Strigl’s essay is a methodological prolegomenon to economic theory: it asks what must be meant by “economy” if economics is to be a genuine science of laws. He begins by rejecting the ordinary concept of Wirtschaft as too unstable and too saturated with non-economic associations. Economic language comes already mixed with technology, psychology, law, ethics, geography, and social theory; the task of theory is therefore not to collect this material as given, but to re-form it in concepts proper to economic explanation.
Wir können kaum eines der Worte, welche die einfachsten Begriffe der Wirtschaftslehre bezeichnen sollen, aussprechen, ohne an technische, psychologische, rechtliche, ethische, oder „soziale“ Zusammenhänge zu denken.
English translation: We can scarcely utter any of the words that are meant to designate the simplest concepts of economics without thinking of technical, psychological, legal, ethical, or "social" connections.
Against both uncritical empiricism and historicist relativism, Strigl argues that economics must isolate the “purely economic” element in experience. Its basic concepts are not borrowed from common speech or neighboring sciences; they are “ökonomische Kategorien,” the necessary forms in which any economic fact must be grasped. The starting point is Gottl’s “Lebensnot,” scarcity in the broad sense: there are fewer goods than possible wants. Strigl strips this notion of its emotional or ethical overtones and treats it as the formal condition from which economic relations arise.
Wirtschaft entspringt aus der „Lebensnot“
English translation: Economy springs from the "exigency of life."
The essay’s structure moves from this problem of concept-formation to the scope of pure theory, then to categories, data, organization, data-changes, economic history, and the status of the social. A key move is Strigl’s reinterpretation of “data.” Modern theory, as he notes through Böhm-Bawerk and Schumpeter, presupposes needs, capacities, goods, production methods, geographical milieu, and social organization. But these cannot remain external, meta-economic givens. If they are relevant to economic law, they must appear in specifically economic form. Thus the “data” of an economy are concrete fillings of the economic categories.
Das Metaökonomische erscheint als Inhalt der ökonomischen Kategorien, die Daten der Wirtschaft sind Konkretisierungen ökonomischer Kategorien.
English translation: The meta-economic appears as the content of the economic categories; the data of the economy are concretizations of economic categories.
This leads to Strigl’s distinctive concept of the “Organisation der Wirtschaft.” It does not mean organization merely in the institutional sense, but the total concrete determination of the economic categories in a given case: the historically variable way in which wants, goods, capacities, command over goods, methods, and social arrangements become economically operative. Pure theory states what follows from the categories as such; organization describes how those categories are realized in a particular historical economy.
Die Gesetze der ökonomischen Theorie sagen uns, was bei gegebener Organisation der Wirtschaft eintreten wird.
English translation: The laws of economic theory tell us what will occur given a particular organization of the economy.
Strigl thereby both secures and limits theory. Economic laws operate strictly where the relevant data are given; when the data change from outside the economic process—say, through natural destruction of goods—there is a “Bruchstelle” that theory cannot bridge as economic law. Such events may be explicable by other sciences, but for economics they are new data-settings. This is not a defect: it defines the autonomy of economics as a law-science.
The same framework lets Strigl reconcile pure theory, special theory, and economic history. Pure theory derives relations from the most general categories; special theories arise when typical historical determinations are added; economic history becomes the history of economic data and of the lawful effects attached to them. History is therefore not opposed to theory, but receives its object from theory.
His discussion of the “social” is especially important. Against Amonn, Strigl denies that social exchange defines economics as such. Robinson Crusoe, household economy, communist planning, and market exchange all belong to economics insofar as they instantiate scarcity and economic categories. The social is overwhelmingly important empirically, but it belongs to organization, not to the pure concept of economy.
Die theoretische Nationalökonomie ist keine Sozialwissenschaft, sondern enthält Aussagen über Begriffe, welche soziale und auch nichtsoziale Erscheinungen erfassen können.
English translation: Theoretical economics is not a social science; rather, it contains propositions about concepts that can encompass social as well as non-social phenomena.
The closing program is thus a purification of economics from both alien causal vocabularies and normative demands. Strigl’s categories are not empirical descriptions, but the forms that make economic experience intelligible as subject to law.
das Rüstzeug des ökonomischen Denkens, sie sind förmlich die Brillen, durch welche wir die Wirtschaft betrachten müssen.
English translation: the toolkit of economic thought; they are, as it were, the spectacles through which we must view the economy.
The work’s relevance lies in its attempt to give Austrian value theory and marginal analysis a rigorous methodological foundation while also answering the historical school: economic theory is not blind to historical variation, but history enters as the changing content of invariant economic forms.
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