Siegmund Feilbogen, L’École autrichienne d’économie politique. La théorie positive de Boehm-Bawerk (1913)

Feilbogen’s review article presents the third edition of Boehm-Bawerk’s Positive Theory of Capital as a consolidation of Austrian economics through sustained theoretical criticism. It moves from the revised edition through the theories of capital, value and price, and interest, before examining the commentaries through the controversy with Adolphe Landry. Its governing concern is how extensive reconsideration can strengthen a doctrine without changing its foundations.

Pourtant, malgré les publications nombreuses parues dans l'intervalle au sujet de la théorie du capital, Boehm-Bawerk avait le sentiment qu'il n'y avait rien d'essentiel à modifier dans le corps de sa doctrine.

English translation: Yet, despite the numerous publications on the theory of capital that had appeared in the interval, Boehm-Bawerk had the feeling that there was nothing essential to be altered in the body of his doctrine.

Feilbogen presents this continuity as the result of scrutiny, not indifference to criticism. The commentaries exceed the original text in length, while revision also reaches the exposition itself:

Mais le texte aussi, dans toutes ses parties, porte les traces d'une revision des plus scrupuleuses.

English translation: But the text too, in all its parts, bears the traces of a most scrupulous revision.

Capital supplies the organizing problem. Productive detours normally improve technical results when production is rationally lengthened, and social capital consists of the intermediate products that enable those detours. Although definitional controversies occupy considerable space, Feilbogen distinguishes their terminological stakes from the substantive explanation of production. His account locates the book at the center of Boehm-Bawerk’s intellectual project:

En effet, c'est le problème du capital qui a préoccupé exclusivement ce penseur, depuis ces débuts jusqu'à nos jours; par conséquent, sa Théorie positive du capital constitue le centre de ses travaux.

English translation: Indeed, it is the problem of capital that has exclusively occupied this thinker, from his beginnings down to our own day; consequently, his Positive Theory of Capital constitutes the centre of his works.

Feilbogen gives particular prominence to the treatment of value and price, recommending its translation into French for its economic, psychological, and philosophical interest. His condensed exposition of Austrian value theory, reviewed by Boehm-Bawerk, starts from the dependence of individual welfare on possession. Where possession secures a positive satisfaction, marginal utility measures value: the least important need dependent on the available good determines the relevant utility.

This principle requires qualifications. Possession may instead save an acquisition effort less burdensome than deprivation. Reproducible and exchangeable goods are valued through the marginal utility of the resources required to replace them, provided replacement occurs in time. Under restrictive conditions of divisibility and freedom to adjust effort, marginal utility and the disutility of the final acquisition effort can furnish equivalent measures. Even where marginal utility is not the direct measure, it remains the upper limit of value.

The price theory extends subjective valuation from individual exchanges to complex markets. It refines supply and demand while reversing the traditional explanation through production costs: productive goods ultimately derive their value from products. Where costs regulate a particular product’s price, those costs depend on alternative uses of productive resources, ultimately their least important rational employment. Feilbogen connects this explanatory approach with Boehm-Bawerk’s preference for elementary cases over mathematical symbols that obscure individual differences.

The main exposition of interest remains substantially unchanged, but the commentaries defend it at length. The dispute with Landry concerns the logical connection between causes and effects even where the participants broadly agree about the real causes of interest. Landry seeks a direct explanation without Boehm-Bawerk’s distinction between present and future values. Both accept that productive instruments derive their value from their products; the difficulty is explaining why product value exceeds instrument value.

Feilbogen follows Boehm-Bawerk in identifying an inconsistency in Landry’s treatment of time. If future utility is discounted in valuing instruments, their future products must be discounted too; this procedure alone cannot establish a surplus. The relevant comparison instead concerns instruments immediately before production and completed products afterward. The passage from future to present goods provides the missing connection. The same objection applies to durable consumer goods: comparing undiscounted future rents with a house’s present sale value shifts valuation dates and produces a misleading gap.

The article thus joins an exposition of subjective value theory to a sympathetic defense of intertemporal valuation. Its concluding methodological demand is precision: distinguish quantities from values and specify the date at which each value is assessed. For Feilbogen, the Landry controversy demonstrates why those distinctions are essential to an adequate explanation of capital interest.