Wilhelm Vleugels, “Wieser, Friedrich von”

Wilhelm Vleugels’s biographical encyclopedia article, originally published in 1935 and republished in 1937, presents Wieser as an integrative thinker whose economics leads into a sociology of power. It moves from his Austrian administrative and academic career through marginal-utility theory to his account of leadership and historical change, closing with works and secondary references.

The biographical opening situates Wieser between scholarship and government: he taught in Prague, succeeded to Carl Menger’s chair in Vienna, and served as minister of commerce in 1917 before returning to teaching after the empire’s collapse. Vleugels locates his principal economic contribution in extending marginal utility to costs: the value of productive factors depends on the least important economic uses to which they are applied. His theory of computation (Zurechnung), demonstrated through two algebraic formulae, supplies the foundation of his general price theory. The entry emphasizes the systematic ambition behind this technical contribution:

It was characteristic of Wieser that in dealing with special economic problems he always attempted to place them in their relationship to the totality of economic phenomena, imparting to economic theory a degree of integration previously unknown.

This strongly appreciative judgment supplies the entry’s organizing principle. Economic phenomena must be understood both in relation to one another and within their social setting. Vleugels therefore treats Wieser’s sociology as an extension of his economic concerns. In Das Gesetz der Macht, Wieser formulated the “law of small numbers”: the many are governed by the few, whether through domination or other forms of leadership. Historical development combines redistribution of political power among classes with a gradual, interrupted reduction in force as a means of settling group conflicts.

He held that forms of social organization are conditioned by the political and cultural maturity of the people.

This proposition connects Wieser’s general sociology to his assessment of postwar democracy. Vleugels calls his prediction that the new democracies would yield to dictatorships ending party conflict “almost prophetic.” The closing assessment thus shifts from exposition to retrospective endorsement of Wieser’s predictive insight. The entry’s significance lies in this compressed connection between subjective value theory, the social conditions of economic life, and the persistence of minority leadership: Vleugels portrays a theorist of economic interdependence whose wider account of society foregrounds power and political development.