Menger’s short review welcomes Ludwig Elster’s new series of monographs as an institutional support for research emerging from university seminars in the state sciences. It proceeds from the enterprise’s reception among German and Austrian scholars to its disciplinary scope and the first three issues. Its central claim concerns the value of publication for both preserving scholarship and sustaining advanced teaching:
Nicht nur der Wunsch der Seminarleiter, die nicht selten geradezu vortrefflichen Arbeiten, welche den obigen Instituten ihre Entstehung verdanken, der Vergessenheit zu entziehen, auch, in einem gewissen höheren Sinne, didaktische Rücksichten lassen den dem obigen Unternehmen zu Grunde liegenden Gedanken als einen sehr glücklichen erscheinen.
English translation: Not only the wish of the seminar directors to rescue from oblivion the not seldom positively excellent works which owe their origin to the above institutes, but also, in a certain higher sense, didactic considerations make the idea underlying the above undertaking appear a very happy one.
Publication thus does more than rescue seminar work from obscurity: Menger attributes an educational purpose to making it available, though he leaves that purpose undeveloped. The rapid growth of university seminars supplies the practical context for his endorsement.
The series’ scope is broad but organized around a common perspective. Economics and statistics belong alongside agricultural and industrial technology and jurisprudence when their subjects are treated with reference to the state sciences. Menger presents this breadth as a coherent publishing programme, without elaborating a theory of disciplinary boundaries.
The first three issues illustrate that programme through Conrad Schmidt’s study of natural wages, Joh. N. Hansen’s investigation of grain prices in relation to nutritional value, and F. Kral’s account of monetary value and price movements in the German Empire during 1871–84. Menger offers no reconstruction of their findings; his collective judgment emphasizes exposition and substantive quality:
Sämmtliche drei Abhandlungen fesseln durch schöne Darstellung und Gediegenheit des Inhaltes.
English translation: All three treatises captivate by beauty of presentation and soundness of content.
The closing praise of editor and publisher follows from this conjunction of scholarly quality and institutional need. The review’s significance lies in Menger’s support for a publication infrastructure connecting seminar instruction with public research, rather than in any detailed intervention in the economic questions treated by the individual studies.
This work was divided into 1 sections when it entered the library's research corpus—an apparatus for search and citation, not necessarily the author's own table of contents. Each title opens its summary.
Put a question to this work; the Librarian answers from its 1 sections and cites the passage.
Ask the Librarian