2,793 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Can an employer demand lasting loyalty while offering only the protections of an ordinary wage contract? This tension gives Rudolf Sieghart’s 1898 review of Emil Steinbach’s Rechtsgeschäfte der wirthschaftlichen Organisation its critical focus. Steinbach distinguishes competitive exchange from relationships of economic organization, in which fidelity entails reciprocal protection. Sieghart welcomes the distinction as a test of legislation on employment duties, business secrecy, and related restrictions, but questions the conditions under which solidarity can flourish. His reservation is material rather than merely doctrinal: people exposed to economic insecurity cannot reasonably be asked to renounce self-interest on the same terms as those assured a livelihood. The review shows how a sympathetic critic turns a theory of contracts into a precise challenge to one-sided obligations—and separates its legislative usefulness from confidence in its wider social realization.
Five numbers drawn from ninety, with payouts pitched far below fair odds and a risk limit that let the operator refuse any wager grown too large: such was the Austrian Zahlenlotto, whose history Sieghart reconstructs from the finance archives that Minister Kaizl opened to him. From its introduction under Maria Theresa in 1751, justified partly to keep Austrian money from foreign lotteries and to dower poor girls, through four lease periods, the state takeover under Joseph II, and the abolition debates that stretched across the nineteenth century, he traces both the institution and its steadily mounting revenues. The statistical chapters, running to 1895, show Lower Austria and Vienna bearing the heaviest per-capita burden and argue that it was want, not savings, that drove the poor into the lottery's arms.
Sehr treffend sagte ein Lotteriesekretär in einem Berichte aus dem Jahre 1769, dass beim Lotto „aller Vorteil immer auf Seite des Unternehmers und alle Gefahr auf Seite des Spielers ruhe“.
English translation: “Very aptly a lottery secretary said in a report from the year 1769 that in the lotto "all advantage rests always on the side of the operator and all risk on the side of the player.”
Between the impulse to gamble and the discipline to save, Sieghart finds the Austrian population fatefully unbalanced, and his widest treatment of public games of chance turns that diagnosis into a program of reform. He classifies lottery contracts by organizer, prize, and access, then follows them from Italian and canonist origins through French, Dutch, English, and German forms to the Habsburg lands, where public gambling appears as a byproduct of mercantilism, a device to keep money at home and to bankroll ventures like the Oriental Company. Class lotteries, goods raffles, the numbers lotto, estate and premium lotteries, and the promesse trade each come under scrutiny, and each is judged corrosive of thrift. His remedy is a state-run interest lottery attached to the Postsparcasse, meant to bend the Spieltrieb toward a Spartrieb.
Der Unternehmer der Spiele in Rom wollte eine Volksbelustigung, der der modernen Glückspiele will eine Volksbesteuerung, einen Ertrag.
English translation: “The organizer of the games in Rome sought a public amusement; the organizer of modern games of chance seeks a public taxation, a revenue.”
Because restoring a customs wall between Austria and Hungary would revive decades of tariff conflict, Sieghart marshals the finance archives to defend the common market on the eve of the 1917 negotiations. His source-based history follows the Zwischenzoll-Linie, the intermediate customs line dividing Hungary from the hereditary lands, from enlightened absolutism through Joseph II's failed abolition to its removal in 1850 and constitutional confirmation in the 1867 Ausgleich. He shows the line perpetually entangled with unequal taxation, noble tax privilege, and the salt and tobacco monopolies, and charts how Hungarian opinion swung from Smithian free trade to Listian protectionism after the German Zollverein. Refuting Kossuth's prophecies of ruin with trade statistics, he concludes that the common market, not a tariff barrier, raised up both halves of the monarchy.
Der Zwischenzoll ist keine kommerzielle Maßregel, als welche sie niemand in Schutz nehmen würde, sondern nur ein schwaches Surrogat einer regelmäßigen Besteuerung, ein Ausweg, wodurch die Regierung die Schranken umgeht, welche ihr durch die fehlerhafte Verfassung gesetzt sind.
English translation: “The intermediate customs duty is not a commercial measure—as such no one would defend it—but only a weak surrogate for regular taxation, a shift by which the government circumvents the barriers set for it by the defective constitution.”
The death of an eighty-six-year-old sovereign in the third winter of war supplies the occasion, but the argument reaches past mourning: Franz Josef's authority, Sieghart contends, rested less on any particular deed than on a personality wholly fused with monarchy, duty, and the state. Printed as a separate offprint from the Neue Freie Presse, this eulogy defines the true monarch as one who stands above nations, classes, and parties, citing Andrássy, Kossuth, and the social democrats as proof of his impartiality. It reads the emperor's embrace of universal suffrage not as demagoguery but as an extension of equal civic obligation, dismisses talk of a court camarilla as nonsense, and treats popular reverence as capital bequeathed to the Crown.
Die Liebe des Volkes ist das Erbgut der Krone.
English translation: “The love of the people is the inheritance of the Crown.”
Half memoir and half post-mortem, this three-part volume moves from Sieghart's own rise through the Ministerratspräsidium under Koerber, Gautsch, and Beck to a structural anatomy of the empire that employed him. Writing in 1932, after Saint-Germain had already dismembered the monarchy, he insists that its unresolved national problems survived in the successor states, and that the Danube basin's true foundation was an economic community of small peoples that dualism had corroded. He portrays universal suffrage as a state-preserving clamp, defends the reformers against the militarism of Conrad von Hötzendorf, and rejects the determinist verdict—associated here with Ludwig Mises—that internal decay doomed the realm: only a world war of unprecedented scale, he argues, could destroy it.
Von allen Einrichtungen der Monarchie war der Dualismus, wie er sich herausgebildet hatte, die unseligste!
English translation: “Of all the institutions of the Monarchy, Dualism, as it had developed, was the most calamitous!”
A tax system can be severe on paper yet lenient toward those whose income is hardest to see. Rudolf Sieghart’s account of Austria’s direct-tax reform begins with this disparity: company profits and official salaries bore burdens that concealed investment income often escaped. His qualified defence of the new system turns on a concrete distinction—between taxing separate sources of revenue and assessing a household’s overall capacity to pay. Family allowances, taxpayer participation in assessment, and penalties for false declarations make that distinction practical rather than merely theoretical. Yet Sieghart also identifies concessions that compromise equity, including exemptions for investments and abatements favouring great landowners. The article offers a precise account of how progressive taxation depends on disclosure, enforcement, and the division of revenue between imperial and local government.