Alexander Mahr, Alfred Amonn (1964)

Alexander Mahr’s obituary presents Alfred Amonn as an economist whose achievement lay in connecting conceptual rigor with practical judgment. Its organizing claim is that economic theory mattered to Amonn because it could clarify causal relationships and improve economic policy. Mahr proceeds from biography through a survey of publications to an assessment of Amonn’s scholarly methods, teaching, and institutional recognition. The resulting portrait places an Austrian-trained theorist at the intersection of methodology, welfare economics, public finance, and the history of economic thought.

Amonn died in Bern on 2 November 1962, aged almost eighty. Born in Bruneck in 1883, he studied law and political science in Vienna, where Menger, Böhm-Bawerk, and Wieser shaped his turn toward economics. Mahr treats this intellectual formation as decisive: Amonn’s 1911 habilitation, Objekt und Grundbegriffe der Nationalökonomie, extended Menger’s methodological investigations and helped clarify the tasks of theoretical economics. Appointments took him from Freiburg in Switzerland to Czernowitz and Prague, followed by a visiting professorship in Tokyo. From 1929 until his retirement in 1953, he held the chair of theoretical economics and public finance at Bern. This trajectory supplies the institutional framework for Mahr’s account of his influence.

The survey of publications distinguishes foundational theory from its application to policy while showing how consistently Amonn worked across both. Studies of Ricardo, basic economic concepts, and theoretical economics stand alongside writings on socialization, wages, wartime economic policy, and federal finance. His two-volume public-finance textbook further demonstrates the breadth of his teaching and research. Mahr gives Grundzüge der Volkswohlstandslehre (1926) a distinctive place: its concern with maximizing production and distributing goods more equally links productive capacity to the level of social welfare. Amonn consequently appears as a representative of the older welfare-economics tradition, rather than as a theorist concerned only with conceptual foundations.

The history of economic thought provides another connection between analytical reconstruction and substantive economic problems. Mahr records the fate of an extensive, source-based history reaching to 1830: wartime paper shortages prevented publication, and political obstacles subsequently frustrated it. The surviving two-volume study of Sismondi receives fuller discussion. According to Mahr, Amonn restored proper recognition to an underestimated economist by examining his contributions and presenting the essential contents of his principal works:

Sismondi hat, wie Amonn mit Recht betont, nicht nur als erster eine wissenschaftlich fundierte Krisentheorie entwickelt — was ja auch schon bisher in Fachkreisen anerkannt wurde —, sondern ist darüber hinaus als der erste Theoretiker der Dynamik der freien Marktwirtschaft anzusprechen.

English translation: As Amonn rightly emphasizes, Sismondi was not only the first to develop a scientifically grounded theory of crises—which had already been acknowledged in specialist circles—but must also be regarded as the first theorist of the dynamics of the free-market economy.

This judgment makes doctrinal history a means of recovering neglected analytical achievements. Mahr also stresses that, in Amonn’s interpretation, Sismondi’s knowledge of market weaknesses led toward socially oriented interventionism, not socialist planning. The distinction matters to the obituary’s broader portrait: recognizing economic dysfunction need not entail rejecting the market system.

Mahr explains Amonn’s remarkable range through selective depth rather than indiscriminate reading. He chose the literature most important to a particular problem and studied it closely. His extensive reviews could be sharply polemical or strongly appreciative, but Mahr credits them with identifying the essential issues. The 1937 critique of Keynes’s General Theory, among the earliest German-language responses, exemplifies this capacity. Mahr endorses its overall judgment without reconstructing its arguments; the passage therefore establishes his assessment of Amonn’s critical authority rather than supplying an independent evaluation of Keynes.

The obituary’s central appraisal follows this account of scholarly practice:

Besonders hoch ist dem dahingeschiedenen Gelehrten anzurechnen, daß er die wirtschaftswissenschaftliche Forschung nicht als Selbstzweck, sondern stets als Mittel zur Erkenntnis der oft sehr komplizierten Kausalzusammenhänge im Wirtschaftsleben und zur Beurteilung der Erfolgsmöglichkeiten wirtschaftspolitischer Maßnahmen betrachtete.

English translation: The deceased scholar deserves particular credit for regarding economic research not as an end in itself, but always as a means of understanding the often very complicated causal relationships in economic life and of assessing the prospects for success of economic-policy measures.

Mahr accordingly praises Amonn’s rejection of wholly unrealistic models that yield no practically useful results. The target is not abstraction as such: the obituary repeatedly values theoretical explanation. Rather, Mahr distinguishes theory that illuminates economic reality from formal exercises detached from it. He condenses this criterion into a statement of purpose:

Ausgangspunkt und Zielsetzung seiner wissenschaftlichen Forschung war doch immer die Gewinnung von Erkenntnissen, die uns besser instandsetzen sollen, die Wirklichkeit des Wirtschaftslebens zu meistern.

English translation: The starting point and aim of his scholarly research was always the acquisition of insights that should better enable us to master the realities of economic life.

Teaching extends this same commitment into Amonn’s institutional legacy. Mahr describes Swiss economics at the time of his arrival as dominated by a historical school more or less hostile to theory:

Die Lehrtätigkeit Amonns hat in hohem Maße dazu beigetragen, bei der jüngeren Generation von Schweizer Nationalökonomen das Interesse und das Verständnis für die Theorie zu fördern.

English translation: Amonn’s teaching contributed greatly to fostering interest in and understanding of theory among the younger generation of Swiss economists.

An extended tribute from H. Sieber supports this assessment, emphasizing logically satisfying concepts, causal and functional explanation, and better scientific foundations for policy. Its ideal is a balanced education that avoids oscillation between exclusively historical approaches and methodological extremes. The closing references to the international Festschrift for Amonn’s seventieth birthday and his academy memberships register public recognition. More importantly, the obituary preserves Mahr’s conception of exemplary economics: theoretically disciplined, historically informed, critically independent, and answerable to practical economic problems.