The archive.

Amid the Methodenstreit, with the German historical school pressing its case against abstract theory, Schüller — in a study dedicated to Carl Menger — mounts a point-by-point defense of the classical economists his contemporaries claimed to have surpassed. Brentano's charge that Smith, Say, Ricardo, and Malthus abstracted from culture, class, and locality, that they reduced human motive to naked egoism, that they preached a merely negative laissez-faire: each, Schüller shows by going back to the texts, is a misreading. He rereads the butcher-brewer-baker passage and the invisible hand in their qualifying context, and argues that the historicists, mistaking analytical abstraction for a denial of particulars, lack the theoretical power for genuine analysis and even muddle what the classics had already secured.

Es gilt die Klassiker — Smith, Say, Ricardo, Malthus — gerade in jenen Punkten, in denen sie Gegenstand der heftigsten, und, wie sich herausstellen wird, ganz unberechtigten Angriffe seitens der historischen Schule geworden sind, selbst wieder zum Worte kommen zu lassen.

English translation: “It is important to let the classical economists—Smith, Say, Ricardo, Malthus—speak for themselves once again, precisely on those points on which they have been subjected to the most vehement, and, as will become apparent, wholly unjustified attacks from the historical school.”

Attention to historical circumstances can sharpen economic judgment—but can it also become an excuse for preserving privilege? Richard Schüller’s 1899 monograph tests the historical school’s policy commitments against concrete disputes over peasant emancipation, guild restrictions, taxation and worker protection. He argues that appeals to inherited rights and local exceptions often obstruct reform without supplying defensible criteria for choosing among competing interests. His defence of classical economics is not a defence of unrestricted laissez-faire: he distinguishes Smith and his German successors from later free-trade dogmatists, recovering their combination of general principles and practical qualifications. The resulting critique makes methodological disagreement tangible: readers can examine how apparently cautious or neutral reasoning determines whose obligations remain enforceable, whose freedom expands and whose protection is deferred.

Neither doctrinaire free trade nor blanket protection survives Schüller's scrutiny, which rests a rational tariff policy on a fact both camps overlook: within a single country the same good is produced at widely unequal costs, in layers reaching from the most favorable conditions to the marginal ones that fix the price. From this — and from the marginal-utility line that runs through Menger, Wieser, and Zuckerkandl — he derives when imports enrich a nation and when they merely displace home production and depress wages and rents. He weighs foreign 'superiority' against real export capacity, defends measured grain tariffs against Brentano's objections, takes apart Germany's and Russia's excessive duties, and treats commercial treaties as the arena where an import harmful in isolation may be admitted for compensating export concessions. The work carries a dedication to Carl Menger.

Der größte Irrtum jedoch besteht darin, daß die Exportfähigkeit als gleichbedeutend mit der Überlegenheit aufgefaßt wird, während es für die Exportfähigkeit ebenso sehr auf die in der Regel ganz übersehenen Konsumverhältnisse als auf die Produktion ankommt.

English translation: “The greatest error, however, consists in the fact that export capacity is regarded as synonymous with superiority, whereas export capacity depends just as much on consumption conditions—which are usually entirely overlooked—as on production.”

An import duty can expand domestic production while making the population poorer. In this 1909 article, Richard Schüller asks how to distinguish protection that earns its cost from protection that merely raises prices. His starting point is the unevenness of production costs among enterprises within the same country: what matters is not simply whether domestic firms can compete, but how costly further expansion will be. This perspective unsettles both blanket protectionism and the assumption that free trade automatically keeps productive resources employed. Schüller’s criticisms of German grain duties, cartel protection and Russian raw-material tariffs give the test practical force. Readers can discover why identical tariff rates may yield sharply different results—and why judging those results requires weighing consumer burdens against productive gains, rather than treating producers’ interests as a unified national interest.

A common wage can conceal sharply unequal capacities to pay it. In this 1911 article, Richard Schüller makes that disparity central to understanding what happens when wages rise. A profitable brewery and a struggling textile factory may recruit at the same rate, yet face very different limits. Schüller argues that identifying the weakest employer is not enough: employment effects depend on how many workers are employed at each level of firms’ capacity to pay. His account explains why modest wage increases may displace relatively few workers, while larger increases encounter broader bands of vulnerable employment. It also challenges the inference that a market wage is therefore a just wage. Readers encounter a concrete alternative to treating labour demand as uniform, without being asked to assume that higher wages carry no employment risks.

A higher wage bill need not lead an employer to dismiss workers; it may instead make closure the decisive alternative. In this 1911 article, Richard Schüller examines why labor demand cannot generally be inferred from the value of a single additional worker. His focus is the enterprise as a working arrangement: cooperating employees, specialized machinery, overhead costs, and limited opportunities to redeploy capital. From this perspective, losing one worker can impair the profitability of the whole establishment, while cheaper labor need not justify expansion. Schüller’s critique of marginal-value explanations gives readers concrete grounds for distinguishing the value of an individual service from an employer’s willingness to retain a workforce—and for understanding why wage changes can produce thresholds rather than gradual adjustments in employment.

When does a protective tariff enlarge production, and when does it merely enlarge producers’ receipts? Richard Schüller makes this distinction the test of Austria-Hungary’s commercial regime after 1906. In this article, preserved as an offprint, he credits industrial gains while questioning agricultural duties that raised food costs, made livestock feed dearer, and secured little-used export opportunities at industry’s expense. His perspective is neither a blanket defence of protection nor a rejection of it: tariffs must justify their burdens through productive expansion. Equally careful with trade deficits, he distinguishes raw-material imports supporting industrial growth from a shrinking manufacturing surplus. Readers can discover how tariff bargaining, consumer prices, and foreign-credit dependence enter an assessment that refuses to equate protected interests’ gains with public benefit.

Behind the wartime slogan of 'Mitteleuropa' lay a technical problem of customs schedules, and it is that problem Gratz and Schüller reconstruct: the secret German–Austro-Hungarian negotiations, from 1915 to their burial in the collapse of October 1918, to fuse the two empires into a single closed economic area. Part of the Carnegie Endowment's economic history of the war, the study tracks the bargaining over preferential tariffs, the last Austro-Hungarian Ausgleich, and the Salzburg framework of gradually reduced Zwischenzölle, then widens into the peace settlements at Brest-Litovsk and Bucharest—Ukrainian grain, Romanian oil, the Danube question, the Polish tangle. Throughout, grand design is forced through protectionist compromise: economic union imagined as a bloc to rival the world's larger markets, yet checked at every turn by incompatible agrarian and industrial interests.

Meine Monarchie braucht unbedingt an ihren Grenzen ein freundlich gesinntes Rumänien.

English translation: “My Monarchy absolutely needs a friendly-minded Romania on its borders.”

Because the study of foreign trade sets every part of economic theory in motion, Schüller refuses to reason from abstract 'branches of production' and turns instead to real firms making the same good at different costs, so that imports strike down the high-cost producer while the low-cost one survives. On that footing he rebuilds the free-trade case, reading the comparative-cost doctrine of Ricardo and Mill as tacitly resting on a subjective theory of price, and gauging tariffs by the spread of domestic costs and the degree of foreign superiority. The later chapters turn to postwar currency disorder and the revival of mercantilist reflexes, to cartel dumping and the Brussels Sugar Convention, to the transfer problem of reparations and interstate debt, and to the hard prospects of customs unions among sovereign states.

Von entscheidender Bedeutung ist, daß die Erreichung entsprechender Erleichterungen für die Ausfuhr vorteilhafter ist als die Behinderung der Einfuhr.

English translation: “It is of decisive importance that achieving corresponding facilitations for exports is more advantageous than obstructing imports.”

Empires fall to armies and diplomacy; this study insists that Austria-Hungary fell to exhaustion—'die Tragödie der Erschöpfung,' the cumulative wasting of food, transport, raw materials, manpower, and finance under a long war and blockade. Also written for the Carnegie Endowment's war history, it treats the Habsburg lands as a single economic organism, self-sufficient in bread as a whole yet fatally uneven between its halves, and follows collapse group by group: grain deficits and famine in Vienna, the depletion of copper and iron, the near-elimination of civilian industry, war finance through the Austro-Hungarian Bank, and the inflation that hollowed out the middle class. The apparent vitality of the war economy, the authors argue, only masked the steady consumption of the country's reserves. The wrenching Stürgkh–Tisza correspondence over wartime food closes the volume as its documentary core.

Es war keine echte, sondern eine fiktive Blüte, dem Fieberzustand zu vergleichen, der auf einem der Auszehrung verfallenen Körper die Wangen rötet.

English translation: “It was no genuine but a fictitious flowering, comparable to the feverish state that flushes the cheeks of a body wasting away in consumption.”

A stable currency did not restore Austria’s access to markets lost with the dissolution of the Habsburg economic territory. That gap between financial recovery and commercial viability anchors Richard Schüller’s account of interwar trade policy. Writing as a participant in Austria’s negotiations, he examines bilateral clearing with unusual candour: he helped devise a mechanism that enabled imports without foreign exchange, then witnessed its imbalances, evasions, and administrative burdens. His wider question is why rules intended to secure equal trading opportunities could fail to prevent discrimination yet obstruct practical reductions in trade barriers. This 1943 article lets readers examine commercial institutions through the choices and disappointments of a negotiator, while distinguishing the political leverage of controlled trade from its economic effectiveness.

Greater need does not necessarily give a worker greater power to demand higher pay: family responsibilities may instead make leaving a poorly paid job harder. This tension anchors Richard Schüller’s account of workers’ demands as conditions for accepting employment, rather than wishes or a fixed subsistence minimum. He examines how savings, information, mobility and union support turn preferences into effective bargaining power. His distinctive claim is that the poorest workers do not automatically set wage levels: employers must also meet the demands of workers whose services they cannot replace. Readers can discover why partial unionization may matter, why dangerous work need not command a premium, and why labour supply depends on the terms offered. Schüller’s racial and national stereotypes also expose limits in his comparative analysis.