Julius Friedrich Gans von Ludassy: Review of Johann von Komorzynski’s Der Werth in der isolirten Wirthschaft (1890)

Julius Friedrich Gans von Ludassy’s review examines Komorzynski’s intervention in the expanding debate over economic value. Opening with recent works by Wieser and Zuckerkandl, it treats value theory as the focal point of contemporary economics. Ludassy praises Komorzynski’s analytical intelligence, reconstructs his objections to Menger at length, and then challenges his proposed alternative. The review’s governing distinction is between the strength of a criticism and the adequacy of the theory meant to replace its target.

Er bringt derselben nicht in allen Beziehungen neue Gesichtspunkte, in mehreren erfreuliche Klärung.

English translation: He brings to it new points of view not in all respects, but in several a gratifying clarification.

This measured endorsement frames the exposition. After an inquiry into needs, Komorzynski distinguishes the predominantly German use-value school from Menger’s theory. The former locates value in goods’ usefulness, ranking needs and the goods capable of satisfying them. Menger instead evaluates determinate quantities through the concrete satisfactions dependent upon them, avoiding the misleading comparison of entire classes of goods with classes of needs.

Komorzynski initially proposes corrections that leave this foundation intact. Menger takes available quantities as given without economically explaining their magnitude; this concerns the completeness of his account, not its validity. Likewise, Komorzynski questions the different valuation procedures applied to consumption goods and means of production, suggesting that the principle used for productive goods could govern goods generally. His more fundamental objection concerns whether the smallest loss of satisfaction following the removal of a good can measure its value.

Diese Vorstellung nun bezeichnet Komorzynski als eine irrige.

English translation: This conception Komorzynski now designates as erroneous.

The decisive conceptual move is temporal. Komorzynski distinguishes continuously effective useful powers from individual products whose usefulness lasts only a limited time. Losing a single product causes a temporary disturbance: the household’s ability to redistribute the resulting disadvantage depends on contingent circumstances. The loss may therefore involve several heterogeneous satisfactions rather than only the least important need, and Komorzynski denies that these losses provide a comparable magnitude of value.

Die Theorie des Grenznutzens erachtet Komorzynski nur unter einer bestimmten Voraussetzung für richtig.

English translation: Komorzynski regards the theory of marginal utility as correct only under a definite presupposition.

That condition is a permanent reduction of useful capacity. An economy organized to sustain recurring satisfactions continually replaces consumed products. If a lasting natural resource disappears, or quantities of a product cease to recur, the economic plan must change permanently. Reallocation can then shift the deprivation onto the least important needs, allowing different quantities of useful powers to be equated through the identical losses their permanent disappearance would produce. A temporary interruption, by contrast, permits only temporary departures from the plan. Komorzynski consequently restricts the marginal-utility principle to enduring losses and defines value through the significance of continuously effective useful powers.

Ludassy regards this objection as the book’s intellectual high point. His response does not rest on treating marginal utility as an invulnerable doctrine: he presents scientific theories as historically transient achievements whose insights may survive within more developed explanations. But eventual supersession does not establish that Komorzynski has supplied the stronger account.

Denn die Kraft der Negation steht hier in keinem Verhältnisse zu der positiven Aufstellung.

English translation: For the force of the negation here bears no proportion to the positive proposition advanced.

The alternative’s scope is Ludassy’s central objection. Restricting value to enduring useful powers excludes goods whose value is evident despite their transient use. His deliberately ordinary example is a traveller carrying provisions, paper napkins, soap leaves, cigars, matches, and newspapers. Such goods can be consumed once without belonging to a continuously renewed provision of useful capacity; nevertheless, Ludassy invokes their prices as evidence that they possess value. The proposed definition therefore excludes precisely the temporary satisfactions that a general theory must explain.

The review closes by questioning Komorzynski’s further suggestion that value can be understood as quantitatively conceived usefulness. For Ludassy, this returns him to the use-value school he had himself criticized. The review’s significance lies in making continuity, replacement, and the flexibility of economic planning explicit problems for marginal-utility theory, while insisting that a successful revision must explain transient consumption as well as sustained provision. Its verdict is appreciative but adverse: Komorzynski sharpens the problem of valuation without establishing an adequate replacement theory.