Robert Zuckerkandl, Die klassische Werttheorie und die Theorie vom Grenznutzen (1890)

Robert Zuckerkandl’s short polemical article defends Menger’s theory of value against Dietzel’s rehabilitation of Ricardo. Its central claim is that marginal utility explains what classical theory merely records: why goods acquire value, how changes in quantity alter valuation, and how valuations generate prices. The argument proceeds from the novelty of marginal utility to the treatment of reproducible goods, then to the methodological limits of isolated-household examples and the explanatory status of production costs.

Zuckerkandl first distinguishes the conditions under which value appears from an account of its nature and cause. Naming utility and scarcity does not yet explain why a particular quantity matters to its possessor.

Denn wenn man auch weiß, unter welchen thatsächlichen Voraussetzungen der Wert entsteht, so braucht man doch nicht zu wissen, was der Wert ist und in welcher ursächlichen Verknüpfung er mit den betreffenden Thatsachen steht.

English translation: For even if one knows under what factual presuppositions value arises, one need not on that account know what value is and in what causal connection it stands to the facts in question.

The missing connection is dependence: goods have value because some satisfaction would be lost without them. Labor cannot substitute for scarcity as the relevant condition, since products of labor may exist in surplus and become worthless. Nor is marginal utility simply a new name for supply and demand. Increasing stocks permit progressively less important wants to be satisfied; each interchangeable portion is therefore valued by the least important satisfaction still attainable. This supplies the causal mediation between quantity, utility, value, and price.

Die Behauptung, der Wert oder Preis sinke, weil die Menge der Güter zugenommen habe, giebt bloß eine, mit Unrecht in die Kausalitätsform gekleidete, unerklärte Beobachtung wieder; die neue Lehre liefert erst die Erklärung.

English translation: The assertion that value or price falls because the quantity of goods has increased merely reproduces an unexplained observation wrongly clothed in the form of causality; only the new doctrine supplies the explanation.

The article next challenges Dietzel’s division between nonreproducible goods, governed by marginal utility, and reproducible goods, governed by replacement costs. Zuckerkandl accepts that replacement possibilities alter valuation, but denies that they require an independent principle. In an isolated household, replacing a lost good may sacrifice another satisfaction obtainable through the same working time, or merely impose additional labor where spare time exists. What matters remains the welfare consequence of losing the good. References to his own work, Böhm-Bawerk, and Wieser establish that marginal-utility theorists had already incorporated these cases.

The more decisive objection concerns the purpose of the isolated-household model. It is an explanatory device, not the ultimate object of economics.

Denn die Volkswirtschaft ist etwas wesentlich anderes, als die isolierte Wirtschaft und was in dieser als Regel gilt, mag dort leicht Ausnahme sein.

English translation: For the national economy is something essentially different from the isolated economy, and what holds as a rule in the latter may easily be an exception in the former.

Under the division of labor, buyers cannot personally reproduce most goods they need. They confront quantities unavailable for expansion through their own work and evaluate purchases by marginal utility. Menger’s example of a fixed stock thus illuminates an ordinary market situation, even when the goods concerned are reproducible by other people. Zuckerkandl shifts attention from a good’s general reproducibility to the actual alternatives available to the person valuing it.

He also rejects the charge that marginal utility yields only vague feelings while costs supply exact measures. Numerical rankings in theoretical examples are illustrative; practical valuations become determinate through the sacrifices people will undertake and the compensation they demand. Likewise, valuing an owned article at its expected replacement price cannot explain price formation: it presupposes prices that must themselves arise from prior valuations.

The final section subordinates the cost law to a broader theory of prices. Prices and costs do not coincide at every possible output. Producers adjust quantities until the resulting price permits cost recovery; explaining why that quantity commands that price requires an account of demand and marginal utility.

Das Produktionskostengesetz giebt überhaupt, wenn wahr, nur eine Erfahrungsthatsache wieder; wann und wie es wirksam sein kann, muß dann durch ein anderes Gesetz erklärt werden.

English translation: The law of cost of production, if true, reproduces in general only a fact of experience; when and how it can be effective must then be explained by another law.

Zuckerkandl therefore preserves the empirical significance of cost-price correspondence while denying its explanatory independence. His concluding history places Menger within German attempts to derive exchange value from subjective utility, presenting marginal utility as their successful completion. The article’s enduring conceptual interest lies in its distinction between observed regularities and causal explanation, and in its insistence that replacement costs, specialization, and market prices must be understood through the satisfactions and sacrifices of valuing individuals. Its closing claim of a definitive Mengerian solution also reveals the polemical ambition behind this reconstruction of classical theory.