The archive.

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?

Does replacing “value” with “economic dimension” explain anything new about exchange? In this critical article, Alfred Amonn tests Friedrich von Gottl-Ottlilienfeld’s proposed reform against a concrete problem: why exchange ratios exhibit regularities despite arising from decentralized decisions. Amonn distinguishes remembered and anticipated prices from the objective relations they may help explain, asking whether a supposed norm of exchange is more than a reference point for bargaining. His alternative locates economic magnitudes not in properties inherent in goods but in relations among exchanging subjects. The dispute offers a precise way to examine what economic concepts must accomplish: a money price, for example, cannot establish command over other goods unless their prices are also known. Amonn’s recognition of Gottl’s insights into exchange decisions and money sharpens rather than softens his demand for explanatory clarity.

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.”

Would opening access to land abolish capital profit—or would independent producers still need tools, buildings, and subsistence on credit? This is one of Alfred Amonn’s concrete tests of Franz Oppenheimer’s economic system in his two-part critical study of 1928. Amonn insists that the historical injustice of property relations cannot by itself explain how prices and incomes are determined. Defending marginal utility theory against Oppenheimer’s objections, he also challenges the inference from competition to equal incomes and from landownership to the dependence of wage workers. The interest lies in the distance Amonn maintains between sympathy for emancipatory reform and acceptance of its economic premises: his criticism shows precisely where a proposed abolition of privilege still owes an explanation of wages, interest, and rent.

Trade unions at the close of the 1920s boom pressed a seductive claim: that higher wages would themselves raise productivity and general welfare—the doctrine this book was written to dismantle. First published in 1930 and reissued in expanded form in 1945, it untangles the many senses buried in the word wage: relative share against absolute goods, nominal against real, the wage rate per unit against total wage income. A higher rate, Amonn warns, need not raise a worker's income at all, since it may cut employment, hours, or output. He works out wage formation under free competition, ties real wages to productivity and capital accumulation, and grants unions a genuine but bounded power to lift wages toward the competitive level while denying they can be pushed permanently above it at capital's expense.

„Lohnsteigerungen“ bilden also eine sehr zweischneidige Waffe im Kampfe der Arbeit mit dem Kapital und den Anteil am Gesamtprodukt. Wenn man sie benutzt, läuft man Gefahr, sich damit ins eigene Fleisch zu schneiden.

English translation: “Wage increases" thus constitute a very double-edged weapon in the struggle of labor with capital over the share in the total product. If one uses them, one runs the risk of cutting into one's own flesh.”

Can wage cuts help restore employment without shrinking the purchasing power on which recovery depends? In this 1933 lecture, Alfred Amonn answers by distinguishing wage rates from total wage income, and relative prices from the general price level. His case is not for indiscriminate deflation: he argues that reducing still-high manufactured-goods prices could revive sales and demand for raw materials whose prices had already collapsed. With monetary means held constant and productive capacity idle, he maintains, lower prices can support greater output, while expanding employment may offset lower wage rates. The revealing tension lies between this proposed outcome and the disruptive transition towards it. Amonn acknowledges postponed purchases and international obstacles, but gives priority to completed adjustment—a choice that makes the lecture a focused statement of the assumptions behind his defence of price and wage reductions.

The double meaning of the word Volk, Amonn contends, has quietly corrupted the foundations of economics by fusing the pure theoretical categories of the exchange economy with the practical concepts of Volkswirtschaftslehre. This introduction to economic thinking—second edition of 1944, essentially unchanged from the 1938 original—treats concepts frankly as instruments made by thought and defines each by the problem it is meant to solve. Moving from economic goods, scarcity, and Wohlstand through the production factors, prices, money, credit, and comparative costs, he denies that Volkswirtschaft is any real unit like a household, insisting it is only an ideational association of separate economies. Four appendices turn the method against Max Weber, Sombart, Gottl, and Englis, whose definitions he finds either candidly stipulative or objective merely in appearance.

Begriffe sind Denkwerkzeuge.

English translation: “Concepts are tools of thought.”

When a peacetime economy converts to war, military demand piles onto civilian demand, usable productive means shrink, and the money circulation is thrown out of joint—three simultaneous shocks that no ordinary peacetime remedy can absorb. Written in Zurich in 1942 alongside Swiss reports by Böhler and Dütscher, this study refuses the comforting idea that policy should preserve the old circular flow; the whole national economy, Amonn argues, becomes structurally a war economy or it is none. He challenges the dogma that taxes never inflate while loans always do, subordinates the prevention of inflation to the overriding goal of maximum production, and defends rationing, differentiated price control, and savings-based war loans, testing each against Swiss figures for the cost of living, wages, and foreign trade.

Aber man geriete dann von der Scylla der Inflation unvermeidlich in die Charybdis der Deflation.

English translation: “But one would then inevitably pass from the Scylla of inflation into the Charybdis of deflation.”

Can monetary expansion cause inflation without doing so every time? In this 1943 article, Alfred Amonn defends quantity theory by separating a conditional causal claim from the evidence needed to explain an actual rise in prices. His distinctive emphasis falls on how money enters expenditure: commercial credit, government spending, and saving do not have identical effects, nor must additional purchasing power raise consumer prices rather than asset prices. Amonn treats the exchange equation as a constraint, not a self-sufficient causal explanation. His closing thought experiment—whether a fully employed economy could replace taxation with newly printed money without raising prices—makes the dispute concrete. The article offers a way to distinguish monetary mechanisms from automatic predictions, while showing why institutions and the destination of spending matter.