.

English translation: Discussion means success.

The first conceptual move is Schams’ distinction between object and problem. Economic phenomena—prices, wages, markets, money, firms—are not yet “problems” until a cognitive aim is chosen. Against Amonn’s criticism of Sombart, Schams argues that methodological history may legitimately examine forms of cognition rather than every substantive problem.

Die Problemwahl ist daher doppelt intentional: Wahl hinsichtlich des Sachgehaltes und Wahl hinsichtlich des Erkenntniszieles.

English translation: The choice of problem is therefore doubly intentional: a choice with regard to the subject matter and a choice with regard to the cognitive aim.

This allows him to accept Sombart’s tripartite frame: the “richtende,” “ordnende,” and “verstehende” Nationalökonomien correspond to metaphysical, natural-scientific, and human-scientific orientations. Schams’ focus is the second: “ordnende Nationalökonomie,” especially the mathematical school. He reconstructs Sombart’s claim that this tradition borrowed from the natural sciences an atomizing, quantifying, law-seeking method and thereby produced only external, partial knowledge.

Die Anwendung der naturwissenschaftlichen Denkweise auf die Wirtschaftswissenschaft führt zu derjenigen Richtung der Nationalökonomie, die ich die ordnende Nationalökonomie nennen wollte.

English translation: The application of the natural-scientific mode of thought to economics leads to that branch of economics which I would like to call the ordering economics.

Schams grants that economics has often imported alien scientific forms, but he rejects Sombart’s equation of mathematical exactness with measurement and quantification. Exactness is not the presence of numbers; it is the adequacy of a mode of concept-formation to its object.

Exaktheit ist eine Frage des Anwendungsproblems und ist nichts anderes als ein Gradbegriff der Kongruenz zwischen Logik der Begriffsbildung und Problem.

English translation: Exactness is a question of the problem of application and is nothing other than a degree-concept of the congruence between the logic of concept formation and the problem.

The central criticism comes when Schams turns to Sombart’s “verstehende Nationalökonomie.” Sombart expels natural-scientific laws, then reintroduces many familiar economic laws—wage-fund, surplus-value, rent, monopoly price, supply and demand—as “Sinngesetze.” Schams sees here not a new theory but a relabeling problem: if the old laws become valid merely by receiving the stamp of meaning, then Sombart has not shown why the earlier economics was cognitively empty.

Also ist bloß der Stempel »Sinngesetze« das Visum, das uns allen den Einlaß in das Land der verstehenden Nationalökonomie gewährt?

English translation: So is it merely the stamp "laws of meaning" that constitutes the visa granting all of us entry into the land of understanding economics?

The essay’s most original section analyzes the structure of physical and economic laws. Physical law contains state variables and material constants; it can treat an initial state as determining future states. Economic relations—price, demand, supply, costs—have no such material constants. The error of natural-scientific economics is therefore not the use of functions, but the transfer of physical structures: equilibrium, statics/dynamics, constancy, and calculable determinacy. Schams calls these alien analogies.

His positive alternative defends an autonomous “Größentheorie.” Practical questions—cost shifting, monopoly price, competition—require functional concepts. Mathematical economics is justified when relations become too complex for ordinary causal prose. But it must distinguish general form-determination from concrete calculation; the latter yields economic history, not timeless theory. Mathematics derives implications from a meaningful setup, but cannot create truth by itself.

Die Mathematik wirkt keine Wunder.

English translation: Mathematics works no miracles.

Schams therefore distinguishes “ansetzendes Denken,” the sense-laden constitution of the problem, from “mathematisch ausführendes Denken,” the formal development of relations. Verstehen belongs especially to the first moment; mathematical analysis can then remain legitimate if it does not smuggle in physical ontology.

The conclusion is both alliance and correction. Schams joins Sombart against scientistic economics, but argues that Sombart attacked too broadly and missed the decisive structural issue.

Nur insoweit sachliche Strukturelemente aus den Naturwissenschaften in die Nationalökonomie übernommen werden — wie wir zu zeigen uns bemühten — geht Sinnbezogenheit, Wesenserkennnis verloren.

English translation: Only insofar as substantive structural elements are taken over from the natural sciences into economics—as we have endeavored to show—is meaning-relatedness, the knowledge of essence, lost.

The essay’s relevance lies in this double refusal: it rejects both uncritical naturalism and anti-mathematical humanism. Its aim is a relationist economic theory grounded in meaning, exact in method, and free of “naturwissenschaftliche Begriffsschlacken.”

Im Kampfe gegen die naturwissenschaftliche Methode in der Nationalökonomie stoßen wir zu Sombart als Bundesgenosse.

English translation: In the struggle against the natural-scientific method in economics, we come upon Sombart as an ally.