Böhm-Bawerk’s short review recommends William Smart’s Studies in Economics through an appraisal of its author’s intellectual qualities, a survey of its ten essays, and a pointed endorsement of its treatment of wages. Recalling an earlier assessment of Smart, he praises the combination of theoretical depth and practical knowledge with lucid, engaging exposition. The review’s central claim is that Smart’s distinctive authority rests on this conjunction of analytical ability, industrial experience, and concern for workers.
Böhm-Bawerk organizes the book into three thematic groups. Four essays concern wages, addressing standards of comfort, a living wage, sliding scales, and women’s wages. Three examine problems directly or indirectly connected with money and currency, including falling prices and overproduction. The final three turn to consumption, a field he describes as long neglected by economics but recently brought forward by English and American writers. He identifies the unifying orientation of these varied inquiries through Smart’s choice of motto:
Für den Geist des Ganzen ist es bezeichnend, dass Mr. Smart als Motto seinen Werken die bekannten Worte Roschers voranstellt: „Ausgangspunkt wie Zielpunkt unserer Wissenschaft ist der Mensch“.
English translation: Characteristic of the spirit of the whole is that Mr. Smart places as a motto before his works the well-known words of Roscher: "The starting point as well as the goal of our science is man".
The quotation from Roscher makes human welfare the frame for Böhm-Bawerk’s account of Smart’s economics. This orientation becomes especially important in the wage essays, which the reviewer singles out as deserving the widest interest. His endorsement rests less on particular conclusions than on the unusual experiential resources Smart brings to theoretical questions:
Als ehemaliger Grossindustrieller, der auch seither als Universitätslehrer in einem Centrum industriellen Lebens — in Glasgow — wohnend, stets den innigsten Contact mit der industriellen Arbeit bewahrt hat, schöpft er gerade in diesen Fragen aus einer Fülle unmittelbarer Erfahrung, wie sie sonst einem Theoretiker wohl selten oder nie zu Gebote steht.
English translation: As a former large-scale industrialist who since then too, as a university teacher residing in a centre of industrial life — in Glasgow — has always preserved the most intimate contact with industrial labour, he draws precisely in these questions upon a wealth of immediate experience such as is otherwise seldom or never at a theorist's command.
Smart’s passage from manufacturer to university teacher thus appears as a source of continuity between economic inquiry and industrial life. Böhm-Bawerk adds that Smart’s sympathy for workers survived this transition: practical familiarity matters because it accompanies both clear reasoning and an active concern for those whose welfare depends on wage questions. The review closes by hoping for readership beyond the book’s original linguistic audience. Its significance lies in this compact statement of what makes economic writing valuable: theoretical rigor rendered accessible, tested against experience, and directed toward consequential questions of human well-being.
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