B14 - History of Economic Thought through 1925: Socialist; MarxistReturn

ThDr. Bernard Bolzano (1781-1848) was not only a mathematician and logician of European stature, a theologian, philosopher, teacher and educator, but also a critical social thinker and reformer, whose work also has distinct economic dimensions. Economic aspects play an important role in Bolzano's vision, and this does not rest on foundations that are only naively fanciful. The star- ting point of his economic considerations is the category of property. In the work of Bolzano, one can trace the vision of the welfare state, the public sector, or the germs of elements of welfare economics. It is possible to appreciate the thoughtfulness, logic and precision of the purposefully established state project. Thanks to the work On the Best State - which Bolzano refused to publish during his lifetime, and which was created in parallel with the logical treatise Vědosloví and other works - he became the most famous Czech utopian. The work remains the first original, and to this day the only, comprehensive and systematic Czech utopia.

My article is an impetus for a discussion on liberal aspect of the thinking of social democratic politician and economist Josef Macek (1887-1972). In the first part I define Macek's approach to liberalism (his understanding of the basic notions, concept of the relationship between an individual and the society, idea of the relationship between socialism and liberalism and his interpretation of Adam Smith). My conclusion is that though Macek was a conscious socialist and he had limitations in respect to libertarian interpretation of the classic liberalism of the 19th century, he was at the same time to a considerable extent influenced by liberalism and he constantly oscillated on the threshold between socialism and liberalism. In the second part of the article I contemplate possible sources of inspiration of Macek's opinions - I primarily question the extent of the influence of F. Oppenheimer and J. M. Keynes - and, moreover, I consider the general ideological context in which Macek's opinions could be embedded. In this respect I conclude that Macek was influenced both by Oppenheimer as well as Keynes but by each of them in a different manner, on a diverse level of commonness and at a different moment. However, the liberal aspect of Macek's thinking far more likely grew out of his knowledge of Oppenheimer and some Anglo-Saxon authors, who have either never or seldom been put in context with Macek, than from his knowledge of Keynes.

This paper examines Friedrich von Wieser's theory of the socialist or communist planned economy. It identifies in Wieser's Law of Power (1926) the abiding interests that stimulated his attempt to use Carl Menger's theory of subjective value to present a theory of socialism, first in Natural Value (1889) and later in Social Economics (1914). It discusses his conception of a unit of marginal utility, or "natural value," as the basic unit of economic calculation in his imputation theory and his use of that building block in his consequent theory of production and distribution in a socialist economy. Lastly, it argues that Wieser's theory attempts to socially objectify subjective values and is actually a return to a pre-Mengerian supply-side, real cost approach to the theory of value. Wieser's theory of economic calculation under socialism thus represents a failure to understand the radical contribution of Menger's value theory to the theory of exchange.