2,793 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Counting great landowners is not the same as measuring landed power. In this 1884 statistical article, Karl Theodor von Inama-Sternegg uses Austrian land-tax lists to distinguish the number of wealthy proprietors from the reach and concentration of their holdings. Galicia’s numerical prominence, Bohemia’s concentration of large properties, and Lower Austria’s dispersed ownership networks emerge as different patterns rather than interchangeable signs of dominance. His perspective combines methodological caution—the records lack acreage and exclude some dispersed wealth—with concern for small proprietors’ independence. Comparisons among noble, ecclesiastical, municipal, and commercial owners further unsettle the image of a uniform landed elite. The article offers a concrete lesson in what administrative statistics can establish about ownership, and where claims about its economic and social influence exceed direct measurement.
When Guerry coined the phrase moral statistics in 1833, he attached a single name to investigations of crime, marriage, and social conduct, and, Inama-Sternegg warns, opened the door to metaphysical system-building on half-tested data. His sustained target here is A. von Oettingen, whose Christian social ethics dressed speculative social-ethical laws as inductive results. Worldview may orient inquiry, the essay concedes, but must never be smuggled into the proof. The sharpest methodological blows fall on international comparison, where tables juxtapose crimes, marriages, and illegitimacy governed by incompatible legal and administrative regimes, and where the law of large numbers only manufactures pseudo-truths. His alternative is historical and contextual: moral statistics is no autonomous discipline but a viewpoint within general statistics, answerable always to carefully analyzed social reality rather than to a doctrine fixed before the facts.
Der ehrliche Forscher verzichtet von vornherein darauf, aus der bloß äußeren Erfahrung die sittlichen Prinzipien, die die Welt erhalten, abzuleiten.
English translation: “The honest investigator renounces from the outset any attempt to derive from mere external experience the moral principles that sustain the world.”
A taxable hearth is not necessarily a household, and a list of citizens is not a count of inhabitants. In this methodological article, Karl Theodor von Inama-Sternegg asks how population history can be reconstructed from records made for quite different purposes. Starting from a critical engagement with J. Jastrow’s study of German urban populations, he tests demographic estimates against the institutions that produced their evidence: taxation, siege provisioning, parish registration, and citizenship admission. His distinctive concern is the false precision created when modern ratios or uncertain multipliers are applied to older records. Yet restraint need not mean abandoning inquiry. Readers discover how sources inadequate for population totals can still disclose occupations, migration, or family structure—and why historical evidence can unsettle demographic patterns too readily treated as universal.
A recorded price may describe a market transaction, a prescribed tariff, or an exceptional moment of scarcity. In this 1886 methodological article, Karl Theodor von Inama-Sternegg asks what happens when historians treat such unlike observations as a continuous numerical series. His distinctive emphasis falls on the institutions and purposes behind the figures: municipal market lists, collegiate accounts shaped by grain-linked rents, and chronicles drawn to extraordinary conditions. He argues that abundant data cannot substitute for knowledge of recording procedures, commodity quality, local measures, and monetary values. Readers gain concrete criteria for distinguishing evidence of ordinary price movements from isolated purchases or administrative intentions—and for understanding why a table’s apparent uniformity may conceal incompatible observations.
Statistics, on the metaphor that governs this public lecture, is the ground plan of social life: abstract and dry, yet fundamental to the whole structure. Refusing any narrow technical brief, Inama-Sternegg presents it as an old, almost instinctive human need, visible in ancient censuses and biblical enumerations. His central move carries statistics from a state function to a social one: because the state sees only what passes through its organs, the whole of society must be called upon to record and reckon. The housewife's account book, the worker's budget, and business bookkeeping all become elementary statistical acts. He marks the limits too, for some things cannot be measured and they are not the least significant, and defends objectivity against its one true enemy, one-sidedness. A servant, then, whose guidance modern life cannot dispense with.
Die Statistik, meine Herren, liegt dem Menschen im Blute.
English translation: “Statistics, gentlemen, is in man's blood.”
A company’s wealth is not necessarily its capital—but what makes the difference legally meaningful? In this 1887 review of the second, revised and enlarged edition of Karl Knies’s Das Geld, Karl Theodor von Inama-Sternegg tests the boundary between economic definitions and legal institutions. He accepts Knies’s criticism of confused capital concepts yet proposes a distinction of his own: assets legally or contractually committed to an enterprise may warrant a specific juridical category. His response to monetary policy follows a similar pattern. Rejecting ambitious international bimetallic schemes need not rule out limited cooperation to stabilize gold and silver. The review offers a compact encounter with a critic who asks what constructive legal and political possibilities remain after persuasive objections have been conceded.
A certificate of release from citizenship is not a record of every departure. This distinction governs Karl Theodor von Inama-Sternegg’s 1887 article on admissions to and releases from Austrian citizenship in 1885. Because emigration could occur without notification, he treats administrative returns as evidence of documented legal changes, not a census of migration. His analysis and tables nevertheless reveal concrete contrasts: Lower Austria’s surplus of admissions against Bohemia’s excess of releases, and the importance of families covered by a single certificate. Reading the figures alongside their legal conditions shows both what these records disclose about the people changing citizenship and why unknown destinations, optional certification, and excluded routes to citizenship prevent a complete demographic balance.
Money held for wards could also finance farms: this dual purpose gives Inama-Sternegg’s study of Austria’s pooled guardianship funds its central tension. Published in 1887 and examining accounts for 1885, the study asks how protected private assets were invested and whose needs those investments served. Inama-Sternegg combines legal history with regional balance sheets to show funds supplying roughly 59 million gulden in mortgage credit, sometimes exceeding local savings banks’ mortgage business. He defends their mortgage orientation while examining obstacles, including loan terms less suited to farmers than competing arrangements. Equally revealing is his caution about the figures: pooled accounts exclude individually administered property and cannot establish wards’ total wealth. The study makes a concrete connection between guardianship rules and rural lending without confusing recorded assets with the whole field of protected property.
A grain price is not a stable historical fact when the measure, currency, and rules of quotation change beneath it. In this study of Vienna’s eighteenth-century grain prices, Karl Theodor von Inama-Sternegg publishes recovered municipal market records while making their difficulties of comparison explicit. A larger grain measure introduced in 1752 and uncertain shifts in circulating coinage require reconstruction before prices can be compared across decades. His converted wheat series suggests alternating periods of scarcity and abundance rather than continuous inflation, with harvest conditions carrying particular explanatory weight. Readers can examine both that interpretation and its evidentiary basis: the accompanying tables retain historical units, while Inama distinguishes recorded quotations from his own calculated averages. The result offers a concrete encounter with how archival prices become economic evidence.
A sale price, a taxable value, and a capitalized income need not measure the same thing. In this 1888 article, Karl Theodor von Inama-Sternegg examines their divergence through Austrian property transactions, comparing evidence from 1886 with an inquiry from 1866. The apparent narrowing of the overall gap between prices and tax valuations conceals opposite movements for agricultural land and other properties. His distinctive concern is both fiscal and statistical: assessments may need reform, yet market transactions cannot simply supply a replacement measure of national wealth. Readers can discover how cadastral revisions, property size, and the composition of auction sales alter the meaning of seemingly straightforward ratios—and why even thousands of observations may fail to represent the property stock from which they are drawn.
A shrinking tax base need not mean declining agriculture. In this 1889 study of Austrian cadastral returns, Karl Theodor von Inama-Sternegg distinguishes changes in taxable land from changes in its cultivation—and asks how reliably either records economic transformation. Owners have incentives to report the end of tax liability, but little immediate fiscal reason to register a pasture’s conversion to arable land. Reporting delays therefore complicate the apparent annual pattern. Against this administrative background, vineyard losses in Lower Austria and expansion in Dalmatia acquire sharper meaning than aggregate totals alone can supply. The study offers a concrete lesson in reading official statistics: land-use records can disclose agricultural change, provided their categories, incentives, and uneven timing remain part of the interpretation.
A birth entered in a parish book does not automatically become a reliable fact in national statistics. In this 1889 introduction to the Austrian Statistical Central Commission’s register survey, Karl Theodor von Inama-Sternegg examines the obstacles between record and count: mismatched ecclesiastical and political boundaries, divided supervision, missing volumes, and uncertain territorial coverage. He connects these administrative problems to a historical question: do apparent demographic regularities endure across centuries, or reflect particular social conditions? Older local registers could help answer it—but only if researchers know what survives and whom it records. His proposals for inventories, jurisdictional directories, and central access show how archival organization could serve both public administration and historical inquiry, without necessarily gathering every original register in one place.