Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk on Otto Effertz’s Arbeit und Boden (1890)

Böhm-Bawerk’s short review of Otto Effertz’s Arbeit und Boden. Kritik der theoretischen politischen Oekonomie proceeds from a qualified acceptance of its premise to a sharp rejection of its argumentative method and treatment of economic literature. Effertz presents labour and land as the two economic elements from which all goods arise. Böhm-Bawerk regards this proposition as correct with qualifications, but hardly new. His principal objection concerns the deductions Effertz draws from it under the influence of Marx’s style and dialectic.

The review allows for genuine insights, particularly Effertz’s discussion of how the different “ages” of labour affect the value of goods and its application to the explanation of capital interest. Yet even this connection, Böhm-Bawerk observes, no longer possesses full novelty. The central methodological charge is that Effertz substitutes verbal facility for investigation of economic relationships:

Es herrscht eben jene durch Marx eingeführte formalistische Dialektik vor, die vielmehr aus dem Klang der Worte als aus der Natur der Sache argumentiert, die dabei mit Worten alles wunderbar glatt und einfach löst, in der Sache aber im günstigen Fall einseitig übertreibt, im ungünstigen vollständig in die Irre führt.

English translation: What prevails is precisely that formalistic dialectic introduced by Marx, which argues from the sound of the words rather than from the nature of the matter, which in doing so resolves everything with words wonderfully smoothly and simply, but which in substance, in the favourable case, exaggerates one-sidedly, and in the unfavourable leads completely astray.

The contrast between the sound of words and the nature of the subject supplies the review’s governing criterion. An apparently seamless deduction may conceal exaggeration or error; accepting the initial proposition does not validate its consequences.

Böhm-Bawerk then turns from theoretical reasoning to scholarly practice. Effertz’s attacks on “bourgeois economists,” he argues, attribute schematic positions to them that fail to reflect the actual development of the literature. He raises, explicitly as a suspicion, the possibility that Effertz knows these writers chiefly through quotations selected by Marx and other socialists for polemical purposes. This would also explain why Effertz presents established ideas as discoveries. Although Effertz contests Marx on some points, Böhm-Bawerk finds his critical manner pervasively Marxian.

The concluding judgment combines recognition of ability with a demand for greater scholarly discipline:

Alles in Allem: der Verf. ist ein gescheiter Dilettant und lebhafter Schriftsteller, der über viele Einfälle — gute und schlechte — verfügt, und der bei etwas weniger Marxomanie und etwas mehr wissenschaftlicher Zucht gewiss sehr beachtenswertes hätte leisten können.

English translation: All in all: the author is a clever dilettante and a lively writer, who has many ideas at his disposal — good and bad — and who, with somewhat less Marxomania and somewhat more scientific discipline, could certainly have accomplished something very noteworthy.

The review’s significance lies in this conjunction of methodological and bibliographical criticism: theoretical ingenuity requires substantive reasoning, and claims to originality require direct acquaintance with existing scholarship. Its verdict is severe, but rests on a distinction between Effertz’s intellectual promise and the scientific adequacy of his execution.