Richard von Strigl, “Wirtschaftstheorie im Dienste der Wirtschaftspolitik” (1928)

This source should be treated as a separately printed contribution from the multi-author Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, not as a standalone monograph. The broader edited periodical volume provides the collective scholarly setting; the supplied text, however, preserves Strigl’s contribution rather than a full table of contents for the whole volume. Its recoverable contributor is therefore Richard von Strigl, whose chapter/article asks how economic theory can serve policy without becoming political advocacy.

Diese Schrift behandelt in anregender Weise die Frage, wie Wirtschaftstheorie Regeln für richtige Wirtschaft geben kann.

English translation: This work treats, in stimulating fashion, the question of how economic theory can furnish rules for sound economic conduct.

Strigl’s contribution opens from the familiar split between theory and practice, but insists that economics suffers from this division with unusual intensity. Practical policy frequently distrusts theory, while theory often remains remote from administrative urgency and partisan conflict.

Kaum irgendwo aber ist die Scheidung so tiefgehend, wie auf dem Gebiete der Volkswirtschaft.

English translation: Hardly anywhere, however, is the division so profound as in the field of political economy.

The first movement of the chapter therefore defines the problem of mediation: theory cannot choose political ends, but it can clarify the causal consequences of means. Strigl’s model is not technocratic rule by economists, but a division of labor in which policy supplies aims and theory tests whether proposed measures can achieve them.

The historical middle section reconstructs classical liberalism as an earlier attempt to unite economic theory and policy. Physiocracy and the English classical economists could draw practical conclusions because they treated economic order as intelligible and law-governed. Yet Strigl argues that liberal policy smuggled in an end of its own: national wealth.

Wealth of nations, Reichtum der Völker, ist das Ziel der liberalen Wirtschaftspolitik.

English translation: Wealth of nations—Reichtum der Völker—is the aim of liberal economic policy.

That standard gives the classical case for free trade its force, especially in Adam Smith’s argument about international division of labor. But Strigl stresses that wealth cannot simply absorb all other political values. A policy may raise total output while altering population, national power, distribution, or social stability in ways that politics may reasonably judge otherwise.

Man sieht hier deutlich, wie der liberale Freihandelsgedanke den wirtschaftlichen Erfolg ganz allein in den Vordergrund rückt.

English translation: One sees clearly here how the liberal free-trade idea places economic success alone in the foreground.

The later sections turn from liberalism to the practical substitutes for theory that arise in policy controversy. Historical description, interest-group argument, and common-sense causal claims all appear to offer guidance, but Strigl treats them as unstable unless disciplined by theory. His target is “vulgar economics”: not popular ignorance alone, but the pseudo-theory embedded in debates over prices, tariffs, subsidies, taxation, and social reform.

The constructive conclusion gives modern economic theory a service role within the edited volume’s wider social-scientific concern with policy. Pure theory abstracts in order to identify general relations; applied theory then reintroduces concrete data—institutions, legal rules, market forms, incentives, and social conditions. Economic theory serves policy best when it refuses both doctrinaire laissez-faire and ad hoc interventionism. It cannot determine what society ought to want, but it can show what follows if society chooses particular means.