The archive.

When the Czechoslovak crown came into existence in late February 1919, old Austro-Hungarian notes overstamped and declared sole legal tender, a successor state set out to build a currency from a wartime paper inheritance. Amonn traces that reconstruction to the stabilization debates of 1924 through note circulation, Lombard credit, discount policy, foreign-exchange reserves, and the wealth levy. His governing distinction separates elastic money, born of discounting genuine commercial bills and adjusting automatically to trade, from inelastic money created by Lombard advances and devisen purchases. On that basis he rejects the loose charge of deflation: Czechoslovak policy aimed at exchange-rate stability and real reserve backing, not deliberate contraction, and the crown's 1922 appreciation owed more to intervention and speculative capital flows than to any shrinking of the money stock.

Die neue Währung stellt sich hiernach formell als eine „Staatsnoten“währung, materiell aber als eine Banknotenwährung dar.

English translation: “Formally, the new currency presents itself as a "state-note" currency, but materially as a banknote currency.”

Can equal incomes explain prices if incomes themselves depend on prices? This is the central difficulty Alfred Amonn finds in Franz Oppenheimer’s reconstruction of objective value theory in the second edition of Wert und Kapitalprofit. In this 1924 critical article, Amonn grants his opponent’s premises provisionally, then tests what the equations actually explain. His objections turn on concrete distinctions: equally capable workers may demand different pay for unpleasant work; a bundle of consumption goods is not interchangeable with its monetary price or subjective worth. Neither dismissing classical theory wholesale nor accepting its reconstruction, Amonn asks what makes an economic explanation more than a restatement of interdependence. His analysis also shows why unchanged equilibrium prices need not demonstrate that demand has ceased to matter.

Restricting domestic credit and building foreign-exchange reserves might seem complementary tasks for a new monetary authority. In this 1924 article, Alfred Amonn shows why they initially worked against each other at the Czechoslovak Bank Office. His assessment of its first five years measures policy against inherited assets, available lending instruments, and the delayed response of trade—not merely against legislative intentions or note-bank doctrine. Lending against securities weakened monetary control, yet, he argues, helped sustain postwar recovery when commercial bills were scarce. Exchange-rate appreciation likewise demanded attention to inventories, production costs, and the financing of raw-material imports. The article offers a concrete account of how monetary authority was acquired through practice, and why reserve losses or departures from orthodox banking rules did not by themselves establish policy failure.

Ricardo both founded theoretical economics and led it astray, so runs the double verdict of this centenary study. He founded it, Amonn argues, by isolating its true problem: not the justice of class shares but the formal mechanism by which rent, profit, wages, and prices arise in exchange. He misled it by taking the labor-value principle as an unexamined axiom, confusing a mere indicator of value with its cause. Across chapters on heterogeneous labor, capital durability, profit, and rent, Amonn shows the principle breaking down, rent springs from the scarcity of land relative to demand, not from cultivating inferior soil. In its place he rebuilds value on relative scarcity, joining Cassel's equilibrium equations to marginal utility, and reads modern theory as the recovery of an insight Ricardo glimpsed and abandoned.

Der Wert der Güter „hängt“ nicht und niemals „ab“ von der zu ihrer Produktion erforderlichen Arbeitsmenge.

English translation: “The value of goods does not, and never does, "depend" on the quantity of labor required for their production.”

Factories, workers, and materials may be available while the credit needed to bring them together is not. In this article on Czechoslovakia’s credit shortage, Alfred Amonn asks why issuing money for productive lending might nevertheless worsen the predicament. He grants that industrial expansion could benefit workers and consumers, but distinguishes that promise from the immediate pressures new spending would place on prices, foreign exchange, and currency reserves. His diagnosis shifts attention from an apparent shortage of notes to the state’s absorption of bank funds for consumption; his remedy is repayment rather than monetary creation. The article offers a concrete way to distinguish industrial distress from monetary insufficiency—and to understand why defending an appreciated currency could require further domestic restraint.

A privately owned central bank might reassure foreign creditors without managing money any better than a public institution. This distinction anchors Alfred Amonn’s critique of Czechoslovakia’s proposed bank of issue. He judges institutional reform by what it actually provides: reserves, control over note circulation, and a usable monetary yardstick. Diverting capital-levy receipts to government debt repayment, he argues, would weaken the new bank’s starting position. His defence of a larger monetary unit introduces a subtler tension: redenomination cannot itself change purchasing power, yet it can make losses in real income visible. Rent controls and senior civil-service salaries show how misleading nominal figures can obstruct adjustment. The article offers a concrete encounter with monetary reform as both financial engineering and a problem of public perception.

Higher farm prices can enrich agricultural producers while leaving the economy poorer. In this 1925 discussion article, Alfred Amonn challenges E. Laur’s inference from agricultural prosperity to national gain by asking what increased domestic production displaces. Labour and capital drawn into farming might otherwise produce industrial goods capable of purchasing more food through international exchange; farmers’ increased purchasing power must also be weighed against consumers’ losses. Amonn’s distinctive insistence is that physical output, sectoral income, and national income require separate judgements. His qualified allowance for temporary protection makes this more than a categorical argument against intervention. The article offers a concrete way to test claims of national benefit: compare alternative uses of resources rather than treating one sector’s gains as gains for everyone.

Can a theory of individual satisfaction explain prices, incomes, and the organization of a social economy? In this two-part critical article, Alfred Amonn tests Friedrich von Wieser’s answer against distinctions that economic abstraction can obscure: between subjective valuation and monetary calculation, individual purposes and relations among persons, explanation and ethical judgment. His objection is concrete: equal prices do not imply equal satisfactions, and accounting in money does not establish that utilities can be added together. Reviewing Wieser’s second edition, Amonn combines appreciation of its sociological insight with scrutiny of explanations that presuppose the prices they seek to derive. The article offers a sustained encounter with the limits of utility-based explanation—and with the question of what disappears when a society is modelled as a single economic subject.

A theory of prices can be logically consistent yet fail to explain why people earn different incomes. In this rejoinder to Franz Oppenheimer, Alfred Amonn withdraws several earlier objections to the reconstructed objective theory of value, then tests the assumptions that remain. Equally capable producers may accept lower earnings to avoid danger or disagreeable work; equal working conditions do not identify a uniquely “normal” worker. These concrete difficulties sharpen Amonn’s distinction between deductive coherence and empirical explanation. His defence of subjective valuation is equally precise: judgments shaped by social circumstances are still judgments made by individuals. The reader encounters an argument for retaining valuing subjects in price theory without treating them as socially isolated—or endorsing marginal utility theory wholesale.

Behind the visible bustle of households, workshops, and markets lies a single circular process no eye observes directly, and making that national economy thinkable is the didactic ambition of this 1926 treatise. Building from need and scarcity toward value, marginal utility, and price, Amonn insists that production and distribution occur uno actu, in one and the same act, and recasts Betrieb against Unternehmung as the units of economic life. He defends land, capital, and labor against every labor-theory reduction, carries the analysis through money, credit, the Konjunkturzyklus, and crisis, and closes with an extended reckoning with the Methodenstreit that set Menger's marginal utility school against Schmoller's historians.

Die „relative Seltenheit“ oder „Knappheit“ ist der letzte Grund der Entstehung und der Höhe der Preise.

English translation: “Relative scarcity" or "scarceness" is the ultimate ground of the emergence and the level of prices.”

Defining an economic equilibrium does not explain what brings it about. In this second reply to Franz Oppenheimer’s reconstruction of objective value theory, Alfred Amonn tests that distinction against occupational choice: a worker may be capable of better-paid work yet prefer an easier job, so lower earnings do not establish inferior ability. His criticism targets the passage from convenient assumptions to purported explanations. Most sharply, he argues that taking the relative values of different kinds of skilled labor as given leaves a general theory of value assuming what it should explain. The exchange offers a concrete way to examine the limits of economic abstraction: when does a definition clarify a causal problem, and when does it merely conceal an unanswered question?

Profit, in the strict sense, is no reward for risk, no wage to the manager, and no return on capital—it is a surplus of value with no place among the ordinary income categories. From that austere premise this 1928 essay reconstructs entrepreneurial profit as the fruit of a single non-transferable act: the economic disposition over means of production toward a concrete purpose. Drawing on Schumpeter's new combinations, Amonn separates the static entrepreneur who merely continues an enterprise from the dynamic one who genuinely undertakes something, treats the shareholder rather than the director as the true entrepreneur, and argues that competition never levels such gains but abolishes them once the innovation is imitated. Entrepreneurial profit, he concludes, has no normal rate and no guaranteed duration.

Es besteht keine Ausgleichungstendenz für den Unternehmergewinn.

English translation: “There exists no equalizing tendency for entrepreneurial profit.”