Amonn’s theoretical rejoinder reassesses Franz Oppenheimer’s reconstruction of objective value theory after its clarification in response to his earlier criticism. He acknowledges misunderstandings and withdraws objections concerning peripheral concepts and the determinacy of Oppenheimer’s equations. Eliminating unspecified factors, including normal income, has substantially narrowed the dispute. The central question is now whether a logically consistent deduction rests on assumptions capable of explaining actual price formation.
Er reduziert sich im wesentlichen auf die Voraussetzungen, die Oppenheimer seiner Deduktion zugrunde legt. Logisch ist kaum noch etwas anfechtbar.
English translation: It reduces essentially to the presuppositions which Oppenheimer lays at the basis of his deduction. Logically, hardly anything further is contestable.
The first disputed assumption is that equally qualified producers’ incomes tend toward equality under static conditions. Amonn distinguishes the capacity to earn a higher income from the decision to exercise that capacity. Equally capable individuals may choose differently because occupations differ in pleasantness, danger, and exertion. Whether their evaluations are personally formed or socially conditioned does not remove this difficulty: higher earnings must still compensate for occupational disadvantages as those individuals judge them. If Oppenheimer instead defines someone who chooses lower earnings as less qualified, qualification ceases to explain income differences and merely redescribes the choices producing them.
Logisch ausgedrückt: der Satz Oppenheimers ist nunmehr ein rein analytisches Urteil und aus einem solchen können sich keine empirischen Erkenntnisse ergeben.
English translation: Expressed logically: Oppenheimer's proposition is now a purely analytic judgment, and from such a judgment no empirical knowledge can result.
This criticism leads to Amonn’s central conceptual distinction between valuation itself and the conditions shaping it. He accepts Oppenheimer’s contention that higher-paid products receive higher valuations and that these valuations depend on traditions and social circumstances. But this concession reverses the proposed explanatory order: incomes depend on prices, and prices depend on valuations. Social conditioning does not make valuation an act performed by society independently of individuals.
Man darf das Wesen eines Tatbestandes nicht mit seiner Bedingtheit verwechseln, was Oppenheimer gewiß nicht realiter, aber doch in der Bezeichnung tut.
English translation: One must not confuse the essence of a state of affairs with its conditionedness, which Oppenheimer certainly does not do in substance, but does do in his designation.
Valuations remain subjective because they belong to subjects, even when their determinants can be called objective. Amonn therefore substitutes producers’ pursuit of higher product prices for Oppenheimer’s supposed universal pursuit of maximum income; income follows from price and the quantity sold. Neither pursuit, he adds, is the sole motive governing exchange. His argument preserves the explanatory role of subjective judgment without treating individuals as socially isolated.
The second major objection concerns the assumption that equally qualified marginal producers work for equal durations and with equal intensity. Defining these conditions into “statics” cannot establish their empirical validity. They may provisionally simplify inquiry, but cannot supply an unquestioned foundation for the entire deduction. The same applies to the claim that marginal producers necessarily possess normal qualification. Amonn’s concern is that the static model has been tailored so closely to the desired conclusion that it loses explanatory contact with reality.
He then separates temporal constancy from functional independence. Quantities that remain unchanged in a static state need not be independent of one another: income and prices still stand in a relation of dependence. This distinction clarifies his earlier objection to the equations, although he acknowledges that eliminating the income magnitude E has made it irrelevant to their revised form.
The final substantive discussion asks how “average qualification” and its corresponding normal income can be identified. Amonn imagines workers of different skill and diligence producing different quantities of silver in freely accessible marginal mines with identical external conditions. Neither those conditions nor the continuous gradations of human capacities single out a uniquely normal producer.
Die „durchschnittliche Qualifikation“ ist objektiv nicht festzustellen.
English translation: The "average qualification" cannot be objectively ascertained.
The example exposes the dependence of the proposed solution on an empirically unsupported benchmark. Amonn concludes that Oppenheimer has achieved formal coherence without adequately explaining actual prices. The article’s significance lies in its separation of deductive validity from explanatory adequacy, and of socially conditioned valuation from an allegedly objective mechanism that could dispense with valuing subjects. A closing footnote carefully limits the positive claim: the subjective factor cannot be eliminated from price explanation, but Amonn does not thereby endorse the conceptual form given to it by marginal utility theory.
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