Karl Pribram, Volkswirtschaftliche Uebungen über Krieg und Wirtschaftspolitik (1917)

Karl Pribram’s report describes economics seminars held at the University of Vienna during the winter and summer semesters of 1915/16. It combines an account of teaching methods with an interpretation of the wartime transformation of economic policy. Its organizing question is how war has altered the state’s position within economic life: through changes arising from its enlarged economic role, through deliberate intervention, and through the increasingly explicit connection between economic and foreign policy. The sequence of student presentations makes these distinctions concrete, moving from emergency measures and domestic provisioning to commercial policy and international economic rapprochement.

Pribram situates these exercises within an established teaching practice. Earlier seminars had addressed housing, labour protection, cartels, and the historical development of economic thought. Each concentrated on a substantial policy field while preserving its connections with neighbouring fields and the wider theoretical system. Congress proceedings and official inquiries provided particularly useful foundations because they brought competing positions together within a bounded body of evidence. Method was itself an object of instruction:

Ein besonderes Augenmerk wird den Methoden der Forschung gewidmet.

English translation: Particular attention is devoted to methods of research.

Since many participants were beginners, Pribram did not normally expect independent treatments of the material. Instead, he interrupted presentations at suitable intervals with questions, making clarification and discussion part of the exposition rather than postponing them until its conclusion. The report thus presents a guided, documentary approach to economic reasoning. For the wartime seminars, attended by between fifteen and thirty participants, principal materials included German and Austrian government memoranda, wartime issues of the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, and publications of the Verein für Sozialpolitik on economic rapprochement.

The introductory lectures distinguished two ways in which the state’s economic position had shifted. Some changes occurred without a governmental policy specifically directed towards producing them; others resulted from deliberate planning. The first category concerned the growing constraint imposed on production and distribution by the state’s expanded economic weight:

Die Erscheinungen der ersten Gruppe lassen sich unter dem Schlagworte der gesteigerten Zwangsläufigkeit der Gütererzeugung und des Güterabsatzes zusammenfassen (erhöhte Bedeutung des Staates als Abnehmer von Rohstoffen und Lebensmitteln, als Auftraggeber der Industrie, als Schuldner).

English translation: The phenomena of the first group can be summed up under the heading of the increased constraint governing the production and sale of goods (the increased importance of the state as a purchaser of raw materials and foodstuffs, as a customer placing orders with industry, and as a debtor).

The distinction prevents every expansion of state influence from being treated as the execution of a coherent programme. Deliberate economic policy, by contrast, addressed the need to promote essential production and reconcile requirements with available supplies. Both developments strengthened the connection between economic policy and foreign policy. Against earlier efforts, partly shaped by liberal ideas, to preserve economic policy’s independence, Pribram treats wartime experience as a revelation of their necessary relationship:

Der Krieg hat uns auch im Wirtschaftsleben politisch denken gelehrt.

English translation: The war has taught us to think politically in economic life as well.

The first sequence of presentations traced this transformation across particular fields. Fritz G. Steiner examined the opening weeks of “Angstwirtschaft,” when Austrian measures chiefly protected individual economic interests through moratoria and maintenance allowances, without yet addressing the economy as a transformed whole. L. Sommer’s presentation on central banks, borrowing, and public finance exposed differences in the systematic character of state credit policy. K. Jokl and Stroß treated Austrian and German food policy; Mayer examined industry, commerce, and trades; and O. Olbrich considered agriculture. Together these subjects disclosed successive stages of increasingly pronounced constraint.

Eißler’s presentation on reconstruction opened a further field of state activity by comparing theoretically possible forms of compensation for wartime destruction from private-economic and state-economic perspectives. A concluding presentation on Social Democracy’s wartime position provided an occasion to examine explanations of the war through the materialist conception of history. Pribram records the analytical opportunities offered by these contributions without supplying detailed findings or reconstructing their debates.

The summer semester concentrated on commercial policy. Here the report’s central conceptual move becomes explicitly normative: Pribram challenges attempts to derive commercial policy’s tasks from exclusively economic analysis while rejecting its subordination to foreign policy.

Die Versuche, eine strenge Unterordnung der Handelspolitik unter die auswärtige Politik abzulehnen, die Aufgaben der ersteren durch eine rein wirtschaftliche Untersuchung zu gewinnen, können indes einer näheren Prüfung kaum standhalten; der staatliche Wille muß in allen Zweigen seiner Betätigung von einem einheitlichen höchsten Ziel den Ausgang nehmen.

English translation: Attempts to reject a strict subordination of commercial policy to foreign policy, and to derive the tasks of the former through a purely economic inquiry, can, however, scarcely withstand closer examination; the will of the state must proceed in every branch of its activity from a single supreme objective.

The presentations tested this unity historically and prospectively. Hudeček surveyed Austrian commercial policy, emphasizing the tendency to enlarge territories enclosed by a common customs frontier. Schima examined whether arguments for economic rapprochement were genuinely economic or selectively invoked principles—especially free trade—otherwise rejected, because political preferences favoured their application in this instance. Jokl considered possible institutional forms and treaty techniques, while K. Pick addressed Austria-Hungary’s commercial relations with the Balkan countries.

The report’s significance lies in joining an account of wartime economic teaching to a framework for interpreting state power. Pribram distinguishes structural economic pressures from intentional policy, yet insists that policy cannot ultimately be separated from political purposes. His seminar programme makes both the expansion of state intervention and the ostensibly economic arguments for international integration objects of critical inquiry.