Richard Kerschagl, L. Walras, Theorie des Geldes. Eine Entgegnung (1923)

Richard Kerschagl’s journal rejoinder answers Alfred Amonn’s criticism of the German Walras translation associated with Kerschagl and Dr. Raditz. Its scope is explicitly divided by responsibility: Kerschagl defends his introduction and bibliographical annotations, leaving Raditz to answer for the translation. The article proceeds from acknowledgments of printing errors to substantive clarifications of monetary terminology, then closes with a protest against Amonn’s polemical conduct. Its central contention is that Amonn mistakes contextual arguments and correctable defects of expression for failures of economic understanding.

Kerschagl concedes that two sheets of second proofs were not incorporated, but rejects the charge that his account of Walrasian bimetallism is nonsensical. The crucial distinction is between a monetary arrangement adopted by an individual state and one capable of securing international metallic parity:

Ein intervalutarisches Metallpari gibt es aber nicht für den Einzelstaat, der die Walrasschen Maßnahmen durchführt.

English translation: There is, however, no metallic parity between currencies for an individual state implementing Walras’s measures.

This qualification supports Kerschagl’s defense of a passage Amonn allegedly removed from its context. In Kerschagl’s account, Walras’s bimetallism retains a partly notal—that is, token-based—form of money creation despite its metallic basis. It therefore cannot simply promise the international parity that monometallism treats as the decisive monetary achievement. External monetary stability might require many states to participate in the same system. The disputed formulation concerns the limits of national implementation, not a denial that metal matters to Walras.

Kerschagl next explains his phrase “stabilization of exodromic policy,” meaning policy directed toward external monetary relations:

Stabilisierung der exodromischen Politik bedeutet einfach das Gleichbleiben der durch die Metallparität gegebenen Kursparität als höchstes und einziges Ziel der Währungspolitik.

English translation: Stabilization of exodromic policy simply means maintaining unchanged the exchange-rate parity determined by metallic parity as the highest and sole aim of monetary policy.

The conceptual move is to distinguish a fixed metallic exchange-rate target from a policy seeking to equalize purchasing-power parities between states. The latter, he argues, has no fixed point and is therefore not stable in the former sense. His defense rests on separating alternative objectives of currency policy rather than treating “stability” as an unqualified good with a single meaning.

The remaining textual objections receive narrower answers: an omitted word is a correction error, a disputed pronoun refers to the “problem” under discussion, and terminology Amonn dislikes has precedents in other economic writers. Kerschagl admits that some formulations could be stylistically improved, while questioning how far stylistic judgment belongs to scientific economic criticism. He sums up his substantive defense:

Meritorisch scheint mir Amonn gegen meinen Anteil an der Arbeit nichts Wesentliches vorgebracht zu haben.

English translation: On the substance, Amonn seems to me to have advanced nothing significant against my share of the work.

The conclusion shifts from monetary analysis to the ethics of scholarly disagreement. Although Kerschagl himself uses sharply accusatory language, he insists that substantive merit cannot excuse a critic’s transgression of acceptable polemical form. The article’s significance thus lies both in its distinctions among metallic parity, purchasing-power adjustment, and international coordination, and in its defense of boundaries between technical criticism, stylistic objection, and personal disparagement.