Siegmund Feilbogen, L’École autrichienne d’économie politique. Les disciples de M. Karl Menger (1912)

Feilbogen’s scholarly article presents the Austrian school through the unfinished problems inherited from Menger and the work of his successors, chiefly Eugen de Böhm-Bawerk and Friedrich de Wieser. Its organizing claim is that Menger established a powerful theoretical framework whose completion required a different intellectual temperament: patient analysis, attention to intermediate causal links, and discrimination between what earlier economics had misunderstood and what it had correctly observed.

Le maître avait le génie des grandes synthèses.

English translation: The master had the genius of great syntheses.

The article first inventories five gaps in Menger’s economics, then introduces the principal disciples and surveys the school’s continuing development. This structure makes intellectual succession a division of scientific labor rather than simple adherence to a founder. The initial problem concerns the extent of the category of economic goods, especially whether and how it includes immaterial goods. The second concerns the valuation of particular, temporary uses, as distinct from the aggregate uses of a good. This distinction becomes decisive for capital theory: if borrowed goods are immediately consumed, how can interest represent payment for their continuing use? Böhm-Bawerk’s rejection of that explanation, and his opposition to Clark’s distinction between capital-value and capital-goods, expose a difficulty requiring more precise conceptual analysis.

The third gap is a comprehensive theory of capital. Feilbogen separates causal explanation from the defense or condemnation of interest:

Or, la tâche de la science est d'expliquer l'existence des phénomènes et, sans cette explication préalable, toute apologie ou attaque est vaine.

English translation: Now, the task of science is to explain the existence of phenomena, and without this preliminary explanation every apology or attack is vain.

Arguments about the legitimacy of interest already presuppose the phenomenon they ought first to explain. Scientific progress therefore requires setting aside merely justificatory theories, critically examining explanations of interest, and synthesizing their valid elements. Menger’s principles supply resources for this task without themselves constituting its completed solution.

The fourth problem follows from Menger’s reversal of the relation between production costs and value. Productive means derive their value from consumption goods, whose value depends on marginal utility. Yet this leaves unexplained how the value of a finished product is assigned among the cooperating means of production. Feilbogen compares the theoretical difficulty to an equation containing several unknowns, while stressing that economic practice continually supplies determinate outcomes:

De cette façon, chaque jour, la pratique résout automatiquement le problème de la répartition. Le rôle de la théorie sera d'expliquer tout ce processus.

English translation: In this way, every day, practice automatically solves the problem of distribution. The role of theory will be to explain this whole process.

Wages, interest, and profit thus become evidence of a process that theory must reconstruct. The “problème de la computation” (Zurechnungsproblem), particularly associated here with Wieser, connects value theory to distribution and to the capitalization of incomes into the value of productive assets. The fifth gap concerns the intermediate mechanisms linking final utility to actual prices. Although Menger displaced production costs as the ultimate foundation of value, their observable influence on prices still needed explanation. Completion consequently requires both finer deductions and partial preservation of earlier insights.

Feilbogen next portrays Böhm-Bawerk and Wieser as intellectually independent thinkers whose lifelong friendship, shared education, and family connection did not erase their differences. Their conclusions nevertheless appeared so similar that Böhm-Bawerk had prepared a detailed statement of their divergences. Their relationship exemplifies a school held together by common problems without requiring identical solutions.

The closing survey broadens the account to Sax on taxation, Mataja on entrepreneurial profit, Meyer on income, and Schüller on trade policy. Feilbogen explains the apparent decline of theoretical productivity partly through the recruitment of talented economists into public administration:

C'est ainsi que l'administration enlève toujours à la théorie les meilleurs talents; de là, cette apparence que la théorie s'épuise.

English translation: It is thus that the administration always takes the best talents away from theory; hence the appearance that theory is exhausting itself.

Against that appearance, he points to Schumpeter’s new system and the younger scholars emerging from the Vienna seminar. Most significantly, he announces Wieser’s projected enlargement of Austrian theory: instead of taking individuals and their needs simply as a starting point, Wieser would investigate collective traditions, customs, and social influence as causes of those needs. The article’s significance lies in this presentation of Austrian economics as an evolving research program, moving from marginal utility toward unresolved questions of capital, distribution, price formation, and the social constitution of individual wants.