Siegmund Feilbogen, L’École autrichienne d’économie politique. Deuxième article (1911)

Feilbogen’s second article on the Austrian school centers on Karl Menger’s Principles, presenting analytical precision as its decisive achievement. Moving from intellectual biography and scientific priority to goods, value, capital, and exchange, he explains how Menger unifies economic theory while preserving distinctions between particular phenomena. This exposition also supports a polemic against labor-value theory and a defense of the entrepreneur’s economic function.

The opening comparison with Menger’s brother Antoine locates their difference in method rather than scholarly seriousness:

Avec Karl Menger, on retrouve le même scrupule dans le détail et une aussi grande érudition qu'avec Antoine, mais il suit une autre méthode.

English translation: With Karl Menger one finds the same scrupulousness in detail and as great an erudition as with Antoine, but he follows a different method.

Where Antoine favors synthesis, Karl isolates phenomena and reduces concepts to their elementary conditions. Feilbogen also defends Menger’s independence from Jevons by contrasting their modes of exposition:

En fait, dans tout le volume de Jevons, ce qui domine, c'est la forme mathématique.

English translation: In fact, in the whole of Jevons's volume what predominates is the mathematical form.

Transforming that mathematical presentation into Menger’s carefully differentiated analysis would, Feilbogen argues, have demanded more effort than independent discovery. The lasting interest of Menger’s work consequently lies not only in its conclusions but in the method used to establish them.

Menger begins with the conditions under which a thing becomes a good: human need, a capacity to satisfy it, knowledge of that capacity, and control over the thing. Feilbogen places this conceptual starting point within an inherited scholarly framework:

Toutes ces notions primordiales étaient d'ailleurs un domaine traditionnel de la science économique allemande de son temps, comme Menger le dit lui-même.

English translation: All these primordial notions were, moreover, a traditional domain of the German economic science of his time, as Menger himself says.

The achievement lies in the subsequent connections. Goods become economic when requirements exceed available quantities. Scarcity then explains both valuation and the competition underlying property. Distinguishing the usefulness of a kind of thing from the importance of a determinate quantity resolves the apparent paradox that water may be more useful than wine yet less valuable. Value depends on the satisfaction endangered by losing an available quantity, not on an intrinsic quality of the object.

Feilbogen extends this subjective account into ethics, aesthetics, and religion. Changing needs can reorder the importance assigned to virtues or forms of beauty; against Nietzsche, he interprets moral change as a rearrangement of enduring virtues rather than their replacement. His treatment of property likewise moves from conceptual analysis to social argument. Scarcity makes exclusion unavoidable, so abolishing property cannot by itself secure universal satisfaction. Yet this establishes no rule of distribution: it constrains reform without supplying a complete theory of justice.

The distinction between the cause and measure of value leads to marginal utility. A farmer’s final sack of grain, allocated to a comparatively dispensable use, illustrates how the least urgent satisfaction dependent on the stock determines its marginal valuation. Feilbogen presents this as a clarification of supply and demand and a corrective to confusions he attributes to Marx and the English economists.

The analysis then reverses the apparent dependence of prices on production costs. Manufacturers may calculate from given input prices, but consumers’ valuations constrain the value of finished products and, through them, productive inputs. The entrepreneur’s direction of labor toward useful production therefore has an economic function that sympathy for workers should not obscure.

In discussing capital, Feilbogen follows Menger from consumption goods to increasingly remote productive goods. Production requires complementary resources and time; its fund must include workers’ subsistence, not merely higher-order goods. Wages, rent, interest, and entrepreneurial profit become prices of productive services within a common theory. Feilbogen nevertheless identifies a difficulty: determining each factor’s return by subtracting the returns of the others risks circularity. Direct consumption uses of land, labor, and buildings offer a possible foothold. His criticism of Jevons similarly insists on distinguishing productive capital, income-yielding property, and consumption.

The conclusion makes unequal subjective valuations the condition of mutually advantageous exchange. Applied to wages, this means that both worker and employer gain. Feilbogen nevertheless allows compulsory accident and old-age insurance to return part of the employer’s gain to labor. He identifies these as consequences Menger did not himself draw. The article thus joins close methodological exposition to qualified criticism and politically engaged applications of value theory.