Gottfried Haberler’s review article examines Richard Strigl’s Die ökonomischen Kategorien und die Organisation der Wirtschaft as an attempt to establish economics as an empirical science of exact laws. Across eight sections, Haberler moves from the methodological problem through Strigl’s categories, the relationship between theory and history, and the treatment of value and prices, before developing two concluding criticisms. His judgment combines substantial agreement with a demand for greater logical clarity: Strigl advances the foundations of economics by dispensing with a special motive of “economic” conduct, but leaves both the derivation of his categories and the transition to more specific theories insufficiently explained.
The opening locates Strigl’s achievement against classical economics, marginal utility theory, and Alfred Amonn. Classical economists insufficiently specified the assumptions under which their laws held; marginalists clarified the role of static conditions but retained an assumption of specifically economic behavior. Haberler accepts Amonn’s objection to making this behavior foundational, while rejecting his separation of social economics from the theory of individual economic activity. Strigl offers a way to preserve their connection without defining economics through a privileged motive.
The decisive move is to distinguish the universal forms of economic analysis from their historically variable contents. Economics does not simply inherit facts already classified by ordinary understanding or neighboring sciences. Like mechanics or chemistry, it selects and organizes experience through its own concepts. Strigl’s four categories are possible uses of goods, control over goods, the economic subject, and a ranking of possible uses. Goods are understood through alternative uses rather than merely as physical objects; economic subjects need not coincide with individual persons; and rankings incorporate purposes without judging their reasonableness. Psychological, technical, legal, and religious circumstances enter through the concrete specification of these categories.
Die Frage lautet nicht: Wie handelt der Mensch in einer bestimmten Situation? sondern: Wie sind die Güterverwendungen durch die gegebenen Daten bestimmt?
English translation: The question is not: How does a person act in a particular situation? Rather: How are the uses of goods determined by the given data?
This reformulation explains the proposed exactness of economics. Conduct that appears irrational does not refute an economic law: ignorance changes which means are available to the actor, while unreasonable purposes remain purposes. Contingency is assigned to the data rather than permitted to qualify the law. Economic history supplies the concrete organization of economic life, whereas theory establishes relationships holding across its possible configurations. Haberler nevertheless recognizes the practical limits of historical specification: historians must select significant features and draw on legal history, technology, psychology, and other disciplines. Economics cannot itself explain every change in its data, including changes caused by natural events.
Strigl similarly removes the psychological clothing of marginal utility theory. Value becomes an analytical measure of the replaceability of one quantity of goods by another, not an independently experienced psychological magnitude. Haberler regards this as compatible with the substantive achievements of marginalism. He objects, however, when Strigl places prices imposed through organized power outside the economic process, treating them as prior determinations of its data.
Die Preisbildung unter dem Einfluß der Macht ist prinzipiell dieselbe wie die „freie“ Preisbildung.
English translation: Price formation under the influence of power is fundamentally the same as “free” price formation.
Haberler’s point is methodological, not an assertion that power has no economic effects. Threats and promises alter available uses and rankings; their effects therefore belong within the same explanatory framework. Moreover, power may influence a price without fully determining it. Continuous transitions between cases undermine a sharp boundary beyond which price theory supposedly ceases to apply.
The first concluding criticism concerns Strigl’s avoidance of an explicit epistemological commitment. Haberler argues that methodological inquiry necessarily carries such commitments, whether acknowledged or not. He reconstructs Strigl’s question as Kantian: economic laws are presupposed, and the conditions of their possibility are sought.
Es fehlt das leitende Prinzip. Die Kategorien scheinen zusammengelesen und nicht abgeleitet.
English translation: The guiding principle is missing. The categories seem to have been gathered together rather than derived.
Strigl should therefore first clarify what constitutes an economic law and then demonstrate the categories required for its possibility. Beginning with material need does not accomplish this: the circumstances giving rise to economic activity are not identical with its defining conceptual structure. Haberler distinguishes the real ground of an activity from the ground of our knowledge of it.
The second criticism concerns the architecture of theory. Universal categories alone must be distinguished from theories incorporating particular technical, institutional, or behavioral assumptions.
Es ergibt sich also das Gebäude der theoretischen Nationalökonomie in Gestalt einer Pyramide, deren Spitze von der reinen Theorie gebildet wird.
English translation: The structure of theoretical economics thus takes the shape of a pyramid whose apex is formed by pure theory.
Descending this pyramid increases explanatory content while narrowing applicability. Distinctions between consumption and production goods introduce problems of imputation; further assumptions permit movement from individual economic activity to an exchange economy. General price laws and much monetary theory require particular behavioral assumptions, even though those assumptions cannot define pure economics. Haberler finds these transitions inadequately developed in Strigl. The article’s lasting methodological interest lies in this combination: defending exact economic laws while insisting that their scope, assumptions, and relation to historical circumstances be made explicit. Despite its unresolved foundations, Strigl’s book represents, for Haberler, a major advance toward that task.
This work was divided into 9 sections when it entered the library's research corpus—an apparatus for search and citation, not necessarily the author's own table of contents. Each title opens its summary.
Put a question to this work; the Librarian answers from its 9 sections and cites the passage.
Ask the Librarian