Robert Zuckerkandl on Walther Jacoby’s Concept of Capital (1908)

Robert Zuckerkandl’s review examines Walther Jacoby’s Der Streit um den Kapitalsbegriff, seine geschichtliche Entwickelung und Versuche zu seiner Lösung. Its central issue is whether capital must be defined through historically specific legal and social relations, or whether a concept independent of any legal order also helps explain economic life. Zuckerkandl praises Jacoby’s lucid exposition while rejecting his attempt to reserve capital exclusively for the social-scientific category.

The review first reconstructs the book’s organization, supplying a guide absent from its contents. Jacoby proceeds from earlier conceptions of capital as assets yielding services or income to the controversy over capital as an economic or historical-legal category, especially in Rodbertus and Adolf Wagner. He then examines proposed resolutions by Böhm-Bawerk, Carl Menger, and van der Borght before presenting his own definition. Zuckerkandl disputes Jacoby’s interpretation of Hermann’s concept of use and expresses reservations about his account of Böhm-Bawerk, but concentrates on the methodological premise governing Jacoby’s alternative.

Following Stammler, Jacoby treats produced means of production as a technical concept that says nothing about the social conditions of their employment. Because social phenomena presuppose legal regulation, he argues, a category independent of law cannot explain them. Zuckerkandl directly contests this inference:

Der vom Verfasser ausführlich bekämpfte grundsätzliche Standpunkt ist meines Erachtens von ihm nicht widerlegt und es unterliegt, wie ich überzeugt bin, nach wie vor keinem Zweifel, daß es ökonomische von jeder Rechtsordnung unabhängige Erscheinungen gibt, welche zur wissenschaftlichen Aufhellung und Erfassung des sozialen Lebens beitragen.

English translation: The fundamental standpoint combated at length by the author has in my judgement not been refuted by him, and, as I am convinced, it remains as before beyond all doubt that there exist economic phenomena, independent of any legal order, which contribute to the scientific elucidation and comprehension of social life.

The disagreement concerns explanatory scope, not merely terminology. Zuckerkandl maintains that economic phenomena independent of particular legal arrangements can contribute to understanding social life; acknowledging legal relations does not require abandoning such categories.

Jacoby’s corresponding conceptual move is to rename produced means of production Produktionsprodukt, reserving capital for income-yielding assets within an economy organized by private property and division of labour. His definition excludes land but includes qualifying assets employed in enterprises or lent to others for income, including goods supplied for consumption. He distinguishes this consumption capital, which does not increase national wealth, from enterprise capital serving the supply of new goods, and conceives social capital through interconnected enterprises and their productive and circulating assets. Zuckerkandl states his preference plainly:

Ich gebe den älteren Lehren, die das Kapital auch als rein ökonomische Kategorie auffassen, den Vorzug.

English translation: I give preference to the older doctrines, which conceive capital also as a purely economic category.

He then tests Jacoby’s categories against cases the final section leaves unresolved. The enterprise-based definition requires a clearer account of production: how should theatres, passenger transport, and medical establishments—and the produced goods they employ—be classified? The inclusion of capital devoted to goods circulation within social capital likewise needs fuller justification. More fundamentally, enterprise activity does not encompass all production:

Endlich muß betont werden, daß auch in unserer kapitalistischen Wirtschaftsordnung die Unternehmung keineswegs die ganze Produktion beherrscht, also sehr zahlreiche produzierte Produktionsmittel existieren, die nicht unter die vom Verfasser gegebene Kapitalsdefinition fallen.

English translation: Finally it must be emphasized that even in our capitalist economic order the enterprise by no means dominates the whole of production, so that there exist very numerous produced means of production which do not fall under the definition of capital given by the author.

This objection exposes the cost of Jacoby’s restriction: even under capitalism, produced means of production extend beyond the institutional setting chosen to define capital. The review’s significance lies in connecting methodological disagreement with concrete problems of classification. Zuckerkandl nevertheless closes with a favorable judgment of the book as a contribution to clarifying the controversy; its unresolved boundaries diminish the adequacy of Jacoby’s definition without negating the value of his analysis.