Friedrich von Wieser · 1929
This file brings together Wieser’s 1911 “Kritische Glossen” on Schumpeter with related defenses of Austrian value theory. Its central claim is methodological as much as doctrinal: theoretical economics must idealize, but it cannot detach its concepts from the lived consciousness of valuing, choosing, calculating economic subjects.
Wieser begins from admiration for Schumpeter’s brilliance, but resists Schumpeter’s attempt to accept Austrian results while rejecting their “psychological” grounding. For Wieser, method and result are inseparable:
Wer unsere Ergebnisse annimmt, muß auch unsere Methode annehmen, sie sind voneinander nicht zu trennen.
English translation: Whoever accepts our results must also accept our method; the two cannot be separated from each other.
By psychological method Wieser does not mean speculative psychology, physiology, or metaphysics. Economics need not settle the nature of the psyche; it studies the practical consciousness already operative in wants, scarcity, choice, and valuation. Hence it can remain independent of changing psychological theories while still refusing a purely external natural-scientific model.
Wir lassen uns in ihre Analysen der psychischen Grundgebilde in keiner Weise ein, sondern suchen Erkenntnisse, die aufrecht bleiben, welche psychischen Grundgebilde immer von der wissenschaftlichen Psychologie festgestellt werden sollten.
English translation: We do not in any way engage with their analyses of the elementary psychic structures; rather, we seek findings that remain valid no matter which elementary psychic structures scientific psychology may eventually establish.
The sharpest dispute concerns hypothesis. Schumpeter models theory on the exact natural sciences, constructing simplified assumptions and judging them by analytic yield. Wieser accepts abstraction and isolation, but insists that economic theory abstracts from experience rather than positing arbitrary fictions. What Schumpeter treats as a neutral formal procedure therefore appears to Wieser as a loss of contact with the very facts economics must explain.
Man sieht, er folgt auch darin einem Vorbilde, das er bei den Naturwissenschaften findet; seine Annahmen haben den Charakter von Hypothesen und er bezeichnet sie auch an zahlreichen Stellen mit diesem Namen.
English translation: One sees that in this too he follows a model drawn from the natural sciences; his assumptions have the character of hypotheses, and he expressly designates them as such in numerous places.
The essays on value extend this same position. Value is grounded in utility, but not in aggregate usefulness; it arises where scarce goods become objects of marginal decision. Wieser’s point is not that usefulness and value coincide, but that only the economically decisive portion of usefulness becomes value.
Der Wert der Güter leitet sich gänzlich von ihrem Nutzen ab, aber ihr Nutzen läßt sich nicht zur Gänze in Wert verwandeln.
English translation: The value of goods is derived entirely from their utility, but their utility cannot be wholly converted into value.
From this follows the doctrine of imputation. Because production joins land, labor, capital, and organization, theory must explain how economic responsibility for the product is assigned. Wieser treats imputation not as a physical partition of output, but as the precondition of accounting, entrepreneurship, income distribution, and rational economic conduct. Costs likewise are not an independent source of value; they are themselves valuations of productive goods through their alternative uses.
This framework lets Wieser criticize both socialist labor claims and Ricardian cost theories. Labor does not create value merely because it is labor or because it is painful; it receives value from the products it can help bring forth. Capital cannot be reduced to stored-up past labor, since present calculation begins from an inherited apparatus of productive opportunities. Cost, rent, interest, and capitalization all remain subordinate to marginal utility.
Das Gesetz des Grenznutzens schließt richtig verstanden das Kostengesetz in sich.
English translation: The law of marginal utility, properly understood, contains within itself the law of cost.
The file’s importance lies in this double defense: against Schumpeter’s formal, natural-scientific purification of theory, and against labor-cost reductions of value. Wieser presents Austrian economics as a unified science of meaningful economic action, built from marginal utility, idealizing empirical method, and imputation.
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