Feilbogen — Ziele und Wege der theoretischen Nationalökonomie in der Gegenwart (1894)

Feilbogen’s essay explains the renewed standing of theoretical economics without reducing it to a dispute with the historical school. Its central claim is developmental: historical and empirical work had been necessary after the collapse of older doctrines, but that very process had now created the conditions for a disciplined return to abstraction.

Die neueste Entwicklungsphase der nationalökonomischen Literatur scheint besonders dadurch charakterisirt zu sein, dass sich — bei ungeschwächter Fortdauer der praktisch-empirischen Forschungsarbeit — seit etwa einem Decennium eine Art von Renaissance der vorher oft todtgesagten abstracten Theorie vollzieht.

English translation: The most recent phase of development of economic literature seems to be characterized especially by the fact that—alongside the undiminished continuance of practical-empirical research work—for about a decade a kind of renaissance of the abstract theory previously often declared dead is taking place.

The sketch therefore reads the marginalist and mathematical movements—Gossen, Jevons, Menger, Walras, Clark—not as isolated innovations but as symptoms of a broader scientific reorganization. Feilbogen treats the newer theory and the historical school as complementary rather than mutually exclusive, insisting that neither can even mark off its own field without the cooperation of the other:

Dass die historische und die theoretische Forschung überhaupt das Bedürfniss fühlen, ihr Arbeitsfeld gegen einander sauber abzugrenzen, statt sich gegenseitig zu negiren, ist wohl auf den Methodenstreit und Menger's erwähnte Erörterungen zurückzuführen. Aber schon die Abgrenzung des beiderseitigen Gebietes ist ohne arbeitstheiliges Zusammenwirken beider Richtungen nicht möglich.

English translation: That historical and theoretical research even feel the need to demarcate their fields cleanly from one another, rather than to negate each other, is doubtless to be traced back to the Methodenstreit and to Menger's discussions. But the very demarcation of the two domains is not possible without a division-of-labour cooperation of both directions.

His account of the historical school is notably sympathetic. It arose from genuine failures in classical value, wage, population, rent, money, and free-trade doctrines, and from the intensified social and political problems of the German present. Its hunger for facts was justified. But Feilbogen argues that some followers converted method into fixed doctrine, mistaking description for science and treating abstraction as inherently suspect. The real crisis was not an incapacity for theory, but a temporary loss of confidence in it.

The methodological core of the essay is a plea for controlled pluralism. The Methodenstreit matters because it clarifies the powers and dangers of induction and deduction. Theory must abstract if it is to explain, but abstraction must remain conscious of empirical connection. Feilbogen’s formula is that experience must mark both the beginning and the end of inquiry:

Sowie für Leverrier die vorausgegangenen Erfahrungen den Ausgangspunkt der Berechnungen bildeten, welche das Fernrohr der Empiriker auf den Ort des zu entdeckenden Planeten hinlenkten, so muss auch für den Nationalökonomen die Erfahrung den Ausgangs- und den Zielpunkt bilden, die Deduction aber die Fragen entwerfen, welche an die Erfahrung zu richten sind, und die Antworten deuten, welche durch die Erfahrung ertheilt werden.

English translation: Just as for Leverrier the preceding experiences formed the starting point of the calculations that directed the empiricists' telescope to the place of the planet to be discovered, so too for the economist experience must form both the starting point and the goal, while deduction must frame the questions to be put to experience and interpret the answers that experience gives.

This also governs his cautious view of mathematical economics. Mathematical form can sharpen exposition and sometimes discovery, but it becomes misleading when it treats immeasurable magnitudes—pleasure, pain, value, supply, demand—as if they were known quantities. Its danger is not abstraction itself but a premature precision that conceals the instability of the underlying concepts.

Feilbogen’s most substantial reconstruction concerns value and price. He credits marginal utility theory with restoring attention to subjective valuation, but denies that it can exhaust political economy. Marginal utility explains important elements of exchange and price formation; it cannot alone explain the historical movement of needs, techniques, legal forms, production, and social organization.

Auf die Thatsache der Werthschätzung allein kann nur eine Statik, nie eine Dynamik der Volkswirthschaft gegründet werden.

English translation: Upon the fact of valuation alone only a statics, never a dynamics, of the national economy can be founded.

Against classical cost theories, Feilbogen insists that costs cannot simply be treated as independent causes of value. Against one-sided marginalism, he insists that production, labor, capital, technical resistance, and “Grenzopfer” are not mere reflections of utility. Value must be understood through reciprocal relations between subjective wants and objective conditions of production.

The essay ends by widening the object of economics. Political economy should not be organized only around goods, exchange, or price, but around the conditions of collective welfare. Its true object remains the wealth and well-being of the people:

Das Object der Nationalökonomie ist, wie schon Altmeister Smith durch den Titel seines Werkes angedeutet hat, der Volkswohlstand.

English translation: The object of political economy is, as the old master Smith indicated by the title of his work, the wealth of the nation.

Feilbogen’s final demand is synthesis. Analysis isolates economic phenomena; synthesis restores their relations to history, law, ethics, policy, and social life. Theory is indispensable, but it becomes scientific only when its abstractions return to the connected world from which they were drawn.