The archive.

Schumpeter’s originality gives Siegmund Feilbogen grounds to defend the Austrian School’s continuing vitality—but not to accept its younger theorist’s claims without resistance. In this 1913 French article, Feilbogen assesses Schumpeter’s books on theoretical economics and economic development, asking what equilibrium analysis leaves out and how credit-financed innovation transforms production. His objections are concrete: present interest payments carry the effects of past commitments, entrepreneurial combinations can yield profit, and economic change involves collective shifts as well as exceptional individuals. Feilbogen admires Schumpeter’s connection between development and crisis while resisting its elevation into an exclusive explanation. The article offers an early critical encounter with Schumpeter in which psychological valuation, time, and ordinary capital accumulation test the boundaries of his theoretical constructions.

If productive instruments derive their value from what they produce, why should the products be worth more than the instruments? This difficulty gives Feilbogen’s review of the third edition of Böhm-Bawerk’s Positive Theory of Capital its sharpest focus. A sympathetic interpreter of Austrian economics, Feilbogen explains subjective valuation while testing the precision needed to account for interest. His treatment of the dispute with Adolphe Landry makes the stakes concrete: comparing a house’s present price with undiscounted future rents can create a misleading surplus by silently changing valuation dates. For Feilbogen, Böhm-Bawerk’s distinction between present and future goods supplies the missing connection. The review shows how an apparently technical choice—when a value is assessed—can determine whether an explanation of interest succeeds.

Solidarity begins as a term of Roman law—liability in solidum, where co-debtors are bound one for all and all for one—and Feilbogen follows its migration through Say, Bastiat, Spencer, and Comte into the social philosophy of Léon Bourgeois. Written for Wilhelm Jerusalem's sixtieth-birthday Festschrift, this essay reconstructs Bourgeois's attempt to found moral obligation without religious sanction: the advantaged individual owes a social debt for the language, tools, and inherited civilization he receives, an obligation recast not as Rousseau's literal contract but as a quasi-contract among co-heirs. Feilbogen stages the French Academy's rebuttal—d'Eichthal, Leroy-Beaulieu, Tarde, Boutroux—that the debt is legally indeterminate and might license the plundering of the capable, then replies by bounding the claim to genuine helplessness and surplus capacity.

Der individualistische Sozialist und der sozialistische Individualist fühlen, daß nur noch eine Wand »dünn wie Papier« sie trennt.

English translation: “The individualist socialist and the socialist individualist feel that only a wall "thin as paper" still separates them.”

When does an illuminating historical analogy become an unwarranted prophecy? In this 1920 review essay, Siegmund Feilbogen tests Spengler’s diagnosis of Western decline without dismissing his gifts as an interpreter of cultural forms. The decisive problem is the model of a culture’s lifespan: why should it resemble a human life rather than a tree capable of flowering repeatedly? Feilbogen challenges the chronology and selective comparisons supporting Spengler’s prediction, while asking what such predictions encourage readers to do—or abandon. His concern is practical as well as scholarly: a doctrine of inevitable decline may channel ambition into imperial power and commerce while discouraging artistic creation. The essay offers a discriminating encounter with Spengler, separating the capacity to perceive historical patterns from the authority to pronounce a civilization’s fate.

Can a diagnosis of cultural decline be useful when its claim to inevitability is rejected? In this 1923 review essay on Spengler’s second volume, Siegmund Feilbogen separates historical warning from political fatalism. He challenges the elastic chronology behind Spengler’s cultural life cycles and exposes a tension in his admiration for aristocratic instinct and military action: if creative culture makes a people an agent of history, what of the thinkers, poets, scholars, and inventors who produce it? Writing in defence of democracy, Feilbogen nevertheless credits Spengler with making symptoms of decay visible. This compact critique shows how a reader can take those warnings seriously without accepting either inevitable collapse or the authoritarian remedies Feilbogen finds in Spengler’s politics.

A prosperous pension fund need not mean a secure old age for the employees it claims to serve. In this 1894 collection of articles, Siegmund Feilbogen tests voluntary insurance against the needs of commercial employees exposed to business failures and denied the pension security of state officials. His case for compulsory provision combines social reform with actuarial restraint: early contributions and employer participation must finance credible benefits, not promises of comfortable retirement at negligible cost. Comparing institutions in Austria, Germany, France and Britain, he asks who actually joins, who withdraws, and what happens when incapacity precedes pension age. The resulting distinction between institutional success and effective protection gives concrete substance to his central question: when does individual thrift require a compulsory framework to become dependable security?

What should future merchants learn that bookkeeping alone cannot teach? Siegmund Feilbogen makes the place of economics in Austrian commercial schools a question of judgment as well as occupational competence. Economics, he argues, connects individual transactions with collective life—but teaching it requires a different order from expounding it as a science. Familiar commodities, industries and institutions should prepare pupils for abstractions rather than merely illustrate definitions learned in advance. Drawing on Herbartian pedagogy, Feilbogen joins this practical method to an ethical ambition: merchants should understand other classes and recognize interests beyond private gain. His use of a student presentation on Austrian trade with China also exposes a tension within that ambition, as education for wider social understanding becomes preparation for national commercial expansion.

Could Switzerland honour its international railway commitments without binding its entire network to perpetual foreign privileges? In this 1911 article, Siegmund Feilbogen defends rejection of the proposed Saint-Gothard convention while resisting both financial retaliation and disruption of European transit. His distinction is precise: material concessions may be negotiable, but permanent limits on political independence are not. Reading the earlier treaties against demands for repayment of foreign subsidies, he argues that state acquisition need not extinguish existing guarantees—or enlarge them into rights over all Swiss railways. The article offers a concrete encounter with treaty interpretation under unequal diplomatic pressure, showing how an ambiguous provision about railway mergers could, in Feilbogen’s view, turn a limited infrastructure obligation into an indefinite constraint on national autonomy.

Industrial growth need not eclipse agriculture, nor commercial expansion displace concern for national independence: these are the balances Siegmund Feilbogen values in his short review of A. de Navay de Földeak’s study of Hungary’s economic role. He praises the author’s statistical precision and restraint, drawing on Levasseur’s preface to place industrial gains alongside the country’s continuing dependence on the land. His strongest endorsement, however, goes to the connection between material development and the preservation of national rights. Five French-backed industrial enterprises give concrete support to his approval of Földeak’s appeal to French merchants. The review shows how Feilbogen’s judgement of an economic survey joins measured assessment of development to sympathy for Hungarian autonomy and Franco-Hungarian trade.

A tax assessed on yesterday’s prosperity may fall due in a year of hardship. Such practical difficulties give substance to Siegmund Feilbogen’s portrait of Robert Meyer, the Austrian finance administrator and scholar commemorated in this July 1914 obituary, introduced by Yves Guyot. Feilbogen connects Meyer’s conceptual precision with his concern for fair treatment of taxpayers, while acknowledging his inability to overcome privileges enjoyed by great landowners. Particularly striking is Meyer’s argument, as presented here, that progressive taxation rests primarily on fiscal productivity rather than justice. The tribute offers a compact encounter with the uncertain boundaries of taxable income—and with Feilbogen’s understanding of conscientious public service, where sound definitions matter but political constraints remain.

Peasants who negotiate a lease by excluding the Civil Code’s provisions supply the telling example in Siegmund Feilbogen’s brief review of Eugen Ehrlich: enacted law and rules actually followed need not coincide. Writing for the Journal des économistes, Feilbogen foregrounds Ehrlich’s challenge to faith in legislative remedies and draws out its affinities with economic liberalism. Yet he does not reduce legal sociology to an argument against state intervention. His closing judgement locates Ehrlich’s scientific contribution in the relationship between social change and legal change. The review offers a compact encounter between a liberal economist’s concerns and a conception of law grounded in observed practice, showing both their common ground and the broader inquiry Feilbogen acknowledges beyond his own emphasis.