Emil Sax, 1845-1927.

Austrian economist, with historicist tendencies.

Emil Sax was born in Jauernig-Johanesberg (modern Javornik, Czech Republic, then part of Austro-Hungarian Silesia). In 1862, he enrolled at the University of Vienna to study law and political science (Staatswissenschaften). He interrupted his studies to serve as secretary to the Austrian commission to the Paris World Exhibition, obtaining his doctorate only in 1868. He subsequently worked as a legal intern at the Vienna Chamber of Commerce and then at a Viennese bank.  He got his habilitation at Vienna and in 1870 started lecturing as a privat-dozent (assistant) in economics at the Polytechnic Institute of Vienna. 

Sax published his lectures on railway economics in 1871, earning him a small reputation as an expert on the topic.  In 1873, Sax was appointed secretary to the director of Austrian railway company (Kaiser Ferdinand-Nordbahn), a job he would retain for the next six years. The very next year, 1874, Lorenz von Stein approved his habilitation at the University of Vienna, and Sax began lecturing (again as privat-dozent) on economics and public finance at the University of Vienna. As his earnings as a lecturer were meager, Sax retained his railway company job, while waiting for a salaried academic job.  Emil Sax was only a little younger than Carl Menger, whom he got to know better during this period.  Sax's two volume work on transportation economics was well-received and put him in a strong position for the next opening.

The break came in 1879, when the University of Vienna decided to offer Sax an extraordinary (associate) professorship, while offering Menger an ordinary (full) professorship. Realizing that moving up at Vienna was not likely anytime soon, and perhaps a little miffed, Emil Sax decided to decline the Vienna post, and instead moved to Prague, to accept the extraordinary professorship of political economy at the (German-speaking) University of Prague   Sax was subsequently tenured as full professor in 1880, and would go on to become dean of its law faculty in 1888 and rector of the University of Prague in 1892.

During this period, Sax also dabbled in politics. For a time (1879-85), Sax served as a deputy of the German Liberal Party (DLP) in the Austrian House of Deputies..

Emil Sax retired prematurely from Prague in 1893 for health reason (he was suffering from increasing deafness).  Sax went into seclusion for the rest of his life in the remote village of Volosca (near Abbazia), on the Istrian coast, writing next to nothing for the next two decades. But he burst back into print in the last stretch of his life.

Although part of Menger's circle at Vienna, and so sometimes regarded as part of the "first generation" of the Austrian School, Emil Sax was never a proper footsoldier of the school, and he distanced himself from their theoretical and methodological stance. Sax's 1884 book was supportive of Menger in the immediate heat of the methodenstreit with the the German Historical School.  But the support came with reservations, and Sax elaborated upon his differences from the Austrian position in his subsequent 1887 treatise. Sax elaborated a theory of public goods and social welfare that went well beyond the individualist approach of Austrian economics.  In his own research, Emil Sax preferred to concentrate on applied fields like public finance, housing and transportation.   His ideological stance, particularly on the role of the State in the economy, was probably closer to the Historicists.  Sax pulled fewer punches against the younger members of the Austrian school - criticizing Mayer's theory of taxation in 1892, and in his 1916 book, Sax produced an outspoken critique of Böhm-Bawerk's theory of capital.

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