Richard Kerschagl, Das soziale Wunschbild als ökonomischer Faktor (1947)

Kerschagl’s rectoral address presents the social Wunschbild not as escapist utopia but as an active economic factor. He chooses the term because social ideals are anticipatory images through which human willing enters economic reality. Economics cannot therefore be treated as a mechanics of things alone, since its processes are formed by persons acting within hopes, fears, interests, and normative expectations.

Es wäre vielleicht richtiger, zu sagen, das soziale und ökonomische Wunschbild, denn alles Wirtschaftliche ist in der Gesellschaft und alle Wirtschaftsvorgänge sind keine Vorgänge an sich, sondern sie gestalten sich aus dem Wollen lebendiger Menschen.

English translation: It would perhaps be more correct to speak of the social and economic wish-image, for everything economic exists within society, and all economic processes are not processes in themselves, but take shape out of the willing of living human beings.

The lecture first distinguishes the wish-image from romantic restoration. A social ideal is directed toward the future, even when it borrows from the past; the past itself cannot simply be reinstated. Kerschagl’s point is neither uncritically progressive nor dismissive of utopia. What seems impossible in one generation may guide partial achievements in another, and even unrealizable schemes can redirect practical reform. Hence the social wish-image is historically effective precisely because it need not be immediately attainable.

Und wenn uns die Geschichte der Gesellschaft und Wirtschaft überhaupt etwas lehrt, so ist es vor allem das, daß sehr häufig die Utopie von gestern die Realität von heute und die Utopie von heute die Realität von morgen zu sein vermag.

English translation: And if the history of society and economy teaches us anything at all, it is above all this: that very often the utopia of yesterday is able to become the reality of today, and the utopia of today the reality of tomorrow.

This gives the address its methodological tension. Ideals matter causally, but their realization is always conditioned, incomplete, and transformed by social life. Fulfilled ideals lose their character as ideals, just as satisfied needs cease to press in the same way. Kerschagl therefore resists both positivist economics, which would exclude ideals as unreal, and ideological economics, which would treat one ideal as absolute. Economic science may clarify means, limits, and consequences, but final social aims cannot be deduced from technical analysis alone.

Im Wunschbild selbst, wie in seiner Verkündung verwischen sich die Grenzen dieser beiden Begriffe leicht und es wird sehr leicht der Notwendigkeit nicht Rechnung getragen, immer dessen bewußt zu bleiben, daß die Ziele selbst jenseits der reinen Nationalökonomie liegen und in der Regel einer logischen und exakten Überprüfung an sich nicht mehr unterzogen werden können.

English translation: In the wish-image itself, as in its proclamation, the boundaries of these two concepts easily become blurred, and all too easily the need is neglected of always remaining aware that the aims themselves lie beyond pure economics and as a rule can no longer be subjected to any logical and exact examination.

Much of the address substantiates this claim through the history of economic doctrine. Kerschagl reads mercantilism, physiocracy, classical economics, utopian socialism, romanticism, Marxism, communism, and the Austrian school as formations of mixed and often contradictory wish-images. Mercantilists combine state direction with commercial liberty; physiocrats join natural order to compulsion; classical economists are not uniformly laissez-faire; Marxism contains revolutionary and evolutionary tendencies. Even the Austrian marginalist tradition, for Kerschagl, is not a single political program but a theoretical framework compatible with sharply different policy conclusions.

These contradictions are not treated merely as errors. They reveal the deep structure of social wishing, especially the recurring conflict between liberty and order. Human beings want autonomy, but also security, form, and social protection. The danger arises when a doctrine denies this plurality and converts one wish-image into a total claim. Kerschagl’s anti-totalitarian implication is clear: economic and social ideals must remain open to criticism because they contain tensions that no system can abolish.

Als tiefster Grund dieser Doppelgestaltung der Wunschbilder, dieser Mischung von Ja und Nein, von Thesis und Antithesis, mag vor allem die innerste Menschennatur gelten können, in der selbst, wie in der Gestaltung des Zusammenlebens, jene seltsame Mischung von Freiheit und Bindung begründet liegt, die bei einer Exklusivität eines der beiden Faktoren nur zu leicht zum Chaos auf der einen, zum Unmenschlichen, exakter gesagt, zum inhumanen wie zum ahumanen Zwang auf der anderen Seite, führen muß.

English translation: The deepest ground of this double character of wish-images, this mixture of Yes and No, of thesis and antithesis, may above all be found in the innermost nature of man, in which — as in the shaping of communal life — that strange mixture of freedom and binding order is founded, a mixture which, when one of the two factors is made exclusive, all too easily must lead to chaos on the one side, and on the other to the inhuman, or more exactly, to inhuman as well as ahuman coercion.

The final part applies this logic to practical policy. Trade policy wants open markets for exports and protection against imports; social policy wants welfare without constraint; monetary policy wants credit elasticity without inflation; fiscal policy wants simplicity and differentiated justice. The popular desire for low prices and high wages crystallizes the same pattern. In postwar Austria, Kerschagl insists that redistribution may be necessary but cannot replace production.

Es kann auf die Dauer nur das verteilt werden, was erarbeitet ist, und alle Verteilungssysteme können nur eine wichtige und notwendige Ergänzung der Erzeugung, aber kein Ersatz für diese selbst sein.

English translation: In the long run only what has been produced by labor can be distributed, and all systems of distribution can only be an important and necessary complement to production, but never a substitute for it.

The address closes by joining economic realism to ethical restraint. Most economic judgments are relative to historical conditions, but humanity and human dignity are not thereby dissolved. Kerschagl’s central contribution is this pluralist account of social ideals: Wunschbilder are indispensable motors of economic life, yet they become destructive when enforced as exclusive truths. Science must analyze their power without surrendering to them, preserving the freedom of inquiry against the coercive fantasy of a final social image.