Emil Sax · 1894
Emil Sax’s 1894 review examines the methodological opening volume of Julius von Gans-Ludassy’s projected system of theoretical and practical economics. Sax recognizes its philosophical learning and lasting contributions to economic logic, while questioning its scale, presentation, and foundational claims. He doubts that the larger project can be completed on the proportions established by this 1,053-page volume, but treats its methodological inquiry as independently significant. Throughout, he distinguishes clarification of the instruments of inquiry from substantive advances in economic knowledge.
Sax considers methodological reflection necessary amid disciplinary disagreement, yet argues that its foundations cannot be established within economics alone:
Man muß zuvor die Erkenntnistheorie selbst revidieren, bevor man mit Erfolg daran gehen kann, dieselbe auf das Gebiet der Oekonomie anzuwenden.
English translation: One must first revise the theory of knowledge itself before one can successfully set about applying it to the field of economics.
This dependence makes assessment partly a philosophical task. Gans-Ludassy’s extensive learning merits respect, but exhaustive polemics and insufficient separation of original results from familiar material make those results difficult to identify. Sax frames the problem through the work’s actual readership:
Ein Werk wie das seinige hat nur für die eigentlichen Fachgelehrten Bedeutung und Interesse, und selbst nicht für jeden unter diesen und für den einen und den anderen in sehr verschiedenem Grade.
English translation: A work such as his has significance and interest only for the specialist scholars proper, and not even for every one of these, and for one and another in very different degrees.
The specialized audience needs concentrated argument, whereas readers who might benefit from more accessible exposition are unlikely to master the volume. Sax nevertheless acknowledges the author’s literary gifts:
Er führt eine brillante Feder, seine Schreibweise gleicht der eines espritreichen französischen Feuilletonisten: alle Finessen der Diktion sind ihm geläufig.
English translation: He wields a brilliant pen; his manner of writing resembles that of a witty French feuilletonist: all the finesses of diction are at his command.
The praise introduces a methodological reservation: rhetorical fluency can carry readers past unresolved difficulties and make verbal ingenuity appear equivalent to conceptual resolution. Elaborate illustration also becomes tiring when sustained across systematic logical analysis. Sax’s criticism aims to recover the book’s intellectual value from the obstacles to its reception.
His first major substantive objection concerns the presentation of economics as philosophy’s successor. In Sax’s reconstruction, Gans-Ludassy describes philosophy as an initially undifferentiated body of knowledge from which positive sciences separate. Economics would inherit its pursuit of happiness, replacing absolute happiness with an attainable balance of pleasure and pain. Sax accepts disciplinary differentiation but rejects the implied exhaustion of philosophy. Philosophy remains the synthesis of knowledge into a unified conception of world and life; the growth of specialized sciences supplies it with new material rather than abolishing its function. He likewise resists reducing intellectual inquiry to anticipated usefulness, emphasizing the satisfaction afforded by knowledge itself.
Turning to economic methodology, Sax welcomes the recognition of the exact-realist school and its Austrian representatives. He regards Gans-Ludassy’s “rational empiricism” as substantially continuous with that approach, though not beyond criticism. A more fundamental disagreement concerns identifying economic action with purposive action. Such a definition would absorb virtually every realized human purpose into economics and undermine the distinction between economics and technique. For Sax, technique concerns accomplishing a particular purpose; economic judgment considers that purpose in relation to other ends and the sacrifices its pursuit entails. Technical success can therefore coexist with economic failure.
Sax locates the volume’s strongest achievements in its analyses of concept formation, abstraction, definition, classification, judgment, inference, and economic laws. He commends its treatment of causality, induction, hypotheses, experiment, and deduction, together with its distinctions among laws, rules, and norms. His decisive correction concerns any opposition between exact laws and induction: exact scientific laws are highly general inductive conclusions, not a priori axioms, and provide the starting points for deduction.
The closing appraisal remains selective rather than dismissive. Sax finds intellectual stimulus in the discussions of economic ideas and systematics despite unresolved foundational differences. His review defends an empirically grounded exact economics while recognizing the book’s logical analyses as valuable independently of its expansive definition of economic action and its proposed succession of economics to philosophy.
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