Alfred Amonn

Alfred Amonn grew up in South Tyrol as the son of Johann Amonn, a merchant from Bruneck (today Brunico), and Anna Seebacher; he attended the Imperial-Royal "Vinzentinum" Gymnasium in Brixen (today Bressanone) and passed his school-leaving examination in 1902. His study of law and political science took him by way of Innsbruck, Munich, Halle, Leipzig, Oxford and London to Vienna, where in 1907 he received his doctorate (Dr. iur. et rer. pol.). In the same year he joined the Vienna Institute of Political Science as an assistant under Eugen von Philippovich, whose series "Wiener Staatswissenschaftliche Studien" (Vienna Studies in Political Science), edited with Edmund Bernatzik, in 1911 also took up his habilitation thesis "Objekt und Grundbegriffe der theoretischen Nationalökonomie" (The Object and Basic Concepts of Theoretical Economics). The habilitation of 1910 opened an eventful teaching career: associate professor in Fribourg, Switzerland, from 1910 to 1912; professor in Czernowitz (today Chernivtsi) from 1912 to 1918; and in between, in 1913/14, standing in for Joseph Schumpeter at the University of Graz during the latter's exchange semester at Columbia University. In 1920 came the call as full professor to the German University of Prague, and from 1926 to 1929 a visiting professorship at the Imperial University of Tokyo. In 1929 Amonn took over the chair of theoretical economics and public finance in Bern, which he held until his retirement in 1953; he was twice dean and, in 1949/50, rector of the university. In method, Amonn pursued the programme of a logically grounded definition of the object of economics, and to this end drew a sharp distinction between the empirical object of experience and the constructed object of knowledge. He expressly sympathized with Carl Menger's methodological separation of theory and history, but kept his distance from the psychological-subjective theory of value of the older Austrian School, and incorporated later impulses from Walras and from Cassel's analysis of scarcity. This synthesis brought him criticism in turn from Marxists such as Isaak Rubin and from social economists such as Sombart and Oppenheimer. In Bern, Amonn was naturalized in 1942; in 1953 he was a corresponding member of both the Bavarian and the Austrian Academy of Sciences, and as an expert adviser and member of economic-policy commissions he shaped Swiss economic policy well beyond his retirement. For his seventieth birthday in 1953, the closer Bern circle around Valentin F. Wagner and Fritz Marbach dedicated to him the Festschrift "Wirtschaftstheorie und Wirtschaftspolitik" (Economic Theory and Economic Policy). He died on 2 November 1962 in Bern, at the age of seventy-nine.