3,673 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
To explain emigration as normal is not to celebrate it—or to prescribe it as a cure for overpopulation. In this 1891 reply to Richmond Mayo Smith, Eugen von Philippovich defends that distinction while asking what governments can do about movements they cannot readily stop. His European perspective joins economic disparities to the practical means by which distant opportunities become imaginable: cheaper passages, family correspondence, and American newspapers reaching Black Forest cottages. Migration responds to hardship at home and employment abroad, but information travels unevenly and expectations can mislead. The article’s distinctive turn is from economic explanation to public responsibility: accountable information offices and cooperation between states should help prospective emigrants judge their chances without private agents’ incentive to encourage departure.
By 1890 no field of German public life — taxation, schooling, local government, the relation of Church to State — could be conceived apart from the social question. Opening with Caprivi's reform bills, this essay presents the Verein für Sozialpolitik as both symptom and instrument of Germany's passage from Manchester liberalism to organized reform. Philippovich sharply distinguishes social reform, which raises the lower strata while preserving individual freedom and private property, from the social revolution preached by Social Democracy. He traces the younger historical school of Schmoller, Brentano, and Wagner, its rejection of abstract natural law for an ethical political economy, and the 1872 Eisenach meeting that cast the State as a moral force above class selfishness. His closing insistence is that insurance schemes leave untouched the kernel of the labor question: the labor contract itself.
The State must be the regulator and moderator of the contending industrial classes, “the greatest moral institution for the education of human kind.”
Emigration, on this account, is an 'elemental' movement — a structural fact of modern life driven by land scarcity, indebtedness, and cheap transatlantic transport, not a pathology the Reich can prohibit away. Compiled for the Verein für Socialpolitik, the volume gathers state-by-state reports on Bavaria, Baden, Hessen, Württemberg, Mecklenburg, Saxony, Hamburg, Bremen, and Prussia, tracing emigration law from mercantilist and military prevention toward the modern task of protecting migrants against fraudulent agents and ruinous routes. Philippovich's Baden material grounds the thesis in social geography: people leave poor soils, insecure vineyards, and districts industry cannot absorb. Against both laissez-faire neglect and fantasies of retention, he argues for organized freedom — migrants free to go, yet informed, supervised, and steered where possible, with emigration policy tied to trade, settlement, and German interests abroad.
Damit ist aber der Abfluß eines Teiles der Bevölkerung zur Notwendigkeit geworden.
English translation: “With this, however, the outflow of a portion of the population has become a necessity.”
A law intended to protect emigrants can also give employers the means to prevent their departure. In this 1892 article, Eugen von Philippovich tests the proposed German imperial emigration law against its professed commitment to freedom. He argues that compulsory notification and a four-week waiting period would expose rural workers to pressure from employers and neighbours, turning administrative safeguards into instruments for retaining labour. Yet his alternative is not simply less government: enforceable passenger contracts, independent advice, and reliable information about wages and working conditions abroad require active public provision. His attention to who controls information—shipping companies, charitable associations, or public institutions—makes the article a concrete examination of the boundary between assistance and obstruction, and of what emigrants need to exercise a nominal right in practice.
Baden’s government once resisted encouraging emigration; within a few years, it was paying impoverished inhabitants to leave. In this 1892 journal article, Eugen von Philippovich uses administrative records to examine the tension between securing livelihoods and exporting poor-relief costs. His settlement histories challenge explanations based simply on overpopulation or personal failings: legal emancipation could leave labourers free but without land, employment, or the support on which they had depended. Clothing allowances, transport bills, disputes over responsibility, and reports from emigrants in America make the policy’s workings concrete. Philippovich’s distinctive concern is the gap between formal freedom and material independence. Following both subsidized departures and alternatives to them, readers can see why he regards domestic economic reform—not merely the removal of distressed residents—as essential to addressing poverty.
Werner Siemens hailed the dawn of a natural-scientific age; others warned the coming century would belong to politics and socialism. Delivered at the Karlsruhe Museum in March 1892, this lecture refuses the opposition, arguing that the political question is generated by technical modernity rather than opposed to it. Railways, steel, telegraphs, and mechanized agriculture have multiplied productive power, yet Philippovich measures genuine Kulturentwicklung not by inventions but by the household — dwelling, food, clothing, bodily care, and working time. Surveying peasants, Zittau handweavers, Baden cigar workers, and Mannheim factory hands, he finds output risen and lives scarcely improved. That contradiction between what technology can do and how people actually live, he holds, is what gives socialism its power over the masses; his answer is neither complacent liberalism nor collective ownership, but a broad Sozialreform of hours, wages, housing, and association.
In dem zur Zeit bestehenden Widerspruch zwischen dem, was die Produktionstechnik an sich vermag und der tatsächlichen Kulturentwicklung liegen die Kräfte verborgen, durch welche der Sozialismus die Massen beherrscht.
English translation: “In the contradiction currently existing between what productive technology is in itself capable of and actual cultural development lie hidden the forces by which socialism dominates the masses.”
A vineyard mortgaged to pay for passage, promised wages that never materialize, and employment fees that consume earnings: these cases give Philippovich’s 1893 review essay its central question—how does migration become dependence? Drawing on Italian statistics, settlement reports, and an American congressional inquiry, he traces the connections between recruiters, shipping agents, immigrant banks, landlords, and labor brokers. His distinctive emphasis is institutional: freedom to leave and laws against abuse do not, he argues, provide adequate protection without reliable information and assistance after arrival. Readers can discover how recruitment debts and compulsory lodging undermine migrants’ independence, and why Philippovich turns Italian proposals for overseas advisory offices into a criticism of German emigration policy.
How did a country built by immigration come to treat newcomers as a threat to its workers? In this 1893 article, Eugen von Philippovich locates the reversal not simply in population growth but in landownership and organized labor recruitment. Once free farmland had passed into private hands, migrants had fewer alternatives to urban wage labor; shipping agents, employers, and brokers could profit from their dependence. Drawing on congressional investigations and consular reports, he follows passage debts into lodging charges, placement fees, and strikebreaking. His proposed remedy—free, reliable information before departure—offers an alternative to reliance on border screening. Yet emigrant protection also serves German national ambitions, while his analysis of exploitation coexists with prejudicial ethnic hierarchies. The article makes these tensions concrete through the institutions that channel migration and distribute its costs.
Industrial peace cannot be legislated as goodwill: it needs institutions through which workers can identify and defend their rights. In this article on an Austrian government bill, Eugen von Philippovich tests proposals for workplace committees and conciliation boards against factory inspectors’ reports of unlawful working rules, wage deductions, and retaliation against complainants. His distinctive argument combines support for compulsory workplace representation with scepticism about industry-wide conciliation where organized constituencies and mutual trust are lacking. Rather than treating strikes simply as disorder, he shows how they may defend rights already promised but denied in practice. The article makes concrete the difference between consultation granted at an employer’s discretion and representation protected by law—and asks how cooperation can develop without requiring workers to trust first and seek safeguards later.
A room count can conceal the difference between habitable shelter and dangerous overcrowding. In this 1894 article, Eugen von Philippovich tests Vienna’s official housing measures against visits to 101 dwellings, recording floor area, air space, rents, and the conditions of working households. Only three inspected homes met both of his minimum spatial standards—a finding about these dwellings, not a representative estimate for the city. His distinctive concern is how measurement becomes a basis for law: tenancy, he argues, requires public safeguards comparable to those governing employment. Yet closing unhealthy homes without expanding affordable supply could worsen the hardship. The article lets readers examine both the household evidence behind reform and the difficult conjunction of sanitary protection, property rights, and tenants’ ability to pay.
Because poverty and market power can themselves coerce, no simple contrast between state compulsion and natural freedom will do — and economic policy, in this reworked fourth edition, becomes the conscious intervention of organized communities in an economy always 'in constant flux.' The agrarian book judges farm size economically rather than ideologically, defending Anerbenrecht, Rentengüter, and inner colonization as adaptive instruments rather than fixed property models, while conceding that peasant emancipation stripped rural households of older securities. The industrial book follows the passage from guild regulation through Gewerbefreiheit to factory, cartel, and organized labor, insisting that formal contractual liberty no longer describes the real bond between employer and worker. Philippovich rejects both laissez-faire individualism and absolute statism: policy is justified precisely where it makes freedom institutionally real, welfare-oriented yet centered on productive capacity.
Der freie Arbeitsvertrag ist eine Fiktion.
English translation: “The free labor contract is a fiction.”
Cooperatives, cartels, and trade unions complicate the liberal picture of independent producers meeting only in the market. In this 1899 article, Eugen von Philippovich asks how organized economic interests can give individuals greater control over their livelihoods without sacrificing equal citizenship or occupational freedom. He rejects both centralized socialism and a restoration of hereditary estates as necessary destinations of association. His distinctive concern is institutional: speaking for an interest is not the same as administering shared affairs. Austrian agricultural councils, industrial chambers, and obstructed workers’ organizations expose the unequal opportunities behind apparently parallel forms of representation. Readers encounter a liberalism prepared to relinquish automatic market harmony while retaining individual initiative—and a concrete inquiry into who may represent economic interests, with what authority and responsibilities.