2,793 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Because public law rests on a contested theory of the state, and on a will that both makes law and is bound by it, it is, Landesberger argues in this 1889 Vienna dissertation address delivered under imperial auspices, uniquely unstable and best approached historically. He begins from Kant, for whom the state's sole task is to posit and protect law, then charts how history outgrew that legal-protection state: the French Revolution's separation of powers, the collapse of the Holy Roman Empire, and Fichte's national conception. The modern Rechtsstaat emerges as a Kulturstaat animated by a unified state will and answerable to 'society,' the dynamic stratification of a people; equality before the law figures less as an individual right than as society's freedom against class domination. The speech closes on the Habsburg motto Viribus unitis.
Der Rechtsstaat ist nicht die politische und culturelle allein, er ist auch die ethische Organisation eines Volkes!
English translation: “The Rechtsstaat is not merely the political and cultural, it is also the ethical organisation of a people!”
A balance of power can describe diplomatic alignments without fully explaining what drives them. In this brief 1890 review of Michele di Gisira’s study of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century treaties, Julius Landesberger distinguishes the pursuit of dynastic interests from the creation of international legal foundations. He praises Gisira’s concise historical account but identifies a concrete omission: Austrian hopes for the Spanish inheritance and their connection with religious politics. His reservation raises the possibility that Gisira’s explanatory standpoint itself limits what comes into view. The review offers a compact example of scholarly judgement that separates clarity of presentation from adequacy of explanation, asking what a mechanical balance among ruling houses leaves out.
Can a sound account of legislative procedure rest on a mistaken theory of sovereignty? Julius Landesberger’s 1891 review of Georg Meyer finds precisely this tension. He welcomes Meyer’s explanation of how Bundesrat, Reichstag, and emperor participate in imperial legislation, yet challenges the notion of a monarch or people as a distinct “bearer of state power.” For Landesberger, the historical importance of princely or popular sovereignty does not establish a legal authority beyond constitutionally defined organs. His objection becomes concrete in disputes over budgets and royal ordinance powers: what does presumed monarchical authority actually authorize? The review offers a pointed encounter between careful constitutional interpretation and inherited political vocabulary, showing why agreement about institutional duties need not imply agreement about the source of their authority.
If a public undertaking raises property values throughout a neighbourhood, should that shared benefit reduce compensation to the owner whose land is taken? This concrete difficulty anchors Julius Landesberger’s 1891 review of J. Sieber’s study of expropriation. He values Sieber’s survey of fragmented Swiss legislation but challenges the use of private-law measures of loss to determine a public obligation. For Landesberger, compensation must do more than repair an owner’s balance sheet: it must distribute the burdens of public purposes equitably, with the state bearing primary responsibility. The review shows how a seemingly technical question about valuation can alter the legal identity of the debtor, the proper forum for disputes, and the boundary between private property and public law.
Weighing how to set Austria-Hungary's currency on a sound footing, Landesberger enters the monometallism-versus-bimetallism quarrel with a strategist's caution. Rather than commit doctrinally to pure gold, which he holds would force ruinous silver sales, deepen the long price depression running since the 1870s, and sharpen a global scramble for scarce gold, he urges a French-type limping standard, saturated with silver yet legally equal to gold, that keeps open the path to a future international bimetallic union. His distinction between gold agio and gold premium lets him defend the Bank of France's practice of shielding reserves through a premium rather than punitive discount hikes. A second essay recasts the 'Relation' as a legal problem: how to convert debts contracted in depreciated paper into gold justly, by averaged conversion periods instead of a single reform-date rate.
Falling prices could show that gold bought more without proving that a shortage of gold caused the fall. This distinction anchors Julius Landesberger’s assessment of the German government’s 1894 Silver Commission, whose search for practical remedies repeatedly encountered unresolved monetary questions. Writing amid renewed bimetallic agitation and agricultural distress, Landesberger weighs geological forecasts, mining technology, and the pressures on indebted farmers without treating any as decisive evidence for monetary reform. His perspective is cautiously internationalist: he questions what price indices can establish while allowing that inadequate monetary expansion might weaken recoveries and prolong depressions. Readers can discover both the evidentiary difficulties behind the silver controversy and why Landesberger thought an inconclusive public inquiry called for confidential expert negotiation rather than the abandonment of international cooperation.
Shareholder rights mean little if those who exercise managerial power escape corresponding responsibility and investors lack the knowledge to judge their actions. In this 1912 contribution, Julius Landesberger tests Austrian company law against German arrangements for professional management and independent supervision. His case for reform is selective rather than imitative: administrative borrowing needs enforceable legal duties, while voting safeguards need reliable reporting and sustained minority representation. His proposal that a substantial minority deposit its shares for at least a year to secure a supervisory-board representative makes that distinction concrete. The article offers a compact account of how authority, liability, and information must work together—and of why taxation and speculative responses to hidden reserves cannot simply be corrected by rewriting company law.
Reverse the lecture's title, Landesberger begins, the national economy and the war, not the war and the national economy, and the 1914 catastrophe appears less as military politics than as the collision of an economy with the forces bent on halting it. Britain, he argues, entered not over Belgian neutrality but because Germany's industrial ascent threatened its world position: German firms served customers better, the 'made in Germany' origin law backfired into a mark of quality, and bank-financed science outpaced English routine in chemicals, machinery, and munitions. Turning to the financial shock, he weighs moratoria, Darlehenskassen, and Reichsbank note issue, the closure of the exchanges, the blockade's threat to the food supply, and the war loans on which monetary normalization depends. Whatever windfalls war brings a lucky few, for the national economy as a whole it is no boom.
Die Kerze wird von zwei Seiten angezündet.
English translation: “The candle is being lit from both ends.”