ABSTRACT
On the first and only occasion I was fortunate enough to meet Böhm-Bawerk in person — in Vienna in the autumn of 1911–1 asked him why it was that his positive theory made the impression, at least on me, of not forming a single perfect whole, but rather of arising out of several parallel strands of thought. When I asked this I was thinking of the differing treatment of the concept of capital at the beginning and end of his work. At the beginning, ‘capitalist’ production focused on the future is presented as the primary phenomenon, capital itself as secondary — as ‘the embodiment of the intermediate products that arise at the different stages of the roundabout path’, At the end, however, he recurs instead to the older concept of a subsistence or wage fund, which means that capital is again conceived of as the primary phenomenon and capitalist production in contrast as secondary.
