Alfred Amonn, Robert Liefmanns „Neue Geldtheorie“ (July 1918)

Alfred Amonn’s polemical review of Robert Liefmann’s Geld und Gold (1916) links a critique of theoretical method to a warning about wartime monetary policy. Its central charge is that Liefmann claims revolutionary originality while repeating established insights and shifting inconsistently between incompatible definitions. The review moves from Liefmann’s treatment of earlier economists through close comparisons of his monetary concepts to the practical consequences of his proposed abandonment of gold.

Amonn opens by presenting wartime demand for economic commentary as an opportunity for intellectually unearned authority. He rehearses Liefmann’s dismissals of Fisher, Böhm-Bawerk, Knapp, and other theorists, then attacks the claim that previous economics ignored individual deliberation and reduced economic activity to material production. Against Liefmann’s assertion of exclusive intellectual ownership, Amonn states:

Was diese Geldtheorie anbelangt, wie sie Liefmann hier vorträgt, so enthält sie auch nicht einen neuen, noch nie dagewesenen Gedanken, die meisten sind vielmehr beinahe so alt, wie die Wirtschaftstheorie überhaupt, und niemand sonst könnte es einfallen, sich mit derartigen Gedanken, wie sie hier als absolut neu und noch nie dagewesen ausgegeben werden, einen wissenschaftlichen Namen machen zu wollen.

English translation: As for this theory of money, as Liefmann expounds it here, it does not contain even one new, unprecedented idea; most of them are rather almost as old as economic theory itself, and it would occur to no one else to wish to make a scientific name for himself with ideas of the kind here given out as absolutely new and unprecedented.

For Amonn, Liefmann’s “psychological” approach exaggerates and distorts an existing principle of subjective value theory: exchange phenomena must be explained through individuals’ needs and economic judgments. He postpones a fuller assessment of Liefmann’s general economics, concentrating instead on whether this approach actually clarifies money.

The review’s evidentiary core is a page-by-page comparison of definitions. Liefmann alternately identifies money with a tangible medium of exchange, the embodiment of an abstract accounting unit, and that accounting unit itself. Amonn accepts that money commonly combines exchange and accounting functions; his objection concerns the unacknowledged movement between distinct concepts:

Aber, daß man einen einmal so oder so gefaßten Begriff in einer theoretischen Arbeit konsequent festhält, ist eine der primitivsten Erfordernisse theoretischen Arbeitens überhaupt.

English translation: But that one consistently holds fast in a theoretical work to a concept once framed in one way or another is one of the most primitive requirements of theoretical work at all.

This methodological demand is more precise than a rejection of monetary abstraction. Either function may organize a definition, but an argument must preserve its chosen meaning or explicitly distinguish alternatives. Amonn reinforces the charge with passages in which Liefmann both affirms and denies that money compares utility and costs, or that an exchange ratio exists between money and goods.

The same test governs Amonn’s examination of income, supposedly the theory’s second fundamental concept. Income appears variously as available money, a cost unit, an abstract accounting magnitude, monetary net returns, and something consumed in satisfying needs. These shifts prevent Liefmann’s insistence that incomes, rather than money, purchase goods from carrying a determinate explanatory meaning.

Wer will nun daraus klar werden, was Liefmann unter Einkommen versteht?

English translation: Who, then, is to make out from this what Liefmann understands by income?

Amonn extends the criticism to purchasing power, which Liefmann variously associates with purchasable goods, the valuation of the accounting unit, and prices, while elsewhere denying that money or the accounting unit possesses it. The cumulative argument is that theoretical novelty cannot be established by terminology whose referents continually change.

The closing section turns this conceptual critique into a policy warning. Amonn describes Liefmann’s proposals as selling the Reichsbank’s gold holdings, ending the gold standard, and removing gold circulation and, if possible, gold backing. He does not claim that orderly money necessarily requires gold. Instead, he argues that gold’s advantages in international exchange demand an economic explanation and cannot be dismissed by invoking its merely relative value.

Das Gold ist ja nicht zufällig zum »Geldgut« geworden, sondern aus einer ganzen Reihe von wirtschaftlichen Gründen, die man kennen soll, wenn man von der Währungsfrage redet, und nicht einfach außer Beachtung lassen darf.

English translation: Gold has not become the "money good" by accident, but for a whole series of economic reasons which one ought to know when one speaks of the currency question, and which one may not simply leave out of account.

For postwar reconstruction, Amonn regards gold reserves as a durable resource capable of securing international purchases after wartime destruction. Their value need not depend on immediate use or precise numerical measurement. The review’s significance lies in this conjunction of conceptual discipline and practical responsibility: unstable definitions undermine not only a theory’s claims to originality but also its authority to justify consequential monetary reforms.