Böhm-Bawerk’s essay surveys recent theoretical economics through reviews of Marshall, Dietzel, Stolzmann, Taussig, Wicksell, Leo von Buch, Wernicke, and Gottl. It is less a neutral bibliography than a methodological intervention: theory must distinguish verbal harmonies from causal explanations, preserve valid insights in older doctrines without accepting their foundations, and refuse the conclusion that confusion over value proves the futility of value theory itself.
Marshall appears first as the great contemporary synthesizer. Böhm-Bawerk admires the Principles for breadth, balance, and systematic power, treating it as the most authoritative statement of modern economics available to his generation.
Wie Mill für seine Zeit, liefert uns Marshall für die unsrige die vollständigste Darbietung des bis jetzt in unserer Wissenschaft aufgehäuften Schatzes von Erkenntnissen, eines Schatzes, dem Marshall zugleich persönlich so manche Bereicherung angefügt hat.
English translation: As Mill did for his time, Marshall provides for ours the most complete presentation of the treasure of insights hitherto accumulated in our science, a treasure to which Marshall has also personally added many an enrichment.
Yet this praise also defines the standard by which Marshall is judged. His reconciliation of cost and utility, demand and supply, short and long periods, is invaluable, but it can remain too conciliatory where Böhm-Bawerk wants sharper causation. In capital and interest theory especially, terms such as waiting, abstinence, productivity, and sacrifice do not by themselves explain why interest arises. Synthesis must not become an elegant arrangement of partially unresolved doctrines.
Dietzel receives the essay’s most sustained criticism because he represents a refined defense of cost theory against marginal utility. Böhm-Bawerk argues that this opposition collapses once Dietzel defines costs through sacrificed alternative uses of productive means. If productive goods are valued according to the utilities displaced by their employment elsewhere, cost is not an independent source of value but a derivative expression of marginal valuation.
Ich glaube, es wird schwer sein, zwischen der eben dargestellten Lehre Dietzels und dieser Lehre der Grenzwerttheoretiker irgendeinen essentiellen Unterschied herauszufinden.
English translation: I believe it will be difficult to discover any essential difference between the doctrine of Dietzel just presented and this doctrine of the marginal-value theorists.
This is the essay’s central theoretical claim. Böhm-Bawerk does not deny that cost regularities matter for reproducible goods or market prices; he denies that they vindicate a labor or sacrifice theory of value. Costs influence prices because costs are themselves values, and those values point back to marginal uses. Dietzel’s attempt to retain a classical residue fails especially where capital, time, and alternative employments make equal labor expenditures yield unequal economic results.
Stolzmann shifts the discussion from value to social power. He challenges abstract theory by emphasizing class position, coercion, legal order, and bargaining strength in the formation of wages, interest, rent, and exchange. Böhm-Bawerk takes this challenge seriously, since actual distribution cannot be derived from technical productivity alone. But he finds Stolzmann’s positive doctrine opaque and unconvincing.
Ich glaube nicht, dass Stolzmann für seine positive Theorie von den Arbeiter- und Capitalisten-Nahrungseinheiten viele Proselyten machen wird.
English translation: I do not think that Stolzmann will make many proselytes for his positive theory of the workers' and capitalists' subsistence units.
The point is not that institutions are irrelevant, but that social force cannot replace economic causation wholesale. Distribution must be explained through the interaction of scarcity, productivity, time, valuation, and institutional power. Böhm-Bawerk resists any theory that turns one element—labor, cost, power, or productivity—into an all-sufficient cause.
The shorter reviews extend this map of late nineteenth-century theory. Taussig is praised for treating the wages-fund doctrine historically and analytically rather than dismissing it as mere error. Wicksell is valued for originality, especially in connecting the bank rate, the natural rate of interest, and movements in the general price level. Leo von Buch, Wernicke, and Gottl represent further efforts to revise Marxism, combine subjective and objective value, or abandon the value problem as misconceived.
Against such skepticism, Böhm-Bawerk ends with guarded confidence. Rival schools and unstable terminology do not show that value theory lacks an object; they show that its object is difficult and that progress requires stricter causal analysis.
Und die Zukunft der Wertlehre? Sie erscheint mir keineswegs so hoffnungslos wie dem Verfasser.
English translation: And the future of value theory? It appears to me by no means as hopeless as it does to the author.
The essay therefore functions as both review and Austrian program. It defends marginal utility as the ultimate foundation of cost, criticizes unresolved compromises in capital and distribution theory, concedes the relevance of social power without granting it explanatory sovereignty, and insists that theoretical economics advances not by abandoning value theory but by clarifying it.
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