Franz Xaver Weiss, Wert. Nachtrag (1928)

Franz Xaver Weiss’s signed encyclopedia supplement updates and defends the subjective theory of value presented in Böhm-Bawerk’s preceding article. Its four sections move from terminology to methodological objections, then to attempts to eliminate value theory and recent competing formulations. Weiss’s central claim is that economic explanation requires an understanding of how individuals allocate scarce means among purposes. Subjective valuation neither excludes objective constraints nor requires measurable utility; it supplies the intelligible connection between needs, available goods, and prices.

The opening section distinguishes usefulness, subjective importance, and objective exchange value. Usefulness means suitability for human purposes; importance arises when scarcity prevents all suitable purposes from being fulfilled; exchange value denotes actual or anticipated purchasing power. Their relationship is sequential but also reciprocal: exchangeability itself makes goods useful and important to their owners.

Ohne Nützlichkeit keine Wichtigkeit; ohne Wichtigkeit keine Tauschkraft.

English translation: Without usefulness, no importance; without importance, no exchange power.

This conceptual connection supports Weiss’s resistance to abandoning the word value. Its meanings concern related phenomena, not arbitrarily unrelated objects. Retaining ordinary language in a precise sense also preserves continuity in theoretical inquiry. Nevertheless, the substantive validity of the value principle matters much more than terminology.

The second section identifies subjective value theory with explanation through understanding economic agents’ actions. Individuals redirect goods from less important to more important employments until further reallocation would sacrifice a greater benefit elsewhere. Equal marginal utilities across uses describe equilibrium under the demanding idealization of complete economic divisibility, including the usability of arbitrarily small quantities. Weiss then organizes his defense around psychology, costs, circularity, and individualism.

Economic purposes are given data, not necessarily pleasure-seeking or morally approved ends. Consequently, subjective value theory entails neither hedonism nor utilitarian ethics. Nor does choice require a common numerical measure of satisfaction:

Wir können vielmehr, wie unsere Erfahrung zeigt, ohne einen Maßstab die Wichtigkeit verschiedener Zwecke (Bedürfnisse) gegeneinander abwägen — hierbei auch Mehrheiten verschiedenartiger Zwecke miteinander vergleichen — und zwischen ihnen entscheiden.

English translation: Rather, as our experience shows, we can weigh the importance of different purposes (needs) against one another without a measuring standard—also comparing combinations of different kinds of purposes—and decide between them.

Comparisons of purposes become quantitative bids and asking prices through their connection with quantities of goods. This “objectification” does not establish measurable utility, and price explanation requires no interpersonal comparison of satisfaction. Money offers a practical approximation to measurement only within limits, since its marginal utility also changes. Weiss likewise answers the objection from irrational conduct by distinguishing the formation of ends from the allocation of means: even nonrational purposes may prompt rational instrumental choices or subsequent correction.

Against the charge that utility theory neglects costs, Weiss traces valuation from consumption goods through productive inputs to labor and land services. Costs may mean input quantities, labor’s disagreeableness, or the value of inputs; these meanings must not be conflated. Input quantities constrain attainable output, but their value is not an independent ultimate explanation of product value.

Es ist vielleicht sogar ihre Hauptleistung, die Kosten als Nutznerscheinung „verstehend“ erklärt zu haben.

English translation: It is perhaps even its principal achievement to have explained costs “interpretively” as a utility phenomenon.

Foregone alternative uses connect costs with utility, while variable working time introduces the sacrifice of rest and leisure. The theory therefore combines subjective purposes with objective supplies and technical possibilities.

Weiss’s treatment of circularity makes a further distinction between underlying priorities and valuations expressed in other goods. Money bids depend on other prices; this genuine interdependence warrants simultaneous equations of the kind developed by Walras and Pareto. Yet, within the explanation, available supplies and individuals’ rankings of purposes remain the ultimate determinants. Marginal utility is an explanatory intermediate, not the ultimate cause of price. Mathematical interdependence and interpretive causal explanation are thus complementary.

Methodological individualism similarly carries no commitment to individualistic policy or socially isolated agents. Social circumstances shape valuations, but causal explanation must still identify what moves individuals to act. An organic account can illuminate an economic activity’s function within the whole without explaining its occurrence. Weiss allows collective valuation as a useful fiction, provided its basis in individual valuations remains clear.

The third section argues that eliminating value terminology does not eliminate the value principle. Cassel’s scarcity theory repeatedly employs subjective determinants despite its polemics against utility theory. Pareto’s choice-based indifference analysis legitimately represents observable comparisons, but Weiss rejects the further suggestion that unmeasurable utility has doubtful reality. Inner experience is evidence too.

Das Wertprinzip ist nicht das Gerüst, das nach Errichtung des Baues der theoretischen Oekonomie abgebrochen werden kann, sondern die Stütze, die das ganze System zusammenhält, ohne die wir seinen Sinn nicht verstehen können.

English translation: The value principle is not the scaffolding that can be dismantled after the edifice of theoretical economics has been erected, but the support that holds the entire system together, without which we cannot understand its meaning.

The final section tests purported alternatives. Liefmann’s marginal returns and Englis’s relative utility largely restate weighted marginal utility. Engländer understates how alternative purchases determine money’s subjective value. Oppenheimer’s revival of labor-value theory implicitly admits subjective valuation through producers’ qualifications and relative scarcity. His grain example preserves one price ratio only by restrictive assumptions, while overlooking reallocations affecting other goods.

The supplement’s significance lies in this defense of interpretive explanation alongside equilibrium analysis. Weiss does not declare value theory complete: his narrower conclusion is that its critics have not supplied a superior replacement for the utility principle.