Cuhel, Zur Lehre von den Bedürfnissen (1907)

Cuhel’s treatise reconstructs Bedürfnis as a prerequisite for economic theory. The word cannot function as a primitive, because ordinary and scholarly usage fuse heterogeneous phenomena; its apparent unity masks a deeper multiplicity:

Wer mir auf diesem Wege gefolgt ist, wird wohl gleichfalls zu der von mir gehegten Überzeugung gelangt sein, daß dasjenige, was in der Wirtschaftswissenschaft mit dem Namen „Bedürfnis“ bezeichnet zu werden pflegt, kein einheitlicher Begriff ist, wie von manchen Volkswirtschaftslehrern angenommen zu werden scheint, sondern ein Gemengsel von nicht weniger als drei einander koordinierten und fünf einander übergeordneten Begriffen.

English translation: Whoever has followed me along this path will likewise have arrived at the conviction I hold, that what in economics is usually designated by the name “need” is not a single unified concept, as some economists seem to assume, but a mixture of no fewer than three mutually coordinated and five mutually superordinated concepts.

The argument starts from welfare and harm but refuses reduction to physiology or ethics. Feelings are fallible signs of life-promoting or life-hindering states; desires make them motivational; economic action arises only when desire is directed toward usable means and command over them. Hence Cuhel’s triad: Wohlfahrtsbegehren seeks preservation, development, or avoidance of injury; Verwendungsbegehren identifies a good, service, or force as means; Verfügungsbegehren seeks disposal over that means. Economics lies between ultimate welfare and mere possession. It presupposes welfare-desires, but its immediate data are use-desires:

Für diese Wissenschaft sind also die Verwendungsbegehren gegebene Tatsachen und ihre Intensitäten gegebene Größen.

English translation: For this science, then, wants for particular uses are given facts, and their intensities are given magnitudes.

A need is accordingly neither a thing, a lack, nor a quantity of goods, but a desire together with the disposition to such desire. Welfare-needs, use-needs, and disposal-needs are connected levels, not synonyms. Cuhel’s review of earlier need theory is organized as a critique of partial identifications: prior writers often seize one moment of the sequence while confusing the level to which it belongs.

The same anti-reifying method governs collective needs. Cuhel rejects a supra-individual social subject without reducing public needs to aggregates of similar private wants. Collective consciousness exists only in persons who represent themselves as members of a collectivity:

Die Kollektivpersönlichkeit oder, wie man zu sagen pflegt, das Kollektivbewußtsein existiert somit, aber nicht neben den oder über den Individuen, sondern in den Individuen, aus welchen sich die betreffende Kollektivität zusammensetzt.

English translation: The collective personality or, as one is accustomed to say, the collective consciousness thus exists, but not alongside or above the individuals—rather, within the individuals of whom the collectivity in question is composed.

Collective needs are therefore individual psychic states with collective reference. Cuhel distinguishes genuine collective needs from parallel private needs and from private interests falsely labeled public. His important intermediate case is the accessory collective need: harms to individuals become collective when their spread, intensity, or effect on common power concerns the group, as in public health, water supply, flood protection, regulation, and public enterprises.

The classificatory chapters discipline analysis rather than multiply labels. Needs may be economic or non-economic, objective or subjective, positive or negative, simple or compound, present or future, individual or collective, public or private, necessary or luxurious; but these predicates apply at different levels. A future use-need matters economically only when it creates a present disposal-need, while past needs persist through debt, obligation, and credit. Classification prevents economics from importing physiology, ethics, or politics under the single word need.

Cuhel then introduces Egenz, the magnitude or urgency of need, to avoid the value-laden language of utility, pleasure, and value. Egenz can be compared within one consciousness by actual or imagined choice: when incompatible desires compete, the desire that becomes will counts as stronger. But there is no unit of need-intensity, and money provides only a practical ordering of disposal-Egenzen, not a true measure:

Diesen Vorgang kann man somit nicht Messen nennen; für ihn dürfte die Benennung Skalieren eher passen.

English translation: This procedure, then, cannot be called measuring; the term scaling would be more appropriate for it.

This ordinalism limits interpersonal comparison: choice reveals one person’s ranking, not a common psychic metric. It also grounds Cuhel’s revision of Gossen. Need-intensity may rise before satisfaction, fall during it, or change discontinuously, so need-curves are schematic and diminishing enjoyment holds only under restricted conditions. For equal use-units, the central economic result is declining marginal use-Egenz and increasing total use-Egenz at a diminishing rate.

The bridge to value theory is disposal-Egenz. When satisfying a use-desire requires command over a good, the urgency of disposal corresponds to economic value; in a homogeneous divisible stock, the unit’s disposal-Egenz is governed by marginal use. Cuhel’s achievement is to ground marginal value not in an ambiguous utility calculus but in a layered psychology of welfare, use, disposal, and ranked alternatives.