Julius Friedrich Gans von Ludassy, Review of Friedrich von Wieser’s Der natürliche Werth (1889)

Ludassy’s review examines Wieser’s Der natürliche Werth through a sustained comparison with his earlier Ueber den Ursprung und die Hauptgesetze des wirthschaftlichen Werthes. Extensive exposition supports a critique of their conceptual consistency. While admiring Wieser’s contribution to marginal-utility economics, Ludassy questions whether natural value, objective exchange value, and productive imputation consistently develop his original subjectivism.

The opening praises Wieser’s linguistic inventiveness, especially Grenznutzen, but challenges the distinction between an earlier theory of value and a subsequent investigation of value phenomena. The relationship between the books becomes the governing question:

Wird uns in dem neueren Werke nur eine andere Seite einer und derselben Wesenheit vorgeführt?

English translation: Are we presented in the more recent work merely with another side of one and the same essence?

Ludassy reconstructs the earlier theory as an account of human interest transferred from the satisfaction of needs to the goods enabling that satisfaction. Value is neither an intrinsic property of things nor simply their price. Scarcity and economic control make valuation necessary, while marginal utility determines the value of individual units within a stock. The psychological foundation involves judgment and practical motivation:

Das Güterinteresse ist somit eine Erregung des Begehrens und beschäftigt Verstand und Willen zugleich.

English translation: Interest in goods is thus an excitation of desire and occupies understanding and will at the same time.

Costs and labour cannot independently explain value, since their own valuation requires explanation. Ludassy establishes this subjective foundation as the standard against which the later book’s distinctions will be tested.

His presentation of Der natürliche Werth follows its movement from marginal utility and stock valuation to prices, productive imputation, rent, interest, wages, costs, and public finance. Increasing abundance may reduce aggregate value while improving welfare: utility, rather than value itself, remains the ultimate economic end. Market valuation introduces another divergence because purchasing power directs production toward profitable demand, not necessarily toward the most urgent needs.

Wieser’s natural value abstracts from unequal wealth, error, coercion, and other disturbances to isolate the relation between utility and available quantities. A rational communist economy supplies its hypothetical setting. This construction nevertheless contests socialist labour-value theory: collective ownership would not eliminate scarcity, marginal valuation, or the comparison of competing productive uses.

Ludassy questions the status of this abstraction. Since the earlier work already excluded defective valuations, the later book must explain whether natural value restates that procedure or introduces a different object. He also rejects a sharp opposition between philosophy and empirical inquiry: philosophy interprets experience rather than dispensing with it. The earlier book was philosophical without acknowledging the fact; the later one risks ideology by making an unrealizable ideal the prototype of actual values. This objection concerns the theory’s foundation, not the worth of every investigation conducted within it.

A related criticism concerns objective exchange value. The earlier work had treated objective value concepts as convenient but scientifically defective expressions of subjective judgments; the later book grants them greater independence while continuing to explain their movements through subjective needs and marginal valuations. Ludassy argues that common causes and patterns weaken the claim that these constitute fundamentally different phenomena. Multiplying subjective use value, subjective and objective exchange value, collective value, and natural value does not establish explanatory unity.

The final substantive dispute concerns productive imputation. The exposition extends valuation to productive means:

Wie die Güter, welche zu unmittelbarer Consumption bestimmt sind, werden auch die Productivgüter geschätzt.

English translation: Productive goods too are valued in the same way as the goods destined for immediate consumption.

Ludassy challenges Wieser’s distinction between a factor’s productive contribution and the return lost when that factor disappears. Defending Menger’s eliminative procedure, he observes that Wieser himself repeatedly reasons through hypothetical loss. A four-horse team illustrates the difficulty of treating a productive combination as merely the sum of independently valued components.

Ludassy’s alternative brings imputation back within ordinary marginal valuation: demand for a product creates a need for its productive means. Their usefulness may be mediated without making their valuation a secondary act. Wine blending supplies a practical objection to fixed proportional dependence between input values and the finished product. The review thus combines exposition with an internal critique of subjectivist value theory. Its concluding esteem for Wieser’s clarity, courage, and analytical power remains compatible with serious disagreement: conceptual criticism contributes to the gradual advancement of economic knowledge.