Markus Ettinger · 1905
Ettinger’s Die Regelung des Wettbewerbes im modernen Wirtschaftssystem. I. Teil: Die Kartelle in Oesterreich is an economic-legal monograph on Austrian cartels and on the wider problem of how modern capitalism regulates competition. Its central claim is that cartels are not artificial exceptions to the market but institutions generated by the development of industrial competition itself.
Die Kartelle sind weder eine von den wissenschaftlichen Vertretern der Nationalökonomie erdachte, noch aber auch durch die Gesetzgebungen ins Leben gerufene Institution.
English translation: Cartels are neither an institution devised by the academic representatives of political economy, nor one called into being by legislation.
This premise gives the work its distinctive balance. Ettinger neither celebrates unrestricted competition nor treats every cartel simply as a criminal conspiracy. He asks why competitive markets produce associations designed to restrain competition, and what legal and political response such associations require. Cartels appear as practical answers to destructive price struggles, uncertainty, overproduction, and unstable relations among firms; but precisely because they organize whole branches, they also create questions of monopoly power and public interest.
The book therefore moves from economic diagnosis to institutional prescription. Ettinger analyzes cartel forms as stages in the organization of an industry: loose agreements may temporarily calm price wars, but they remain vulnerable to distrust, evasion, and anxiety over market shares. More integrated forms promise greater stability by transforming rivalry into collective calculation. Cartelization is thus presented as an internal tendency of modern industry, not as a mere legal accident.
For Ettinger, this makes state neutrality impossible. If private associations already regulate prices, output, risk, and branch policy, then the public authority must decide how such regulation is to be supervised or limited.
Dem Kartellprobleme kann und darf der Staat nicht länger als stiller Beobachter gegenüberstehen.
English translation: The state can and must no longer stand before the cartel problem as a silent observer.
The sentence captures the book’s program. Ettinger is not simply arguing for prohibition; he is arguing that the state must recognize cartels as real economic powers. A liberal order cannot pretend that competition remains untouched when firms have organized themselves to manage it. The political question becomes how to distinguish stabilizing coordination from private domination, and how to protect the general interest when an entire branch acts collectively.
A further emphasis falls on the organizational logic of risk. Ettinger treats cartel and cooperative forms as devices for reducing the insecurity that individual firms face in open competition. Under certain assumptions, membership can become a means of neutralizing exposure rather than increasing it.
Es ist evident, dass alle diese Voraussetzungen gleichzeitig niemals eintreten können, so dass irgendein Risiko aus der Zugehörigkeit zur Genossenschaft niemals für ein Mitglied erwachsen kann.
English translation: It is evident that all these conditions can never occur simultaneously, so that no risk whatever can ever arise for a member from belonging to the cooperative.
This reasoning reveals the constructive side of the study. Cartels are not described only as instruments of price exploitation; they are also mechanisms for making production and sale more predictable. By pooling information, fixing rules, and aligning member conduct, the association redirects attention from internal struggle to common branch strategy.
Die ganze Energie wird daher für Wahrung der Interessen der Gesamtbranche frei werden.
English translation: All energies will thereby be freed up for safeguarding the interests of the branch as a whole.
Yet this is also where the danger becomes clearest. If the energy of firms is unified around the “interests” of the branch, consumers, outsiders, labor, and the state must ask whether those interests coincide with the public good. Ettinger’s significance lies in this tension: cartels may rationalize competition, but they may also convert market coordination into monopoly power.
Overall, the monograph is an early systematic attempt to understand cartels as products of modern competitive development and as necessary objects of public regulation. Its importance lies in refusing both naïve faith in laissez-faire and simple anti-cartel denunciation. Cartels are real institutions created by market pressures; because they are real and powerful, Ettinger argues, they cannot be left outside law and public policy.
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