Unsere Aufgaben is a programmatic inaugural essay on the vocation of economic science and of an economic journal. Böhm-Bawerk begins from the unusual public urgency of political economy in the late nineteenth century. Economic life has become interdependent: harvests, currencies, tariffs, machines, transport, labor conflict, legislation, and international markets now bind individual welfare to remote social causes.
Selten oder nie war das Interesse für Wirtschaftsfragen, 1 für Fragen der Volkswirtschaft und Sozialpolitik, so allgemein und lebhaft wie in unseren Tagen.
English translation: Seldom or never has interest in economic questions—in questions of political economy and social policy—been so general and lively as in our own day.
The essay’s first task is diagnostic. Böhm-Bawerk presents the age as one in which practical administration, theoretical clarification, and social reform can no longer be separated. Daily policy problems multiply; older legal and economic forms are strained by technical change; and the “social question” demands institutions that can make progress beneficial to the masses. His stance is reformist but anti-utopian: social policy must avoid both impossible ideals and resigned inaction.
So türmen sich die wirtschaftlichen und sozialpolitischen Aufgaben unserer Zeit gleichsam in dreifachem Aufbau.
English translation: Thus the economic and social-political tasks of our time pile up, as it were, in a threefold structure.
The second task is institutional. Böhm-Bawerk distinguishes the journal from the finished book or decisive act of statecraft. A journal lives among unresolved problems, where inquiry must remain open, disciplined, and hospitable to multiple methods. Its work is not to enforce a party line but to create contact among theory, statistics, history, law, administration, and practical experience.
Schon deshalb, weil ja ihr Lebenselement die Fragen der Zeit, die drängenden, gährenden Fragen sind, für die es noch keine patentierte Lösung gibt.
English translation: Precisely because its lifeblood consists in the questions of the day—the pressing, fermenting questions for which there is as yet no patented solution.
This pluralism is not relativism. Böhm-Bawerk insists that contributors must bring competence, evidence, and seriousness to public questions. Specialization is necessary, but it becomes dangerous when it hardens into one-sidedness. The journal should therefore counteract professional narrowing by making different forms of knowledge mutually corrective.
Das Geringste ist, daß er über den jeweiligen Gegenstand Sachkenntnis und Erfahrung besitzen muß.
English translation: The least that can be required is that he possess expert knowledge and experience of the subject in question.
Böhm-Bawerk’s defense of theory is also practical. Practice sees immediate facts vividly, but may miss indirect causes and long chains of consequence. Theory’s value lies in showing what is not directly visible: the hidden mechanism behind unemployment, poverty, prices, wages, and policy effects. Correct diagnosis is already a practical achievement, because it prevents false remedies.
The essay’s social-political argument turns on durability. Böhm-Bawerk doubts reforms that depend only on temporary market conditions or wage bargains. Lasting improvement requires institutional “anchors” less exposed to the fluctuations of supply and demand: insurance, factory hygiene, housing, Sunday rest, schooling, and regulated working time. These measures matter because they stabilize gains that poverty and competition might otherwise dissolve.
Aber die gesunde Ausgestaltung, die sich gleich weit von falschen, unerreichbaren Idealen, wie von einer in mürrischem Pessimismus wurzelnden Untätigkeit hält, wird uns noch lange und viel zu denken geben.
English translation: But the sound development—one that keeps equally distant from false, unattainable ideals and from an inactivity rooted in sullen pessimism—will give us much to think about for a long time to come.
The essay finally defines economics as a socially responsible science of mediation: between theory and practice, freedom and regulation, historical detail and abstract law, reforming hope and causal sobriety. Its ideal journal is anti-dogmatic without being weak, empirical without being blind to theory, and socially engaged without surrendering to fashion.
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