Hans Bayer’s journal article develops a methodological programme for reunifying economics around the purposes of economic life. Bayer’s central distinction is between aggregation—overlapping findings from separate fields—and synthesis: an ordered whole whose diverse elements become intelligible through a common end.
The historical opening traces economics from its philosophical grounding in justice and natural order to the competing specialisms of historical research, pure theory, and business-cycle analysis. Bayer does not reject abstraction; he argues that abstraction becomes misleading when it removes essential features of social economic life or when theorists apply model results without restoring their omitted conditions. The resulting theories cannot simply be assembled:
Diese Verzeichnung der Wirklichkeit führt dazu, daß die Teilergebnisse der verschiedenen Richtungen der Wirtschaftslehre nicht, wie etwa die Steine eines Mosaiks, aneinander fügbar sind, weil sie gar nicht zusammen passen können.
English translation: This distortion of reality means that the partial results of the different schools of economics cannot be fitted together like the stones of a mosaic, because they cannot fit together at all.
His criticism of competitive equilibrium centres on the interdependence of its assumptions: complete market knowledge, mobile and divisible capital, equally powerful participants, and instantaneous adjustment. Relaxing these conditions changes the mechanism itself. Likewise, comparative statics can juxtapose positions without explaining movement between them. Even Hicks’s dynamic equilibrium, Bayer argues, requires an external disturbance to initiate the cycle it describes.
Applied problems nevertheless force theory beyond disciplinary isolation. Growth analysis encounters institutions and social structure; pricing encounters concentration, power, and strategic conduct; monetary theory encounters fiscal policy, wage bargaining, productivity, and expectations. These connections establish the necessity of broader explanation without yet supplying its unifying principle. Growth research and Predöhl’s spatial economics illustrate promising syntheses within particular fields, especially where quantitative analysis reconnects with historical and sociological interpretation.
The decisive third-section controversy concerns values. Against positivism and the exclusion of ultimate ends from scientific inquiry, Bayer maintains that ostensibly neutral economics already imports judgments through consumer sovereignty, production maximization, and preferred distributive rules. Merely accepting ends supplied by politics deprives economics of grounds for criticizing them. His alternative distinguishes freedom from unexamined premises from freedom from values:
Voraussetzungenlosigkeit heißt, daß kein Satz der Beweisführung zugrunde gelegt werden darf, ohne daß man sich zuvor von seiner Wahrheit und Gewißheit Rechenschaft gibt.
English translation: Freedom from presuppositions means that no proposition may be made the basis of a proof without first accounting for its truth and certainty.
Bayer thus treats ultimate values as objects of ontological knowledge rather than arbitrary prescriptions. This is the article’s strongest philosophical commitment: economics can discover its purpose through the nature of material goods and the individual and social nature of human beings. Its claims to scientific unity depend on accepting that commitment, not simply on encouraging interdisciplinary research.
The final section identifies the economic end as securing enduring material foundations for personal development. Production remains a means: greater output is not an improvement if its human costs impede that development. Individual freedom must accommodate collective interests, while institutions must serve persons rather than absorb them. Bayer derives subsidiarity from this reciprocal obligation, assigning functions to individuals and smaller communities wherever they can perform them as well as larger bodies.
His “teleological equilibrium” names the ideal alignment of scarce means with this human end. Because complete alignment is unattainable, the concept supplies a continuing orientation for change rather than a stationary resting point:
Im teleologischen Gleichgewicht aber ist eine ständige innere Dynamik der Wirtschaft verkörpert.
English translation: In teleological equilibrium, however, a constant internal dynamic of the economy is embodied.
“ tension” becomes the corresponding methodological category: relations between production and consumption, needs and income, individuals and collectives, and absolute ends and relative means generate economic movement. Advertising illustrates its critical application, since profitable stimulation of demand need not satisfy underlying human needs. Bayer nevertheless cautions that ultimate ends yield no immediate policy prescriptions: practical conclusions require economic knowledge and accurate assessment of historical circumstances. The article’s relevance lies in this attempted integration of explanation, normative criticism, and policy judgment; it outlines the foundations of synthetic economics without supplying the complete system.
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