Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk: Review of Gustav Cohn’s Grundlegung der Nationalökonomie (1888)

Böhm-Bawerk’s review assesses the general intellectual character of Gustav Cohn’s systematic economics textbook rather than surveying its contents. Responding to sharply opposed judgments by Adolph Wagner and Platter, he argues that the book combines exceptional strengths with serious deficiencies. His appraisal moves from Cohn’s breadth of vision and literary power to his theoretical incompleteness, then identifies a methodological source of that incompleteness. The central distinction is between illuminating economic life in its many connections and explaining it with sufficient conceptual depth.

Den grössten Vorzug des Buches möchte ich in einer Eigenschaft erblicken, für die ich keinen bezeichnenderen Ausdruck finden kann, als den der Lebensfülle.

English translation: The greatest merit of the book I should like to see in a quality for which I can find no more characteristic expression than that of fullness of life.

This “fullness of life” consists in connecting economic activity with family, state, religion, politics, intellectual and ethical culture, philosophy, and history. Cohn’s insistence on these connections offers stimulating perspectives even on familiar subjects. Böhm-Bawerk treats his occasionally excessive rhetoric as a secondary fault. The fundamental problem is that the abundance of perspectives does not culminate in completed explanations:

Es wird ungemein viel angeregt und ungemein wenig erledigt.

English translation: Uncommonly much is stimulated and uncommonly little settled.

Wagner had interpreted Cohn’s omissions generously, as the deliberate restraint of a master seeking to stimulate readers. Böhm-Bawerk instead suspects that the arguments themselves have not been thought through. He distinguishes the vivid clarity of individual presentations from the higher-order clarity required of a systematic work: ideas must ultimately fit together, and the decisive theoretical questions must receive answers.

The review locates this weakness partly in Cohn’s gifts as an essayist, but also in his position within the dispute between historical and exact methods. Cohn formally recognizes both induction and deduction, empirical inquiry and abstract hypotheses. In practice, however, his historically grounded suspicion of economic laws interrupts the reasoning that his own hypotheses require.

Er bringt ihr nicht blos den Glauben an die Unumstösslichkeit der Denkresultate, sondern auch die Schärfe des Denkens selbst zum Opfer.

English translation: He sacrifices to it not merely the belief in the incontrovertibility of the results of thought, but the acuteness of the thinking itself.

The distinction is crucial: acknowledging the fallibility of conclusions need not mean sacrificing precision in reaching them. Böhm-Bawerk’s charge is that Cohn begins abstract explanations, then retreats into generalities when further analysis would be necessary, invoking the distance between hypotheses and actual life. The connections that enrich Cohn’s account thus fail at the point where they should lead from surface description to theoretical understanding.

Böhm-Bawerk explicitly accepts both the value of historical research and the legitimacy of criticizing classical economics. His objection concerns criticism that supplies no better theoretical account in its place.

Die historische Forschung soll die Dogmatik befruchten, erleuchten, ihr Gesichtsfeld erweitern, sie corrigiren: aber sie soll sie nicht entmuthigen und noch weniger verflachen.

English translation: Historical research should fertilise dogmatic theory, illuminate it, widen its field of vision, correct it: but it should not dishearten it, and still less render it shallow.

Here “Dogmatik” denotes systematic theoretical reasoning, whose productive relationship with historical inquiry the review seeks to defend. Both induction and deduction must be pursued as rigorously as possible. A building-cost estimate supplies the practical analogy: knowing that actual expenditure will differ from an estimate is no excuse for careless arithmetic. Likewise, an abstract hypothesis cannot reproduce the whole of economic life, but making it less exact only increases that distance. Historical qualification should supplement rigorous abstraction, not license an unfinished version of it.

The closing comparison with Wilhelm Roscher tests methodological professions against actual exposition. Although Roscher publicly opposed theoretical economics more strongly than Cohn, his textbook transmitted its accumulated laws extensively. Cohn professes greater methodological openness yet presents the inherited theoretical material in fragmented form, stripped of its coherence and sharpness. Böhm-Bawerk therefore doubts that readers will reward him as they rewarded Roscher. The review’s broader significance lies in its defense of exact reasoning without claims to exhaustive realism: the incompleteness of abstraction makes empirical correction necessary, but does not diminish the obligation to think abstract arguments through.