Inama-Sternegg’s journal article presents the methodological and administrative programme for Austria’s census of 31 December 1890, conducted in early 1891. Its argument proceeds from the organization of statistical processing to territorial belonging, domestic association, occupation, property, and livestock, before addressing implementation. An extensive documentary supplement reproduces the ministerial ordinance of 9 August 1890, questionnaires, and instructions. The central thesis is that meaningful reform depends less on multiplying questions than on recovering relationships already latent in individual returns.
The law of 1869 constrains innovation, but centralized processing offers a route forward without legislative revision. Earlier censuses funnelled individual information through local summaries whose simplicity reflected municipal administrative capacities. Higher authorities merely added these totals: geographical aggregation preserved neither the richness of the original evidence nor the connections between its categories.
Die Klarstellung der Wechselbeziehungen, welche zwischen den einzelnen von der Zählung erhobenen Bevölkerungsverhältnissen bestehen, ist immer mehr zur unabweislichen Forderung geworden.
English translation: Clarifying the interrelationships between the individual population characteristics recorded by the census has increasingly become an imperative requirement.
The proposed two-stage procedure retains simplified local summaries for rapid preliminary results, then transfers the original returns to the Statistical Central Commission. There, individual counting sheets make the material rearrangeable into combinations and groups. Centralization thus promises both analytical depth and greater accuracy through direct scrutiny of the primary records.
Territorial classification demonstrates the stakes. Inama-Sternegg distinguishes the population physically present from habitual residents and those legally belonging to a locality. He retains actual presence as the basis of state statistics, assigning detailed investigation of discrepancies with residence chiefly to municipal statistics. Legal belonging, however, must be established at district level for recruiting quotas and reform of municipal domicile rights. Comparing birthplace, residence, and legal affiliation should reveal migration and the divergence between social attachment and inflexible legal membership. Reciprocal exchanges of individual census data with foreign states extend this inquiry to Austrians abroad, although differing census dates and questions limit comparability.
Domestic classification likewise requires distinctions that a common address cannot supply. Family, household, and dwelling designate kinship, shared economic provision, and accommodation respectively.
Aber die Wohnung ist doch auch das einseitigste und unvollkommenste Kriterium des im häuslichen Zusammenleben ausgedrückten socialen Verbandes der Bevölkerung.
English translation: Yet the dwelling is also the most one-sided and incomplete criterion of the population’s social association as expressed in domestic life together.
Explicitly recording each occupant’s relationship to the dwelling’s head should recover families and households obscured by lodgers and shared accommodation. Institutional populations must be treated separately lest barracks, hotels, or hospitals distort ordinary housing statistics. His methodological criticism also carries a normative commitment: individual enumeration has advanced accuracy while encouraging an atomistic conception of society, neglecting the family he regards as its foundation.
Occupational statistics develops the same relational approach. Classification must register not merely economic branches but positions within them and the dependants supported by each occupation.
Zunächst ward es klar, dass nicht nur die Erwerbtreibenden, sondern die ganze Bevölkerung an der socialen Ordnung participierte, welche Beruf und Erwerb so massgebend erzeugte.
English translation: First it became clear that not only those engaged in gainful activity, but the entire population participated in the social order so decisively produced by occupation and livelihood.
Approximately 150 occupational types, cross-classified with employment status and demographic characteristics, should replace broad totals. Expanded questions on secondary earnings recognize livelihoods that resist a single occupational label. The omitted category of dependent home workers exposes a remaining weakness: economic dependence can coexist with relative social independence and transferred business risk. New property questions similarly qualify occupational position, but cannot establish the distribution or size of all holdings.
The closing discussion tempers reformist confidence. Livestock totals fluctuate with markets and seasons, making a year-end snapshot a poor measure of normal stock; improved ownership groupings still leave connections with productive enterprises unresolved. Military enumeration, expanded urban housing surveys, revised locality directories, and reporting deadlines complete the programme. The appended forms and instructions show how these ambitions become duties of classification, verification, and transmission. The article’s lasting relevance lies in its demonstration that administrative processing determines which social relationships a census can make visible—and which it loses.
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