Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk: Review of Franz von Mensi’s Die Finanzen Oesterreichs von 1701 bis 1740 (1891)

Böhm-Bawerk’s review evaluates Mensi’s archival history as a foundational contribution to Austrian financial historiography. It moves from the book’s restricted scope to its account of borrowing and banking, then to the achievements of Gundaker Thomas von Starhemberg, before defending Mensi’s documentary method. Its central judgment is that painstaking reconstruction must precede comprehensive historical synthesis.

Die ältere Finanzgeschichte Oesterreichs harrt zum allergrößten Teile noch ihrer Darstellung.

English translation: The older financial history of Austria still awaits its exposition for by far the greatest part.

The deficiency concerns not merely historical narrative but the preliminary investigation and publication of archival evidence. Mensi’s nearly 800 pages cover only forty years and chiefly public debt; taxation receives incidental treatment. Böhm-Bawerk nevertheless regards these limits as appropriate to the immense quantity of unexplored material. The book constitutes a necessary step whose value should not be measured against an as-yet unattainable comprehensive history.

The substantive story is one of sustained fiscal distress: an internationally engaged great power fought four expensive wars with an undeveloped tax system and weak public credit. Its extraordinary variety of borrowing arrangements expressed institutional vulnerability rather than financial abundance.

Der Staatskredit mußte sozusagen auf Krücken gehen, die er der Privatwirtschaft abborgte.

English translation: The public credit had, so to speak, to walk on crutches which it borrowed from the private economy.

This metaphor organizes Böhm-Bawerk’s interpretation of the evidence. Sovereign borrowing depended on the ruler’s personal credit, the creditworthiness of financial officials, pledged assets, loans extracted through official relationships, and the assistance of provincial estates. Banks offered a more durable intermediary between the needy state and a public reluctant to lend directly to it. Mensi traces the Banco del Giro, the Wiener Stadtbank, and the Universal-Bankalität; Böhm-Bawerk singles out the Stadtbank as an especially effective and lasting support for Austrian public credit.

Starhemberg supplies the personal center of this institutional history. Böhm-Bawerk shifts the standard of administrative achievement away from the volume of debt incurred and toward the prevention of collapse under exceptional constraints:

Man darf seine Verdienste nicht daran messen wollen, wie viele oder wie wenige Schulden Oesterreich unter seiner Verwaltung machen mußte, sondern daran, daß er unter den denkbar schwierigsten, ja verzweifelten Umständen Staat und Volk vor einer eigentlichen Katastrophe zu bewahren wußte.

English translation: One must not seek to measure his merits by how many or how few debts Austria was obliged to incur under his administration, but rather by the fact that, under the most difficult, indeed desperate circumstances imaginable, he knew how to preserve state and people from an actual catastrophe.

Taking charge of the finances in 1703, Starhemberg sustained another decade of war while strengthening credit. After leaving the Hofkammer presidency in 1715, he continued through the Stadtbank to support state borrowing. Böhm-Bawerk’s extended quotation from Mensi stresses the productive tension between protecting the bank against excessive government demands and making its credit available to the state. Prudent administration and conscientious conduct accumulated public confidence whose benefits outlasted Starhemberg’s strongest years.

The closing methodological assessment explains why the book’s factual density is an achievement, even at the expense of literary appeal.

Was die Darstellungsweise anbelangt, so hat sich Mensi gegenüber dem ungeheuren Stoff, den er vorzuführen hatte, etwas mehr als Chronist wie als Geschichtsschreiber verhalten.

English translation: As regards the manner of presentation, Mensi, confronted with the enormous material he had to set forth, has conducted himself somewhat more as a chronicler than as a historian.

Böhm-Bawerk expressly approves this choice. Mensi provides necessary orientation but gives priority to accurately documented facts ordered by subject and chronology. A narrative organized around broad developmental lines might read more attractively, yet premature selection could suppress evidence irrelevant to the author’s immediate purposes but indispensable to later researchers. The review thus links its praise of archival completeness to a conception of scholarship as cumulative labor: Mensi preserves material for colleagues and successors, sparing them repeated investigation. Its concluding wish for recognition and continuation follows from this double achievement—illuminating how precarious state credit was sustained while establishing a reliable basis for future financial history.