Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk: Review of Giovanni Montemartini’s Il risparmio nella economia pura (1896)

Böhm-Bawerk’s brief review endorses Montemartini’s effort to establish saving as a systematic subject of economic theory. Following Karl Menger’s preface, it begins with a contrast between the visible technical processes of economic life and the less visible acts that direct them:

Dagegen haben die der äusseren Betrachtung sich entziehenden Factoren, zumal die dispositiven Acte der menschlichen Wirtschaft, obwohl gerade sie der Güterbewegung Ziel und Richtung geben, bis auf die jüngste Zeit bei der Mehrzahl der Volkswirte wenig Beachtung gefunden.

English translation: By contrast, those factors which withdraw themselves from outward observation, above all the dispositive acts of the human economy, although it is precisely these that give aim and direction to the movement of goods, have until most recent times found little attention among the majority of economists.

Saving exemplifies this neglected sphere of economic decision. Böhm-Bawerk describes Montemartini’s opening critical survey as exposing the incidental character of earlier scholarship: economists addressed saving chiefly when theories of capital formation or consumption required it. The decisive conceptual move is to reverse this dependence, making saving the organizing subject rather than an auxiliary topic:

Von dieser älteren Gepflogenheit abweichend, bemüht sich der Verfasser, das Thema des Sparens zum Mittelpunkte einer sachlich und systematisch streng geordneten und alle einschlägigen Beziehungen erschöpfenden Darstellung zu machen.

English translation: Departing from this older practice, the author endeavours to make the theme of saving the centre of an exposition strictly ordered in substance and system and exhausting all the relevant relations.

The review closes by praising Montemartini’s seriousness, thoroughness, critical acumen, and command of both older literature and recent theory. Its assessment concerns the importance and scholarly execution of this research programme; it does not expound particular results. The work deserves attention as an initial advance into a largely uncultivated field. The review’s significance lies in its insistence that economics attend to the directing acts behind observable movements of goods, with saving granted an analytical standing of its own.