Friedrich von Wieser, Geleitwort zur vierten Auflage (1921)

Wieser’s foreword, dated Vienna, July 1921, explains why the fourth edition of the second division of Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk’s Kapital und Kapitalzins reproduces the third edition unchanged. Its two-part argument joins editorial restraint to an assessment of the enduring importance of the Positive Theorie: fidelity to a deceased author requires preserving his last formulation, while theoretical achievement need not depend on final agreement with his central explanation.

The opening distinguishes two reasons for leaving a text untouched. Böhm-Bawerk’s history and criticism of interest theories had, in Wieser’s judgment, gained undisputed standing and could be treated as complete. His positive explanation of interest, however, remained contested. Drawing on his personal acquaintance with Böhm-Bawerk’s intellectual development, Wieser describes a lifelong effort to elaborate a foundational idea, sustained despite the burdens of public office. Had Böhm-Bawerk lived to prepare another edition, Wieser expects that he would have added substantial new material. Yet that expectation authorizes no editorial reconstruction:

Wer aber dürfte es auf sich nehmen, die Gedanken zu finden, die auszusprechen ihn der Tod verhindert hat?

English translation: But who might take it upon himself to find the thoughts which death prevented him from uttering?

The question makes the unchanged edition an acknowledgment of limits rather than a declaration of theoretical completeness. Those limits matter especially because interest theory divides even economists otherwise united in their principles:

Das Thema des Kapitalzinses ist in der ganzen theoretischen Ökonomie dasjenige, das zu den stärksten Abspaltungen der Gedanken die Keime enthält, auch die österreichische Schule, die sonst in fast allen Hauptpunkten der Theorie geschlossen ist, hat sich hier vom Grunde aus getrennt.

English translation: The theme of interest on capital is, in the whole of theoretical economics, the one that contains the seeds of the strongest divergences of thought; even the Austrian School, which is otherwise united on almost all the main points of theory, has here divided from the ground up.

Wieser thus presents preservation as the responsible response to both authorial absence and unresolved disagreement. The surviving formulation must stand as Böhm-Bawerk’s intellectual legacy, even though its author would probably have moved beyond it.

The second part shifts from editorial justification to theoretical significance. Wieser ranks the Positive Theorie, apart from Marx’s Kapital, as the theoretical work that had most occupied economists since the classical period. He nevertheless leaves its ultimate verdict open. Even if its foundational idea proves less decisive for explaining interest than Böhm-Bawerk claimed, the theory retains value through that idea’s remaining range of application, the productive relationships it reveals, and the clarity with which it connects them.

Selbst wenn E. BÖHM-BAWERKS „Positive Theorie“ nicht das letzte Ziel der Zinstheorie sein sollte, so führt sie doch für das ganze Gebiet der ökonomischen Theorie zu einer Gipfelaussicht von seltener Fülle und Klarheit der Bilder, und unsere theoretische Erkenntnis, wenn sie auch noch nach höheren Gipfelpunkten streben sollte, wird ihren Weg immer über sie zu nehmen haben.

English translation: Even if E. Böhm-Bawerk's "Positive Theory" should not be the final goal of the theory of interest, it nevertheless leads, for the whole field of economic theory, to a summit view of rare fullness and clarity of images, and our theoretical knowledge, even should it strive after still higher summits, will always have to take its way over it.

The concluding mountain image condenses Wieser’s assessment: a theory may remain indispensable without being definitive. The foreword’s relevance lies in this separation of doctrinal acceptance from intellectual productivity, and in its insistence that preserving a major theoretical achievement does not require closing debate over it.