The archive.

A plausible premise does not guarantee a sound economic explanation. In this short 1890 review of Otto Effertz’s Arbeit und Boden, Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk grants—with qualifications—that goods arise from labour and land, but challenges the deductions Effertz builds upon that claim. His qualified appreciation of Effertz’s observations on the “age” of labour and capital interest sharpens the distinction between fruitful insight and what he regards as Marx-inspired verbal dexterity. The review also exposes a concrete scholarly dispute: has Effertz actually read the “bourgeois economists” he dismisses? Böhm-Bawerk’s suspicion remains a suspicion, but it makes this compact polemic a pointed encounter with his standards for economic reasoning, fair criticism, and claims to originality.

Does a salary cease to be income when it is saved, or a laborer’s wage when its recurrence is uncertain? In this short 1890 review of Robert Meyer’s Das Wesen des Einkommens, Böhm-Bawerk tests a proposed definition against precisely such cases. He welcomes Meyer’s exposure of contradictions in established accounts of income, yet argues that Meyer’s own emphasis on securely recurring consumption goods excludes earnings and benefits that an income theory must explain. Free accommodation and an equivalent rent allowance sharpen the discrepancy. The review offers a compact example of Böhm-Bawerk’s methodological judgement: better definitions require clearer accounts of economic relationships, not merely more ingenious wording. His criticism identifies where Meyer’s analysis is fruitful without accepting its proposed solution.

Do production costs explain value, or do they already presuppose values that need explaining? In this short polemical intervention, Böhm-Bawerk asks Heinrich Dietzel to specify his alternative to marginal utility theory before a substantive rebuttal can begin. Mines and vineyards make the difficulty concrete: might productive assets derive their value from their products rather than determine it? Writing as a defender of marginal utility, Böhm-Bawerk distinguishes agreement that prices tend toward costs from agreement about why they do so. The interest lies less in a completed refutation than in watching him sharpen the dispute—showing how apparently opposed theories may share observations while disagreeing over the direction of explanation.

The Methodenstreit, the bitter quarrel over whether economics should proceed by historical description or by exact, isolating analysis, supplies the occasion for this review-essay on Schmoller's memorial volume to Wilhelm Roscher. Böhm-Bawerk reframes the dispute: the real question is not whether the historical method is legitimate, which no one denies, but whether Menger's isolating method deserves equal standing beside it. Deduction, he notes, serves physics and astronomy without scandal; the classical economists erred not from want of facts but from having distilled them wrongly. He then turns the historians' own practice against them, since they cannot discuss price, cost, or interest without smuggling in inherited abstractions, and closes with a plea for tolerance: let economists write less about method and work more with every method.

Meine Absicht ist vielmehr, den Streit zu versöhnen als ihn weiter zu verschärfen.

English translation: “My intention is rather to reconcile the dispute than to sharpen it further.”

A textbook must offer beginners settled truths, yet by 1890 political economy no longer possessed an uncontested doctrinal core, and it is through this pedagogical bind that Böhm-Bawerk reviews S. M. Macvane's Working Principles of Political Economy. He credits its clarity and independence while faulting its conservatism: Macvane retains cost as the ultimate regulator of value, rejects Jevons's route from utility to exchange value, and rests wages on a fund of contemporary savings scarcely distinct from the classical wages-fund doctrine. Against this, Böhm-Bawerk argues that the annual mass of consumable goods is not fixed in advance but shaped by saving, demand, and the division of production between consumption and capital goods. The review becomes a workshop in which Austrian capital theory emerges as a bridge between marginal productivity and distribution, labor priced by its Grenzprodukt.

Where shall we find nowadays a stock of undoubted, clear, and simple truths?

Scarcity may explain why capital goods have value, but not why they yield a surplus beyond their own cost, and it is this wedge that Böhm-Bawerk drives into Professor Giddings's theory of interest. Writing in a short correspondence, he grants a narrow element of truth, that finite human laboring powers keep the supply of capital limited, then denies that the painfulness of overtime labor can be the root of interest. He rejects Giddings's cost-based account, since roundabout methods are adopted because they are cheaper per unit rather than dearer, and a circumstance that merely increases outlay cannot be the cause of gain. Behind the objection lies a careful separation of conditions from causes, and of scarcity-value from surplus-value, exposing the equivocations between labor cost, productive power, and the time-structure of production that let the puzzle of interest seem already solved.

"Limited supply" of capital is certainly a condition of the existence of interest; but interest is a long way from being explained by it.

A state powerful enough to wage repeated wars could still struggle to persuade its subjects to lend it money. In this 1891 review of Franz von Mensi’s archival history of Austrian finances from 1701 to 1740, Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk highlights the private credit, pledged assets and banking intermediaries that sustained precarious sovereign borrowing. He judges Starhemberg’s financial administration not by the debts it accumulated but by the catastrophe it averted. The review also makes a pointed methodological defence: Mensi’s dense documentary record, less polished narrative than ordered chronicle, preserves evidence that a more selective historian might discard. Readers encounter both a concrete account of the supports beneath public credit and Böhm-Bawerk’s reasons for valuing archival completeness over premature synthesis.

How can tax policy be studied when societies cannot safely be subjected to controlled experiments? In this 1891 review of Georg Schanz’s five-volume history of Swiss taxation, Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk finds an unusually promising resource in twenty-five cantonal systems: neighbouring jurisdictions whose similarities and differences permit careful comparison of laws and outcomes. His enthusiastic judgement rests on the connection between detailed institutional history and causal explanation. Yet the findings he highlights complicate any easy celebration of Swiss democracy: political freedom does not guarantee tax compliance, and greater municipal influence over assessment can allow local interests to obstruct broader fiscal aims. This short review shows what Böhm-Bawerk valued in historical research—and why he thought its evidence could challenge both administrative assumptions and taxpayers’ national prejudices.

Resemblance between doctrines need not prove intellectual borrowing. In this 1891 review of the second part of Karl Diehl’s study of Proudhon, Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk endorses Diehl’s defence against Marx’s plagiarism charge: similar conclusions may emerge from different lines of reasoning. He especially values the comparisons that place Proudhon’s bank projects alongside other experiments in monetary and credit reform. His favourable appraisal also brings a sharper tension into view. Diehl regards Proudhon’s attempt to combine socialist aims with individual freedom as his distinctive ambition—and argues that abolishing money, wages and interest cannot be reconciled with retaining private production. This compact review shows Böhm-Bawerk weighing historical comparison, intellectual independence and the feasibility of reform without collapsing them into a single verdict on Proudhon.

For Böhm-Bawerk, originality is no excuse for intellectual isolation. His 1891 review of the second, revised and enlarged edition of Walras’s Éléments d’économie politique pure acknowledges Walras as an independent discoverer of marginal utility while explicitly separating that achievement from his mathematical method. The point of friction is Walras’s pride in a doctrine fundamentally unchanged after fifteen years: has the system developed through engagement with other economists, or only from its own resources? Böhm-Bawerk offers a pointed assessment rather than a detailed theoretical rebuttal, balancing admiration with doubts about the adequacy of revision. This short review lets readers see how he distinguishes recognition of a shared economic insight from endorsement of either its mathematical presentation or its subsequent development.

Can unequal bargaining power explain capital income without a developed theory of prices? In this 1891 review of Otto Wittelshöfer, Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk accepts the distinction between capital goods and ownership rights but challenges the explanatory weight placed on owners’ power over workers. His objection is not that power has no economic effects: it is that Wittelshöfer has not shown how those effects interact with the causes determining particular prices and wages. The review’s sharpest distinction is between possessing a conception of value and supplying a theory of value. Readers encounter a focused dispute over what an explanation of profit must establish, conducted by a critic who acknowledges the book’s intellectual force while rejecting its principal conclusions.

Böhm-Bawerk presents the Austrian School not as a methodological faction but as a movement to rebuild positive economics from its foundations, its true field being theory in the strict sense rather than the quarrels of the Methodenstreit. He grants the historical school that classical doctrine is incomplete while refusing to trade abstraction for induction and statistics. Marginal utility becomes the reconstructive principle: a good's value follows the least important satisfaction that would be lost without it, dramatized by the farmer whose burning sack of grain forces a reallocation to the least important use, and this idea unlocks exchange, price, cost, and distribution in turn. The essay's Copernican claim reverses the classical order, making costs the values of productive goods rather than the ultimate regulators of value, and recasts the problem of imputation as the very grammar of distribution.

Was sie anstreben, ist eine Art Renaissance der ökonomischen Theorie.

English translation: “What they aim at is a kind of renaissance of economic theory.”