Felix Kaufmann, Die ökonomischen Grundbegriffe. Eine Studie über die Theorie der Wirtschaftswissenschaft (1923)

Felix Kaufmann’s German-language study investigates the conceptual foundations of economics as a science of laws. It moves from scientific classification and criticism of economic theory to an account of economic conduct, concluding with an appendix on money and prices. Its guiding aim is methodological:

Die vorliegende kleine Arbeit setzt sich das Ziel, den engen methodischen Zusammenhang, der die Wirtschaftswissenschaft vermöge ihres Charakters als Gesetzeswissenschaft mit den übrigen Gesetzeswissenschaften verknüpft, ins Licht zu rücken.

English translation: The present small work sets itself the goal of bringing to light the close methodological connection which links economic science, by virtue of its character as a science of laws, with the remaining sciences of laws.

Kaufmann begins with Windelband’s distinction between idiographic sciences, which describe individual phenomena, and nomothetic sciences, which investigate laws. Each law-seeking discipline requires material categories defining its domain, alongside the universally applicable resources of logic and mathematics. Drawing on Husserl’s distinction between material and absolutely formal concepts, he argues that a discipline’s concepts must be obtainable through formal modifications of its basic categories. Physics supplies the recurrent analogy: identifying the conceptual constituents of motion does not establish which laws of motion hold empirically. Conceptual intelligibility and empirical regularity remain separate questions.

Hier wie dort aber stehen Abwandlungen der einen, methodologischen Frage zur Erörterung: Wie wird die strenge Scheidung zwischen Form und Inhalt in den Erfahrungswissenschaften vollzogen?

English translation: Here as there, however, it is variations of the one methodological question that are up for discussion: how is the strict separation between form and content carried out in the empirical sciences?

This separation grounds Kaufmann’s criticism of Hans Mayer and Richard Strigl. Mayer characterizes economic activity through ranked ends, insufficient means, and their common employment; Strigl derives economic categories from Lebensnot, the insufficiency of goods relative to requirements. Kaufmann acknowledges their methodological clarity but argues that both substitute conditions under which economic conduct occurs for its conceptual essence. Their approaches exemplify the danger of defining a phenomenon through its causes or intended effects.

Diese Frage wird nämlich von den Wirtschaftstheoretikern durchgängig mit einer methodisch gänzlich andersartigen Problemstellung vermengt oder durch sie ersetzt, nämlich mit der Frage nach den empirischen Voraussetzungen des Wirtschaftens.

English translation: For this question is throughout confounded by economic theorists with a methodologically wholly different formulation of the problem, or replaced by it, namely with the question concerning the empirical presuppositions of economic activity.

Kelsen’s treatment of the state supplies a precedent: just as apparently independent predicates of the state can be understood as concerning law, statements about needs and ends must be examined for what they assert about economic conduct. The marginal-utility principle becomes Kaufmann’s decisive test. Whether needs are ranked through an allegedly objective hierarchy or through sympathetic understanding of an individual, their ranking depends on experience of behaviour. In an individual case not already covered by an empirical type, the stronger need is identifiable retrospectively through action. Invoking it as an independent explanation risks duplicating what requires explanation.

Kaufmann connects this objection with his account of causality. Empirical causal rules provide revisable expectations; exact determinism involving indefinitely many variables supplies no usable empirical determination. Marginal utility nevertheless retains value as a heuristic for discovering regularities in economic behaviour. His target is its psychological interpretation, not the investigation of psychological facts relevant to conduct. The Austrian school’s achievements therefore require clarification rather than abandonment.

His positive account defines economic conduct as behaviour establishing an order of selection among relations to the external world. A good denotes such a relation, not simply a physical object. Behaviour and relations to external things constitute the material categories, while order belongs to formal logic. Economic action establishes an order without necessarily executing an independently given hierarchy of needs or purposes. Pure economic theory should derive its concepts from these categories and formulate empirical laws without importing conceptually extraneous explanatory entities. This reconstruction clarifies empirical findings rather than adding new ones.

The appendix distinguishes ordinal arrangement from arithmetic measurement. An ordering of goods does not itself permit numerical comparison: this requires an additional assignment of numbers, whose formal possibility supplies no empirical criterion of usefulness. Kaufmann defines money through proportionality between quantity and assigned value-number, separating this conceptual issue from exchange functions and actual price formation. He similarly reformulates Gossen’s law in terms of quantities and prices rather than psychological satisfaction. The study thus defends a division of labour: experience establishes economic regularities, while methodological analysis identifies the categories that make those regularities specifically economic.