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NOTE 9. Emil Sax: The Recluse from Voloska

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9. Emil Sucks, the recluse from Veloska

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Within the ranks of the Austrian School, Emil Sucks occupied an original, but now largely

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forgotten position. Just a few years younger than Carl Menger, he was, at the start of

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his economic research, more of a competitor of Menger than a fellow campaigner, and only

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began supporting and further developing methodological individualism and the subjective theory of

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of Value, after becoming a professor in Prague. He distanced himself from the Austrian School

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yet again a few years thereafter. Disappointed, he retired from university life. But after

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a quiet period lasting almost twenty years, he resumed his research and, in the last decade

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of his life, became an unusually prolific author.

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Emil Sachs was born in 1845 into a family of cloth manufacturers and civil servants

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from Jawornik Jansky-Wroch, previously Jawornik Johannesburg in East Silesia, today the Czech

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Republic. His father died a few months after his birth. The young Emil studied in Vienna,

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gained a doctorate of law and worked initially as Secretary of the Austrian Commission at

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the World Exhibition in Paris, and as a trainee legal officer at the Viennese Chamber of Commerce.

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In 1870, Sachs began teaching economics at the Polytechnisches Institut in Vienna, the

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precursor of the Technische Hochschule, Institute of Technology. An abridged version of his

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very first lecture, A Theoretical Foundation of Railroad Economics, was published in 1871.

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The renowned railway expert subsequently took over the post of secretary to the director

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of the Kaiser Ferdinand-Nordbahn Railroad, and in 1874 received his Habilitation in Economics

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and Finance from Lorenz von Stein. In 1879 the academic staff of the University of Vienna

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had unanimously voted upon a tenured professorship for Menger and a non-tenured professorship

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for Sachs. The Ministry for Education complied with the proposal in Menger's case, but Sachs,

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who had just published his two-volume work Verkehrsmittel in der Volks- und Staatswirtschaft

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1878-1879, Means of Transport in Economics and State Economy, accepted his non-tenured

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professorship in distant Prague, where he became fully tenured one year later.

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At the end of the 1880s he was elected Dean and later President of the German University

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of Prague.

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At the beginning of his university career, Sachs, also a member of the Deutsche Liberale

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The German Liberale Partei became an elected representative in the House of Deputies of the Imperial Council for the constituency of Tropal, present-day Opava, Czech Republic, a mandate he carried out until 1885.

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The Deutsche Liberale Partei is literally the German Liberal Party. It favored classical liberal economic policies, advocated the unification of the German-speaking countries into one nation-state, and demanded a strict separation of church and state.

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In his role as politician he warned of the dangerous consequences of national strife and of the great political dangers it posed for the Austrian monarchy.

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Sachs joined Menger's circle early on and was one of the first to support him in the Methodenstreit.

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Yet from the start he developed a clearly autonomous position which he presented in one of his main works,

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In Zucks's opinion, the subjectivist theory of value embodies a kind of natural law.

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As an apple falls from a tree and the stars move according to the laws of gravity, one

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Robinson Crusoe and an empire of one hundred million obey the same law of value when it

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comes to economic activity.

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According to Zucks' claim, the driving forces of humanity were egoism, mutualism and altruism.

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Human needs were the most important basic concept of economics. Zucks drew a distinction

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between collective needs and individual needs, and correspondingly between a state economy

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and a private economy. Both were intertwined, however, on account of the law of value. Value

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controls and guides human relations toward the multifariousness of goods at large. It

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therefore also guides relations between people who are dependent on the rapports between goods.

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Value would thus result not only from the relationship of humans to the world of goods,

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but would also be a fruit of social coexistence. While the theory of value was developed within

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the Austrian School into a logic of values, Zuck's pursued mainly psychological considerations,

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talked about valuation or feeling of value and regarded value theory as applied psychology.

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This resulted therefore in significant differences within the mainstream of the Austrian School.

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Unlike Boehm-Bawerk, Zucks did not consider labour to be an economic good. He rejected

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Visa's imputation theory and saw interest as being a result of the barter economy and

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not as an economic category. For Zucks, Boehm-Bawerk's theory of interest was weak and

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and Irreconcilable with the Imputation Theory. Finally, he also disagreed with the Tax Theory

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of the renowned and acknowledged expert of the school, Robert Meyer, 1855-1914, whom

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he accused of a lack of precision in scientific thinking.

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When the second professorship in Vienna next to Menger's became vacant once again, and

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Eugen von Virupowicz was appointed, Zucks had to acknowledge that his aspiration of

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of returning to the University of Vienna would long be postponed. It was obvious that his

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work was not getting the recognition he had expected. Bitterly disappointed, he went into

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early retirement. Until the time of his death he lived with his wife in a remote house with

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a view of the sea in Voloska, a small fishing village in Istria, a peninsula at the head

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of the Adriatic, today shared by Croatia, Slovenia and Italy.

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With a resigned distance toward life, he looked for solitude as if contemplation were his

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greatest need.

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After a work hiatus of more than twenty years during which there were only a few and insignificant

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interruptions, Zucks began to publish a new series of books, something almost sublime

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in light of events of the time like war and its miserable aftermath.

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der Kapitalzins, 1916, Capital Interest, the second edition of his monumental three-volume

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Verkehrsmittel in Volks- und Staatswirtschaft, 1918-1922, and a lengthier contribution to

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Wertungstheorie der Steuer, 1924, The Valuation Theory of Taxes.

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Emil Sachs lived to see his tax theory and his theory of public economy come to bear

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fruit, particularly in Sweden and Italy.

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He an Italian citizen, he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Cologne in

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1926. He was soon forgotten in the countries that emerged after the collapse of the Austrian

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monarchy, an event that affected him greatly, but on account of its originality, astuteness

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and profundity, his complex, comprehensive and sophisticated work, though difficult to

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To cope with linguistically, still fascinates today.