Now it is at once conceded that a science, in explaining its phenomena, must ignore some of the relations which those phenomena bear to other phenomena. No science is called upon to link its facts with all the other facts in the universe. Concretely, in explaining value, we have not solved the problem if the explanation assumes value. Rather, we are reasoning in a circle. For the power is proportioned, not to the quantity of their wealth in pounds or yards or other physical units, but simply to its amount in value.
Natural value is one element in the formation of exchange value.
It does not, however, enter simply and thoroughly into exchange value. This purchasing power can only be either the inaccurate name of the English School for value itself, or else a consequence of the possession of goods which have value in the sense in which Wieser uses the term value, in the note on page 53 of his Natural Value already quoted. If the Austrian analysis attempt nothing more than the determination of particular prices, one at a time, on the assumption that the transactions are, in each particular case, so small as not to disturb the marginal utility of money for each buyer and seller, and on the assumption that the values and prices of all the goods owned by buyers and sellers are already determined and known, except that of the good immediately in question, it is clear that it but plays over the surface of things. If it attempt more it is involved in a circle. Endnotes The extreme abstraction of the utility school is made very clear by Pareto, op.