Die Positive Theorie des Kapitals und ihre Kritiker. I. Professor Clarks Ansichten über die Entstehung des Kapitals

Summary

This is a single polemical journal essay, the opening installment of Böhm-Bawerk’s replies to critics of the Positive Theory. Its immediate object is J. B. Clark’s “Genesis of Capital,” but its scope is foundational: whether capital theory should begin from actual capital goods or from an abstract, permanent fund behind them. Clark’s view, as Böhm-Bawerk reconstructs it, separates changing instruments, materials, and machines from a supposedly durable capital-substance.

Das wahre Kapital aber sei ein hievon unterschiedener „dauernder Fonds“ (permanent fund), eine „Summe oder ein Betrag von Produktivvermögen“ (sum or amount of productive wealth).

English translation: True capital, however, is said to be a "permanent fund" distinct from this, a "sum or amount of productive wealth."

Böhm-Bawerk first treats Clark’s attack as a misunderstanding of the thesis that present goods normally outrank future goods of the same kind and number. Clark’s saver with 200 dollars is not, on Böhm-Bawerk’s reading, comparing a coach-horse today with the same horse next year. He is comparing what 200 present dollars can do at the present margin with what 200 future dollars can do under later circumstances. The identity required is not identity of use, but comparability of the good whose temporal availability is being valued.

Diese ebenso harmlose, als logisch notwendige Ergänzung ist es, die ich mit meinem von Professor Clark verpönten Zusatz „Güter gleicher Art und Zahl“ zu geben beabsichtigte.

English translation: This supplement—as harmless as it is logically necessary—is what I intended to provide with my addition, disapproved of by Professor Clark, "goods of the same kind and number."

The phrase “same kind and number” is thus not a fatal “switching rail” but a logical control. Without it, time-preference would be confused with differences of substance or quantity: diamonds with pebbles, or 2000 dollars with 1000. Clark’s “sum of wealth” remains ambiguous. If it means goods, Böhm-Bawerk argues, it must specify kind and quantity; if it means equal value, the claim that present value exceeds equal future value becomes a contradiction.

The reply then turns into a methodological attack on Clark’s “true capital.” Böhm-Bawerk’s decisive move is ontological realism: capital has no causal existence apart from the concrete goods composing it. Aggregate capital may be maintained through replacement, but replacement is not the persistence of a mysterious entity. Machines, stocks, raw materials, tools, and half-finished products do the economic work; a “fund” behind them is at best shorthand.

Nun, ich kenne kein anderes Kapital als die konkreten Güter, die dasselbe zusammensetzen, und ich glaube: auch die Welt der Tatsachen kennt kein anderes.

English translation: Now, I know of no capital other than the concrete goods that compose it, and I believe that the world of facts likewise knows of no other.

This is why the essay repeatedly identifies Clark’s language as a dangerous figure of speech. It may be convenient to say that capital remains unchanged when consumed elements are replaced by others of equal value. Taken literally, however, it obscures maladjusted replacement, crisis, and old errors about saving: the concrete elements are spent, sold, or used up, even if the capitalist restores the aggregate. Scientific abstraction must not become reification.

The strongest substantive test is the production period. Clark claims that “true capital” synchronizes labor and its result: because goods exist in all stages, the worker need not wait. Böhm-Bawerk answers that immediate consumption is possible only because other concrete capital goods have already advanced through earlier production periods. The tanner may exchange today’s leather for shoes today, but those shoes are not thereby the immediate physical product of his labor.

Die wahre und unmittelbare Frucht seiner Arbeit ist das von ihm bereitete Leder und sonst nichts.

English translation: The true and immediate fruit of his labor is the leather he has prepared and nothing else.

Clark’s own exception for new industries reveals the weakness. The same waiting appears whenever production expands beyond the existing chain of partly finished goods. In a stationary economy, staggered production periods interlock so smoothly that they look abolished; in a dynamic economy the alleged power of “true capital” is actually tested and fails. What appears timeless is only the social layering of dated, concrete processes.

Das wahre Kapital Professor Clarks ist ein mystischer Begriff, der die ihm zugeschriebene Kraft weder in der dynamischen noch in einer stationären Wirtschaft äußert.

English translation: Professor Clark's true capital is a mystical concept that manifests the power ascribed to it neither in a dynamic nor in a stationary economy.

The close is conciliatory about Clark’s practical insights but severe about his terminology. Böhm-Bawerk says they agree on many concrete points, especially abstinence and the trade-off between present enjoyment and future income. Yet Clark’s prestige makes the metaphor dangerous for less cautious followers. The essay’s enduring relevance lies in this discipline of concepts: capital theory should be a natural history of real capital goods, not a mythology that lets words dominate things.

Wo die nüchterne Naturtreue auch nur um Haaresbreite verlassen wird, hört die Klarheit des wissenschaftlichen Denkens unwiederbringlich auf; an die Stelle der Herrschaft der Sache tritt die des Wortes, der klingenden Phrase.

English translation: Wherever sober fidelity to nature is departed from by so much as a hair's breadth, the clarity of scientific thought irretrievably ceases; in place of the rule of the thing comes the rule of the word, of the sonorous phrase.