The archive.

Would opening access to land abolish capital profit—or would independent producers still need tools, buildings, and subsistence on credit? This is one of Alfred Amonn’s concrete tests of Franz Oppenheimer’s economic system in his two-part critical study of 1928. Amonn insists that the historical injustice of property relations cannot by itself explain how prices and incomes are determined. Defending marginal utility theory against Oppenheimer’s objections, he also challenges the inference from competition to equal incomes and from landownership to the dependence of wage workers. The interest lies in the distance Amonn maintains between sympathy for emancipatory reform and acceptance of its economic premises: his criticism shows precisely where a proposed abolition of privilege still owes an explanation of wages, interest, and rent.

Trade unions at the close of the 1920s boom pressed a seductive claim: that higher wages would themselves raise productivity and general welfare—the doctrine this book was written to dismantle. First published in 1930 and reissued in expanded form in 1945, it untangles the many senses buried in the word wage: relative share against absolute goods, nominal against real, the wage rate per unit against total wage income. A higher rate, Amonn warns, need not raise a worker's income at all, since it may cut employment, hours, or output. He works out wage formation under free competition, ties real wages to productivity and capital accumulation, and grants unions a genuine but bounded power to lift wages toward the competitive level while denying they can be pushed permanently above it at capital's expense.

„Lohnsteigerungen“ bilden also eine sehr zweischneidige Waffe im Kampfe der Arbeit mit dem Kapital und den Anteil am Gesamtprodukt. Wenn man sie benutzt, läuft man Gefahr, sich damit ins eigene Fleisch zu schneiden.

English translation: “Wage increases" thus constitute a very double-edged weapon in the struggle of labor with capital over the share in the total product. If one uses them, one runs the risk of cutting into one's own flesh.”

Can wage cuts help restore employment without shrinking the purchasing power on which recovery depends? In this 1933 lecture, Alfred Amonn answers by distinguishing wage rates from total wage income, and relative prices from the general price level. His case is not for indiscriminate deflation: he argues that reducing still-high manufactured-goods prices could revive sales and demand for raw materials whose prices had already collapsed. With monetary means held constant and productive capacity idle, he maintains, lower prices can support greater output, while expanding employment may offset lower wage rates. The revealing tension lies between this proposed outcome and the disruptive transition towards it. Amonn acknowledges postponed purchases and international obstacles, but gives priority to completed adjustment—a choice that makes the lecture a focused statement of the assumptions behind his defence of price and wage reductions.

The double meaning of the word Volk, Amonn contends, has quietly corrupted the foundations of economics by fusing the pure theoretical categories of the exchange economy with the practical concepts of Volkswirtschaftslehre. This introduction to economic thinking—second edition of 1944, essentially unchanged from the 1938 original—treats concepts frankly as instruments made by thought and defines each by the problem it is meant to solve. Moving from economic goods, scarcity, and Wohlstand through the production factors, prices, money, credit, and comparative costs, he denies that Volkswirtschaft is any real unit like a household, insisting it is only an ideational association of separate economies. Four appendices turn the method against Max Weber, Sombart, Gottl, and Englis, whose definitions he finds either candidly stipulative or objective merely in appearance.

Begriffe sind Denkwerkzeuge.

English translation: “Concepts are tools of thought.”

When a peacetime economy converts to war, military demand piles onto civilian demand, usable productive means shrink, and the money circulation is thrown out of joint—three simultaneous shocks that no ordinary peacetime remedy can absorb. Written in Zurich in 1942 alongside Swiss reports by Böhler and Dütscher, this study refuses the comforting idea that policy should preserve the old circular flow; the whole national economy, Amonn argues, becomes structurally a war economy or it is none. He challenges the dogma that taxes never inflate while loans always do, subordinates the prevention of inflation to the overriding goal of maximum production, and defends rationing, differentiated price control, and savings-based war loans, testing each against Swiss figures for the cost of living, wages, and foreign trade.

Aber man geriete dann von der Scylla der Inflation unvermeidlich in die Charybdis der Deflation.

English translation: “But one would then inevitably pass from the Scylla of inflation into the Charybdis of deflation.”

Can monetary expansion cause inflation without doing so every time? In this 1943 article, Alfred Amonn defends quantity theory by separating a conditional causal claim from the evidence needed to explain an actual rise in prices. His distinctive emphasis falls on how money enters expenditure: commercial credit, government spending, and saving do not have identical effects, nor must additional purchasing power raise consumer prices rather than asset prices. Amonn treats the exchange equation as a constraint, not a self-sufficient causal explanation. His closing thought experiment—whether a fully employed economy could replace taxation with newly printed money without raising prices—makes the dispute concrete. The article offers a way to distinguish monetary mechanisms from automatic predictions, while showing why institutions and the destination of spending matter.

Where should a student of economics begin—thrown at once into the tangle of modern theory, or led through the history of the science's own errors? This guide answers plainly: the aim of study is the capacity to judge practical policy on a theoretically grounded understanding, and the surest path runs through the original works of Turgot, Smith, Ricardo, Menger, and Walras before any textbook. Amonn maps the terrain to be mastered—general value and price theory, the factor incomes of wage, interest, and rent, money and the quantity theory, comparative costs, business cycles, and Malthusian population theory—always separating theoretical questions from the political goal-setting that lies beyond science. A closing mathematical appendix reduces supply, demand, and equilibrium price to linear functions worked out by hand.

Das Primäre in einer Wissenschaft sind ihre Probleme.

English translation: “What is primary in a science are its problems.”

Remembered chiefly as a moralist and forerunner of socialism, Simonde de Sismondi had his strictly theoretical economics undervalued for a century—an imbalance this first volume, offered as a belated centenary tribute, sets out to correct. Amonn reconstructs the 1803 De la richesse commerciale, in which capital governs production understood as a process of turnover, and translates key passages with commentary. He follows Sismondi's distinction of necessary from surplus wages, his national economic balance set against the mercantilist trade balance, his treatment of money as sterile wealth and credit as merely immaterial capital, and his consumer-centered case for free trade against tariffs, guilds, apprenticeship laws, and privileged companies. Throughout, he marks where Sismondi's labor-based reduction of land and capital anticipates the socialist value theories their author himself declined to draw.

«Die Regierung kann also» – so schließt Sismondi – «niemals in die Irre gehen, wenn sie in allen Fällen in Sachen der Handelsgesetzgebung nach dem wohlverstandenen Interesse des Konsumenten verfährt.»

English translation: “The government," Sismondi concludes, "can therefore never go astray if in all matters of commercial legislation it acts in accordance with the well-understood interest of the consumer.”

Rising output need not mean rising welfare: displaced workers may lose purchasing power just as mechanization expands productive capacity. In this 1945 essay, Alfred Amonn makes Sismondi’s attention to such disruptions central to a reassessment of his economic thought. He separates theoretical achievement from policy allegiance, challenging both the dismissal of the early liberal work as derivative of Adam Smith and the reduction of the later interventionist work to humanitarian protest. Amonn finds continuity in Sismondi’s analysis of capital, income, and consumption, while acknowledging weaknesses in his deductions. The distinctive issue is not merely whether an economy eventually reaches equilibrium, but what happens to employment and livelihoods along the way—a distinction through which Amonn connects Sismondi’s work to modern theories of crises and employment.

What did an early coin’s stamp certify—weight, metal quality, or the place where it would be accepted? Alfred Amonn makes this concrete dispute a test of how economists and historians explain the origins of money. Defending Kaulla against Herbert A. Cahn’s criticism, he argues that surviving objects cannot establish their institutional meaning without interpretation: a mark on temple property need not mean what a mark on circulating coinage means. Yet practical plausibility is not historical proof, and money need not have emerged everywhere by the same route. The article offers a pointed encounter between documentary evidence and economic reasoning, showing both why conjecture is unavoidable and why an explanation of money’s usefulness cannot substitute for an account of its actual beginnings.

To fix a price at all, one must already know how prices form—and confusing value with price, this essay warns, wrecks the attempt from the start. Contributed to the 1946 Bern anthology Konkurrenz und Planwirtschaft, Amonn's piece first pries apart two words ordinary usage runs together: price, the money ratio of a good, and value, its regular exchange ratio against other goods. He distinguishes indirect influence such as tariffs from direct price policy, showing how ceilings breed shortages and rationing while floors breed surpluses and quotas, and grounds the whole in modern functional supply-and-demand theory and elasticity. Economics can test whether measures suit a chosen aim, he concludes, but the aims themselves belong to politics—so direct policy should ordinarily aim at durable competitive equilibrium, best secured by curbing monopoly.

Die Wert- und Preistheorie ist eine unumgängliche Voraussetzung einer rationellen Preispolitik, wie einer rationellen Wirtschaftspolitik überhaupt.

English translation: “The theory of value and price is an indispensable prerequisite of a rational price policy, and indeed of a rational economic policy generally.”

Higher wage rates need not mean higher earnings for workers as a whole: employment, prices, and bargaining power can pull in different directions. In this 1947 lecture, Alfred Amonn asks what wage policy can accomplish once those differences are taken seriously. He challenges the assumption that competition automatically secures productivity gains for labour, emphasizing workers’ limited ability to wait, move, or obtain information. Yet he also argues that wage increases can cost jobs—a constraint collective bargaining cannot abolish. His distinctive emphasis falls on changing the conditions of wage determination through labour protection, organization, and informed state mediation rather than simply fixing rates. The lecture offers a concrete way to examine whose income a wage measure protects, and whether a nominal gain represents greater purchasing power.