Karel Engliš, Tschechoslowakei (1927)

Karel Engliš’s book section surveys the development of Czech economic scholarship and then presents the epistemological foundations of his own Brno school. Its three parts move from national and institutional history, through a classification of contemporary economists, to a sustained account of economics as a teleological science. The organizing claim is that a science acquires its distinctive object through its manner of considering phenomena, not simply through the material things it studies. Economics becomes intelligible when objects and processes are understood as wanted or unwanted, and consequently as means and ends.

The introduction situates economic scholarship within the Czech national revival. Engliš links its comparatively late emergence to a predominantly rural Czech population, while towns remained in German hands. Economic development after 1848 and the recognition that economic strength supported political power encouraged an initially practical literature concerned with education, cooperation, and reform. Palacký’s historical writing supplies the broader cultural setting; Chleborád, Rieger, Jonák, and Wellner mark early stages of economic exposition. The decisive institutional development was the establishment of a separate Czech university in Prague. Kaizl and Bráf gave economics and public finance an academic foundation, with Bráf exercising particular influence through teaching and methodological reflection.

The second part distinguishes the Prague historical school, the Brno philosophical school, and a socialist current. These are tendencies rather than rigid affiliations. Prague combines German historical influences with Austrian economic reasoning: Horáček, Fiedler, and Gruber exemplify historical and policy-oriented work, while Mildschuh and Basch develop theoretical treatments of taxation, purchasing power, and inflation. Engliš also acknowledges scholars outside these groupings and German-speaking economists working in Czechoslovakia, although his substantive survey concentrates on Czech scholarship. His selection privileges works with enduring scientific ambitions over literature addressing immediate practical questions.

Brno provides the transition from disciplinary history to methodological argument. Alongside the normative jurisprudence of Kelsen and Weyr, Engliš places his economic epistemology and Loevenstein’s application of it to public finance. The socialist current receives a shorter treatment, particularly through Modráček’s cooperative organization of labour and Macek’s studies of socialist pricing and social policy. The unequal treatment reflects the section’s progression toward an exposition of Engliš’s own conceptual framework.

Das Denkobjekt der Wissenschaft hängt von der Betrachtungsweise ab.

English translation: The conceptual object of a science depends on its mode of consideration.

This proposition governs the third part. Bread can be the same physical thing for a chemist and a household manager while constituting different objects of knowledge. Scientific unity therefore rests on a consistent kind of cognition rather than on an inventory of external objects. Engliš distinguishes natural qualities, such as hardness or redness, from relational qualities, such as usefulness, goodness, or punishability. The latter cannot arise from sensory observation alone: they express agreement or disagreement with something wanted or something that ought to be.

Was gewollt ist, ist ein Postulat; was sein soll, ist Norm.

English translation: What is wanted is a postulate; what ought to be is a norm.

Postulate and norm are related perspectives on willing and obligation, illustrated by the father who wants children to study and the children who understand that they ought to study. Yet the corresponding modes of explanation remain distinct. Natural science connects causes and effects; teleology connects means and ends; normative thought establishes a norm’s validity through its logical ground in another norm. Finality is not merely causality read backwards, since the identification of a means requires that its consequence be represented as wanted. Nor does futurity itself establish purpose: an anticipated consequence of war need not be desired.

Die Norm entsteht teleologisch, der Wille entsteht kausal.

English translation: The norm arises teleologically; the will arises causally.

The three perspectives thus complement one another without becoming interchangeable. Asking why a particular norm holds leads to another norm; asking why obligation exists at all leads to someone’s will. Likewise, explaining the content of willing through ends differs from explaining the occurrence of willing as a causal event. Engliš locates the connection among these perspectives in human consciousness, which can consider phenomena in each way.

His account of valuation extends this classification. Value expresses the quantitative degree of a quality. Natural qualities admit comparison by degree, whereas relational qualities have positive and negative poles according to whether they fulfil or contradict a postulate or norm. Crucially, “subjective” does not mean merely individual. A desired feeling is accessible only to the experiencing subject, but a precisely communicated ideal can guide another person’s assessment even if that ideal varies between individuals. The child’s preference for a toy and the father’s preference for an educational book therefore express different postulates, not simply competing estimates on an identical scale. Some normative classifications, such as whether an act constitutes murder, do not admit degrees, so classification and valuation coincide.

Die Wirtschaftswissenschaft stellt sich ihre Erscheinungen als gewollt vor und verbindet dieselben als Mittel und Zwecke.

English translation: Economics represents its phenomena as wanted and connects them as means and ends.

Economics belongs to the teleological sciences because goods, needs, costs, and returns become visible through this purposive relation. A need is the wanting of something as a means; a good is an object wanted as a means; costs are a wanted detriment accepted for a greater benefit. These concepts are formal and complementary: each takes its content from the governing postulate. Subjective satisfaction and an objectively communicable human ideal can therefore generate differently constituted needs, goods, and values. The concluding methodological demand is to identify the specifically economic postulate that supplies this content, a task Engliš refers to his larger work. The section’s lasting relevance lies in its conjunction of a situated history of Czech economics with a rigorous distinction between causal explanation, purposive intelligibility, and normative validity.