Siegmund Feilbogen, L’École autrichienne d’économie politique. Eugen de Boehm-Bawerk (né en 1851) (1912)

Feilbogen presents Boehm-Bawerk’s contribution to Austrian economics through his sustained investigation of capital and interest. The portrait begins with the contrast between an experienced administrator and an exacting theorist:

A la fois praticien éprouvé et dialecticien subtil, Boehm-Bawerk offre un type de dualité surprenante.

English translation: At once a proven practitioner and a subtle dialectician, Boehm-Bawerk presents a type of surprising duality.

This duality frames an account of intellectual concentration rather than narrow specialization. The investigation of interest leads backward to the definitions of goods, value, and price, and outward to controversies over production and distribution. Feilbogen makes the methodological premise explicit:

D'ailleurs, dans la théorie tout se tient : en partant d'un problème unique, pourvu qu'on le creuse suffisamment, on arrive jusqu'aux premiers principes et, par là, aux autres problèmes de la même science.

English translation: Besides, in theory everything hangs together: starting from a single problem, provided one probes it deeply enough, one arrives at first principles and, thereby, at the other problems of the same science.

The first conceptual task is to prevent double counting. Against Mac Leod’s claim that credit creates wealth, Boehm-Bawerk also challenges economists who reject that conclusion while treating rights as goods independent of their objects. Following Menger, he relates economic goods to particular persons’ needs and powers of disposal. A legally guaranteed right supplies a condition under which a thing becomes a good, not an additional good alongside it:

Cette puissance ne peut constituer un second bien, indépendamment de la chose, puisque la puissance de disposer est une des conditions requises pour que la chose soit un bien.

English translation: This power cannot constitute a second good independently of the thing, since the power of disposal is one of the conditions required for the thing to be a good.

Likewise, purchased clientele represents an expectation of earnings rather than an independent economic good. These distinctions prepare the later rejection of capital’s “use” as a separate source of interest.

The study of value and prices provides the next foundation. Feilbogen emphasizes Boehm-Bawerk’s reconciliation of marginal utility with the observable influence of production costs. Materials may determine prices within an industry, but their own valuation derives from the final products obtainable through competing uses. Iron diverted from ploughs to automobiles illustrates this interdependence. Technical economies of labour do not make costs the ultimate cause of value: expanded output reduces marginal utility. Cost explanations thus retain local validity while requiring a more fundamental account of valuation.

The historical critique distinguishes productivity, use, abstinence, labour, and exploitation theories of interest. Feilbogen admires Boehm-Bawerk’s practice of strengthening predecessors’ arguments before exposing their defects. Physical productivity, however, cannot by itself explain why a product’s value exceeds that of the capital consumed. If productive power alone accounted for the surplus, capital’s valuation would absorb it. Use theories duplicate capital’s value; abstinence risks counting a sacrifice twice; labour theories confuse ownership income with remuneration for work, or justify interest without explaining it.

Against Rodbertus and Marx, the temporal distinction becomes decisive. Labour does not account for every economic good, and a claim to a completed product does not establish entitlement now to its future value. The example of workers successively building a machine over five years clarifies the difference. Preference for present over future goods supplies Boehm-Bawerk’s explanation of interest. Feilbogen nevertheless interprets this account as a synthesis: uncertain survival, forgone personal use, and forgone productive employment recover legitimate elements of abstinence, use, and productivity theories. His praise therefore qualifies the apparent completeness of their rejection.

The positive theory connects temporal valuation with productive detours. Production periods include the making of tools and machinery, and prudent extensions normally improve technical results. Feilbogen regards this as a distinctive reformulation of productivity theory. Boehm-Bawerk defines productive capital as intermediate products, excluding land, labour, and wages destined for consumption. A national subsistence fund replaces the narrower wages fund: the resources sustaining workers, entrepreneurs, and capitalists constrain the possible extension of production.

The closing controversies show the reach and limits of the argument. Refuting Marx’s particular economic theory does not, Feilbogen stresses, destroy socialism itself. Clark’s distinction between enduring capital-value and changing capital-goods returns the discussion to double counting: Boehm-Bawerk treats replacement goods as new capital. The portrait thus locates his achievement in the integration of subjective valuation, production time, and sustained resistance to treating different aspects of one economic reality as separate sources of wealth.