Oskar Engländer · 1924
Oskar Engländer’s German review, published in 1924 on pages 311–317, examines the methodological foundations and economic theory of Karl Englis’s Czech-language book of 1922. Moving from the classification of sciences to motivation, value, exchange, and money, Engländer acknowledges the system’s constructive ingenuity while questioning its psychological premises and empirical validity.
The review begins by reconstructing Englis’s division of empirical knowledge:
Er unterscheidet die empirischen Wissenschaften in Naturwissenschaften, normative Wissenschaften und teleologische oder Postulatwissenschaften.
English translation: He divides the empirical sciences into natural sciences, normative sciences, and teleological or postulate sciences.
Natural sciences explain causal relations; normative sciences concern what ought to be; teleological sciences interpret phenomena through ends and means. Economics belongs to the third category. Its distinctive character consequently depends less on a particular set of objects than on how those objects are understood.
Die Art der Beobachtung sei es, von der aus uns das, was man allgemein als wirtschaftlich bezeichnet, als wirtschaftlich erscheint.
English translation: It is, he holds, the mode of observation from which that which is generally designated as economic appears to us as economic.
This perspectival definition makes disciplinary demarcation a central problem. Economics cannot simply be identified with goods, society, or culture. Nor can the economic principle alone establish its subject matter:
Der Gegenstand der Wirtschaftswissenschaft ist auch nicht durch das wirtschaftliche Prinzip bestimmt, denn dieses Prinzip ist ein nur formales und verlangt ein höheres Wertpostulat.
English translation: Nor is the subject matter of economic science determined by the economic principle, for this principle is a merely formal one and requires a higher value postulate.
Englis supplies this substantive orientation through subjective and objective postulates: the minimization of suffering and an ideal of the human being. Engländer’s objection is that the subjective formulation does not distinguish economic action from purposive conduct generally. Allowing economics to select the actions that interest it leaves the principle of selection unexplained.
The review therefore subjects Englis’s motivational psychology to sustained criticism:
Das originäre subjektive Postulat des Wirtschaftlichen sei das Postulat eines Minimums an Leid.
English translation: The original subjective postulate of the economic is, he holds, the postulate of a minimum of suffering.
Engländer argues that seeking pleasure and avoiding pain are not interchangeable. Desire need not involve suffering, and relief need not produce pleasure; anticipation of a theatrical performance can itself be enjoyable. Knowledge, aesthetic experience, and concern for others also resist reduction to personal pleasure and pain. He proposes the pursuit of values and avoidance of disvalues as a broader account of motivation. Yet this replacement still does not identify what makes an action specifically economic. The distinction between correct and incorrect valuations connects subjective aims with objective standards without resolving the disciplinary boundary.
These objections carry into Englis’s treatment of needs and economic laws. Numerical representations of need intensity presume measurement or numerical comparability that Engländer considers unestablished. More fundamentally, felt intensity is not the same as motivational force: patriotism, for instance, may induce someone to endure intense hunger and thirst. A theory of choice therefore cannot move directly from quantities of feeling to practical decisions.
Engländer nevertheless recognizes particular insights. He welcomes the identification of value with utility and the observation that purchasers compare an acquisition with alternative uses of their money. His criticisms seek sharper distinctions within the system: universally usable goods need not be called “abstract,” and costs incurred in expectation of a surplus must be distinguished from costs understood as relinquished alternatives.
The same demand for conceptual and empirical precision shapes the discussion of optimization. Maximizing units of intensity per monetary unit cannot explain satisfaction unless those intensity units are measurable. Engländer instead stresses rankings of goods, while allowing that several lower-ranked goods may collectively outweigh a higher-ranked good. He also denies that marginal equalization follows logically from minimizing suffering; such a proposition requires empirical support rather than deduction from the postulate alone.
In the closing discussion of exchange and money, Engländer questions the combination of monetary nominalism with a definite general usefulness assigned to the monetary unit. He rejects explanations of price relations through an average individual’s valuations: equal prices establish neither equal social valuations nor a measure of social utility. His qualified appreciation of Englis’s constructive thought thus accompanies a consistent methodological objection. A coherent theoretical system must remain answerable to distinctions between purposiveness and economic action, feeling and motivation, and market prices and collective valuation.
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