Hans Mayer’s German memorial essay presents Friedrich Wieser’s intellectual life as a sustained search for unity in economic and social explanation. Its commemorative premise is that scientific achievement survives its creator:
Nun liegt sein Werk, das Ergebnis eines langen und schaffensreichen Lebens, losgelöst von den Fesseln der Zeit und Vergänglichkeit vor.
English translation: Now his work, the result of a long and creatively rich life, lies before us, released from the fetters of time and transience.
Mayer turns this assertion into a defense of Wieser’s contribution to Austrian economics. He traces a movement from Carl Menger’s subjective theory of value through Wieser’s accounts of production, costs, and imputation to his investigation of social power. Yet he explicitly limits the comprehensiveness of his retrospective:
Ein zusammenfassender Rückblick auf das ganze wissenschaftliche Lebenswerk dieses Geistes von seltener Spannweite kann an dieser Stelle nur Umrisse geben.
English translation: A summary retrospect upon the entire scientific life's work of this mind of rare range can in this place give only outlines.
The outline emphasizes conceptual connections rather than exhaustive chronology. Menger supplies the decisive starting point: needs and scarcity explain valuation, whereas costs and labor expenditures cannot independently establish value. Mayer places this innovation against both the inadequacy of classical economics and the retreat from general theory into historical description and political prescription.
Hiemit war in der Tat, nach Erkenntnis der Unbrauchbarkeit der klassischen „Kosten“- und „Arbeitswerttheorie“, die sich letzten Endes in einer Zirkelerklärung bewegt hatten, eine neue Basis für die Wirtschaftstheorie gefunden.
English translation: With this there was in fact found, after the recognition of the uselessness of the classical "cost" and "labour value" theories, which in the last analysis had moved in a circular explanation, a new basis for economic theory.
Wieser’s achievement, in Mayer’s account, was to turn this foundation into a connected explanation of economic activity. Beginning with an economy producing for its own needs, he develops marginal valuation and extends it from consumption to production. Productive resources derive their value from the utility of their products; they do not independently create product value. Their valuation then enters alternative productive uses as cost. Imputation addresses the allocation of product value among cooperating factors, supplying a basis for explaining income distribution. Mayer thus treats marginal utility as one component of a broader theory, not an adequate description of its entire scope.
The relations disclosed in the “simple economy” hold independently of particular legal institutions. Institutional arrangements modify their concrete operation without abolishing the underlying laws. Capitalist and socialist economies consequently become different applications of a common explanatory framework. For Mayer, this generality also establishes the possibility of scientifically informed economic and social policy: interventions can be assessed through their consequences within an intelligible system.
The memorial’s praise is openly comparative. Mayer credits Wieser with overcoming a separation between utility and costs that he finds unresolved in Jevons and Walras. Market equilibrium alone does not exhaust the explanatory task; scientific superiority rests on connecting more phenomena through fewer independent assumptions. This partisan assessment also makes Mayer’s criterion of theory explicit: abstraction must earn its standing through explanatory performance.
Wieser’s Theorie der gesellschaftlichen Wirtschaft provides the principal demonstration. Mayer presents it as explaining capitalist society through the interaction of general economic laws, social regularities, private law, and the distribution of power. Prices, wages, rent, entrepreneurial profit, money, and public and international economic relations belong within this framework. Its methods include isolating causal elements, constructing idealized forms, and progressively reducing abstraction to restore concrete conditions. Theory is directed toward understanding reality, not substituting a self-contained conceptual world for it.
The final movement places economics within Wieser’s larger ambition to understand society. Earlier inquiries into social forces, law, and power prepare the way for Das Gesetz der Macht. The First World War and the collapse of the monarchy sharpen this undertaking, prompting a search through historical development for regularities beneath apparent contingency. Mayer presents the emergence and operation of power as the basis for explaining social structure and historical change.
The sociology receives less detailed reconstruction than the economics, but completes the essay’s intellectual trajectory. Wieser’s career becomes a continuous effort to discover lawful connections, first in valuation and production and ultimately in collective life. Mayer’s memorial therefore also articulates Austrian economics’ wider scientific aspirations: subjective value theory promises a unified economic explanation, while the inquiry into power extends the search for order to society and history.
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