Robert Meyer’s Review of Otto Wittelshöfer’s Untersuchungen über das Capital (1890)

Robert Meyer’s German review of 1890 evaluates Wittelshöfer’s theory of capital through its attempted connection between socialist criticism and a needs-based theory of value. Locating the author near Rodbertus and Marx, Meyer regards this connection as a significant but unfinished advance:

Den wesentlichsten Fortschritt gegenüber der socialistischen Lehre, den Verfasser angebahnt, freilich nicht vollendet hat, möchte ich darin sehen, dass er seine Lehre an eine von den Bedarfsverhältnissen abgeleitete Werttheorie anzuknüpfen sucht.

English translation: The most essential advance beyond the socialist doctrine which the author has initiated, though admittedly not completed, I should see in the fact that he seeks to link his doctrine to a theory of value derived from the conditions of need.

The qualification governs the review. Meyer finds Wittelshöfer’s value theory insufficiently developed and inadequately justified against Böhm and Wieser. Identifying production with need also threatens to obscure the distinction between subjective-value and labour-value theories. Nevertheless, deriving the value of intermediate goods from future finished products provides a productive basis for examining capital.

The conceptual centre is Wittelshöfer’s distinction between “objective” and “subjective” capital valuation. Objective valuation concerns the eventual value of finished products under fully known future conditions; subjective valuation consists in individuals’ estimates of production and demand. Meyer cautions that this terminology differs from Menger’s and Böhm’s. Under existing ownership relations, individual estimates can diverge from objective values, redistributing wealth and directing production even when gains and losses offset one another in aggregate.

Die Darstellung dieser Differenzen ist der Hauptzweck und wohl auch der verdienstvollste Theil des Werkes.

English translation: The presentation of these differences is the chief purpose and probably also the most meritorious part of the work.

Meyer thus credits the analysis of discrepancies without settling whether its construction of objective value is theoretically necessary. Wittelshöfer’s account encompasses intermediate goods and the formation of human productive capacities. Capital formation increasingly commits resources to distant futures and uncertain needs, making valuation progressively more fallible. Errors have comparatively limited consequences when goods remain with one owner throughout their productive use. Exchange gives them a different significance:

Indem aber die Vorproducte ihren Eigenthümer wechseln, werden diese Schätzungen und die dabei unterlaufenen Irrthümer von der grössten Bedeutung.

English translation: But inasmuch as the intermediate products change their owner, these estimates, and the errors occurring in them, become of the greatest importance.

Transfer fixes an estimate in a transaction: the seller escapes subsequent consequences while the buyer assumes them. An owner may therefore profit despite having paid an objectively excessive price, provided another purchaser overvalues the asset still further. Private enrichment need not indicate an improvement in productive conditions.

Meyer follows this mechanism through credit, business interests, interest, rent, and legal obligations. Fixed monetary claims can survive changes in the economic values underlying them; legal protection and insolvency arrangements may consequently deepen the separation between private claims and productive conditions. Yet Meyer questions an account that emphasizes growing individual capitals without equally considering corresponding losses. He also insists that labour valuation requires investigation rather than the automatic application of a socialist exploitation principle.

The treatment of crises offers the argument’s strongest application. Meyer praises the depiction of apparent prosperity sustained by wasteful consumption, foreign indebtedness, and misdirected investment. Luxury projects can absorb resources while necessary productive equipment remains unreplaced. Entrepreneurs’ financial positions may also obstruct recovery after productive conditions would otherwise permit it. These observations reveal how individual financial success and collective economic deterioration can coexist.

Meyer nevertheless distinguishes an illuminating description from a sufficient causal explanation. An economic organization that permits valuation errors does not by itself explain why those errors periodically move together in an optimistic direction. The theory therefore leaves the timing and collective character of crises unresolved. Wittelshöfer also supplies no remedies.

The closing assessment balances perceptive discussions of intellectual, physical, and entrepreneurial labour against cumbersome rederivations of established doctrines and insufficient engagement with other economists. Meyer’s concern is substantive comparison and acknowledgment, not simply a demand for more citations. His overall judgment remains favourable: the book’s importance rests on its incomplete effort to connect socialist criticism of ownership and economic disorder with a theory of value grounded in needs. He endorses that intellectual direction without accepting the system as a finished explanation.