Amonn’s critical review examines the first volume of Robert Liefmann’s Grundsätze der Volkswirtschaftslehre and its ambition to reconstruct economic theory on psychological foundations. He acknowledges the continuing need for a satisfactory theoretical system:
Der Versuch dazu ist schon oft gemacht worden, aber allgemeiner als je zuvor ist heute die Ueberzeugung, daß er immer noch nicht befriedigend gelungen ist.
English translation: The attempt at this has often been made, but today the conviction is more general than ever before that it has still not succeeded satisfactorily.
Yet Liefmann’s reconstruction, Amonn argues, combines inherited marginal-utility insights with unstable definitions and illegitimate calculations. Moving from conceptual criticism to numerical examples, the review concerns not merely theoretical priority, but what subjective valuation can explain and how economists may represent it.
Liefmann opposes his psychological conception of economic activity to the allegedly technical-materialist orientation of earlier economics. Amonn presents the proposed foundation through Liefmann’s definition:
Es sind also »Erwägungen, die auf einem Gegenüberstellen und Vergleichen von Nutzen und Kosten, rein psychisch aufgefaßt, mit dem Ziel eines möglichst großen Nutzenüberschusses, Genusses, beruhen«.
English translation: They are therefore "considerations which rest upon a juxtaposition and comparison of utility and cost, conceived in purely psychical terms, with the aim of the greatest possible surplus of utility, of enjoyment."
Amonn questions the movement between deliberating, striving, adapting, and allocating: these are different activities, not interchangeable definitions. When economic activity becomes the planned distribution of means among needs, Liefmann approaches an established conception of economizing. Moreover, an account concerned with external goods need not exclude psychological explanation. Goods remain the objects about which agents deliberate and over which they dispose.
The central conceptual objection concerns the identification of utility with pleasure and cost with displeasure. Amonn understands utility as an improvement in welfare, whether through obtaining pleasure or removing pain. Cost consists in relinquishing another possible improvement. His examples distinguish enjoyment from the removal of an unpleasant sensation and the sacrifice of goods from an independently experienced pain. Utility and cost can therefore be compared as alternative changes in welfare; Liefmann’s difficulty in comparing opposed psychological qualities arises partly from his own definitions. Amonn also separates comparison from measurement, rejecting the claim that economic comparison requires a distinctive third term.
Liefmann’s concept of Ertrag, or return, is intended to overcome this difficulty through a double comparison. Utility is first compared with cost for each need; the resulting returns are then compared across needs:
Wenn ich den Ueberschuß von Nutzen über die Kosten für jedes Bedürfnis und mit jeder Kosteneinheit feststelle und diese Ueberschüsse, die Erträge, dann vergleiche, habe ich die Richtschnur für das wirtschaftliche Handeln.
English translation: If I ascertain the surplus of utility over cost for every need and with every unit of cost, and then compare these surpluses, the yields, I have the guiding rule for economic action.
Amonn challenges both the shifting treatment of return as a difference or a ratio and the suggestion that agents directly experience such mathematical relations. Numerical expressions of subjective intensity establish equality or relative strength, not measurable magnitudes. They cannot show that one need is twice as strong as another, nor justify addition, subtraction, or division. Calling the numbers illustrative does not make the arithmetic valid. This criticism also applies to marginal-utility theorists who employ the same procedure, qualifying Amonn’s defence of that tradition.
His alternative reconstruction begins with the strongest unsatisfied need. Weaker needs remain latent until stronger ones have been sufficiently satisfied; agents consider whether the required sacrifice is smaller than the prospective benefit and what alternative satisfaction the same means could secure. Reworking Liefmann’s examples, Amonn argues that the proposed equalization of marginal returns gives way to the familiar equalization of marginal utilities associated with Gossen and subsequent marginal-utility theory.
The later discussion disputes Liefmann’s account of earlier economics. Marginal valuation concerns the satisfaction dependent on retaining a unit of a stock, requiring a distinction between accidental loss and consumption that satisfies a need. Imputation extends valuation to productive goods through the consumer goods they help produce, without treating technical productivity itself as the cause of value. Amonn also contests Liefmann’s interpretation of Böhm-Bawerk on present and future goods.
Finally, Amonn distinguishes available resources from decisions about expenditure: choosing acquisitions presupposes knowledge of one’s means, not possession of every desired consumer good. He postpones judgment on whether Liefmann’s monetary conception of capital can explain interest until the promised second volume. The review’s methodological stakes are the limits of arithmetic in subjective valuation, cost understood through forgone benefit, and the compatibility of psychological explanation with objective resource constraints.
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