Siegmund Feilbogen · 1911
Feilbogen’s article in the Journal des Économistes defends the Austrian school’s theoretical contribution while explaining the circumstances of its emergence. Addressing French readers, this first installment moves from the place of value theory within economics to the conflicts that encouraged Austrian intellectual independence: German historicism, Marx’s theory of value, and the unequal distribution of prestige within German-speaking scholarship. Its defense is qualified: subjective valuation provides an indispensable foundation but cannot exhaust economic explanation.
Feilbogen begins with the pursuit of satisfaction and the avoidance of pain, locating value in the intensity of subjective experience:
Satisfaction et peine sont des états de sentiment ; et leur intensité constitue la valeur des choses.
English translation: Satisfaction and pain are states of feeling; and their intensity constitutes the value of things.
This formulation establishes the importance of psychological analysis without making it the economist’s exclusive task. Economics must also investigate the technical and social causes that alter effort, well-being, and prices. Feilbogen explicitly recognizes the necessity of empirical inquiry:
Ces causes techniques et sociales exigent, sans doute, une observation constante, étant donné qu'elles se transforment de nos jours avec une rapidité prodigieuse; les observer, c'est faire le métier d'économiste.
English translation: These technical and social causes no doubt require constant observation, since in our day they are transformed with prodigious rapidity; to observe them is to practise the economist's calling.
Observation and abstraction serve complementary purposes. Tracking contemporary changes does not by itself explain how they affect valuations, prices, and incomes. The English wage-fund doctrine supplies a practical warning: inadequate theoretical foundations encouraged economists to deny the efficacy of strikes and trade unions. Conceptual errors thus matter beyond disputes among specialists.
Feilbogen presents Austrian abstraction as laboratory work whose results can support historical and statistical research. Against the concentration on immediate developments, especially among French economists, he defends a division of intellectual labor:
C'est pourquoi il est bon qu'il se soit trouvé un groupe de penseurs désintéressés, disposés à se dévouer entièrement à l'étude des éléments abstraits de la valeur.
English translation: That is why it is well that there has been found a group of disinterested thinkers, ready to devote themselves entirely to the study of the abstract elements of value.
The claim is for the usefulness of specialized theoretical inquiry, not its monopoly over the discipline. Against Landry’s suggestion that Austrian intellectual activity was nearly exhausted, Feilbogen recalls Mill’s premature confidence that value theory was complete before the innovations of Jevons, Menger, and Walras. French indifference, he argues, reflects neither an inability to reason abstractly nor proof of the school’s sterility, but the absence of the conflicts that made an Austrian movement necessary.
The first conflict concerns German historicism. Feilbogen connects its ascendancy with the defeat of the republican movements of 1848, renewed respect for historical institutions, and resistance to speculative philosophy. Historical monographs displaced the search for general economic laws. The Austrian reaction arose partly from the resistance of thinkers whose aptitude for abstraction found little recognition in an environment suspicious of deduction.
Marx made this methodological problem more acute. Feilbogen credits Capital with combining extensive historical evidence and forceful deductive reasoning. Historicist economists could appreciate its scholarship while distrusting its labor theory of value and conclusions concerning surplus value, yet distrust alone could not furnish an alternative explanation. The Austrian project therefore acquired a constructive task: to oppose Marx through a reconstructed theory of value. Feilbogen nevertheless distinguishes deductive power from systematic completeness. He considers the achievements of Menger and Böhm-Bawerk unfinished because their theoretical domain remains too narrow, and suggests that American economics might help extend it. Incompleteness supplies a reason for further development rather than a verdict of exhaustion.
The final section situates theoretical disagreement within a geography of scholarly authority. Through a metropolis–colony analogy, Feilbogen describes German neglect of Austrian innovations and the resulting desire for intellectual independence. Lorenz von Stein’s position at Vienna exemplifies this hierarchy: his historical and Hegelian syntheses offered little encouragement to Menger’s contrasting approach. Menger appears as both a theoretical innovator and an agent of institutional resistance.
A substantial footnote reproduces Menger’s letter of 26 June 1911 concerning his early reading, library, legal environment, and philosophical and mathematical interests. This personal evidence supplements the institutional account. Ending with a continuation notice, the installment establishes the school’s rationale rather than presenting its doctrines systematically. Its central argument defends abstract value theory while acknowledging its explanatory limits and the historical conditions of its emergence.
This work was divided into 2 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 2 sections and cites the passage.
Ask the Librarian