9. Emil Sucks, the recluse from Veloska
Within the ranks of the Austrian School, Emil Sucks occupied an original, but now largely
forgotten position. Just a few years younger than Carl Menger, he was, at the start of
his economic research, more of a competitor of Menger than a fellow campaigner, and only
began supporting and further developing methodological individualism and the subjective theory of
of Value, after becoming a professor in Prague. He distanced himself from the Austrian School
yet again a few years thereafter. Disappointed, he retired from university life. But after
a quiet period lasting almost twenty years, he resumed his research and, in the last decade
of his life, became an unusually prolific author.
Emil Sachs was born in 1845 into a family of cloth manufacturers and civil servants
from Jawornik Jansky-Wroch, previously Jawornik Johannesburg in East Silesia, today the Czech
Republic. His father died a few months after his birth. The young Emil studied in Vienna,
gained a doctorate of law and worked initially as Secretary of the Austrian Commission at
the World Exhibition in Paris, and as a trainee legal officer at the Viennese Chamber of Commerce.
In 1870, Sachs began teaching economics at the Polytechnisches Institut in Vienna, the
precursor of the Technische Hochschule, Institute of Technology. An abridged version of his
very first lecture, A Theoretical Foundation of Railroad Economics, was published in 1871.
The renowned railway expert subsequently took over the post of secretary to the director
of the Kaiser Ferdinand-Nordbahn Railroad, and in 1874 received his Habilitation in Economics
and Finance from Lorenz von Stein. In 1879 the academic staff of the University of Vienna
had unanimously voted upon a tenured professorship for Menger and a non-tenured professorship
for Sachs. The Ministry for Education complied with the proposal in Menger's case, but Sachs,
who had just published his two-volume work Verkehrsmittel in der Volks- und Staatswirtschaft
1878-1879, Means of Transport in Economics and State Economy, accepted his non-tenured
professorship in distant Prague, where he became fully tenured one year later.
At the end of the 1880s he was elected Dean and later President of the German University
of Prague.
At the beginning of his university career, Sachs, also a member of the Deutsche Liberale
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.
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.
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.
Sachs joined Menger's circle early on and was one of the first to support him in the Methodenstreit.
Yet from the start he developed a clearly autonomous position which he presented in one of his main works,
In Zucks's opinion, the subjectivist theory of value embodies a kind of natural law.
As an apple falls from a tree and the stars move according to the laws of gravity, one
Robinson Crusoe and an empire of one hundred million obey the same law of value when it
comes to economic activity.
According to Zucks' claim, the driving forces of humanity were egoism, mutualism and altruism.
Human needs were the most important basic concept of economics. Zucks drew a distinction
between collective needs and individual needs, and correspondingly between a state economy
and a private economy. Both were intertwined, however, on account of the law of value. Value
controls and guides human relations toward the multifariousness of goods at large. It
therefore also guides relations between people who are dependent on the rapports between goods.
Value would thus result not only from the relationship of humans to the world of goods,
but would also be a fruit of social coexistence. While the theory of value was developed within
the Austrian School into a logic of values, Zuck's pursued mainly psychological considerations,
talked about valuation or feeling of value and regarded value theory as applied psychology.
This resulted therefore in significant differences within the mainstream of the Austrian School.
Unlike Boehm-Bawerk, Zucks did not consider labour to be an economic good. He rejected
Visa's imputation theory and saw interest as being a result of the barter economy and
not as an economic category. For Zucks, Boehm-Bawerk's theory of interest was weak and
and Irreconcilable with the Imputation Theory. Finally, he also disagreed with the Tax Theory
of the renowned and acknowledged expert of the school, Robert Meyer, 1855-1914, whom
he accused of a lack of precision in scientific thinking.
When the second professorship in Vienna next to Menger's became vacant once again, and
Eugen von Virupowicz was appointed, Zucks had to acknowledge that his aspiration of
of returning to the University of Vienna would long be postponed. It was obvious that his
work was not getting the recognition he had expected. Bitterly disappointed, he went into
early retirement. Until the time of his death he lived with his wife in a remote house with
a view of the sea in Voloska, a small fishing village in Istria, a peninsula at the head
of the Adriatic, today shared by Croatia, Slovenia and Italy.
With a resigned distance toward life, he looked for solitude as if contemplation were his
greatest need.
After a work hiatus of more than twenty years during which there were only a few and insignificant
interruptions, Zucks began to publish a new series of books, something almost sublime
in light of events of the time like war and its miserable aftermath.
der Kapitalzins, 1916, Capital Interest, the second edition of his monumental three-volume
Verkehrsmittel in Volks- und Staatswirtschaft, 1918-1922, and a lengthier contribution to
Wertungstheorie der Steuer, 1924, The Valuation Theory of Taxes.
Emil Sachs lived to see his tax theory and his theory of public economy come to bear
fruit, particularly in Sweden and Italy.
He an Italian citizen, he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Cologne in
1926. He was soon forgotten in the countries that emerged after the collapse of the Austrian
monarchy, an event that affected him greatly, but on account of its originality, astuteness
and profundity, his complex, comprehensive and sophisticated work, though difficult to
To cope with linguistically, still fascinates today.