The archive.

Compulsory attendance can put students in lecture halls, but what makes them study law? In Unsere Rechtsstudien (1887), Sigmund Feilbogen treats student disengagement as a problem of educational design rather than discipline alone. Drawing on examination coaching and observations of French and English institutions, he asks how Austrian universities can cultivate independence in beginners newly released from school supervision. His striking proposal is to introduce criminal law early: its connections with public controversy and moral judgment could awaken an interest that later sustains historical study. Tutorials and regular written examinations would support, rather than supplant, academic freedom. The work offers a concrete account of the tension between professional preparation and intellectual breadth—and of why freedom to learn requires more than the removal of constraints.

An economist may anticipate later discoveries without transforming how economic life is understood. This distinction drives Siegmund Feilbogen’s 1889 comparison of James Steuart and Adam Smith. Against attempts to explain Smith’s achievement through borrowed doctrines or historical circumstances, Feilbogen sets a demanding test: Steuart shared many of the same formative influences and offered striking insights of his own. Why, then, did their economics diverge? Feilbogen locates the difference in Smith’s organizing concepts of labour, capital, and distribution, contrasting them with Steuart’s recurring reliance on an exceptionally capable statesman. His defence is not unqualified: Steuart’s methodological caution earns praise, while Smith’s glorification of self-interest draws criticism. The article offers a concrete way to distinguish intellectual priority from explanatory originality—and fidelity to a thinker from repetition of his conclusions.

An idea’s first appearance does not explain its power to reshape a discipline. In this 1890 essay, Sigmund Feilbogen asks why Adam Smith transformed political economy when David Hume had already advanced many similar propositions. His answer shifts attention from priority to proof, conceptual organization, and economic judgment. Hume, he argues, defended commerce chiefly for its contribution to state power and cultural refinement; Smith made productive efficiency a criterion for assessing it. Feilbogen respects Hume’s humane opposition to slavery and commercial hostility while questioning whether refinement can settle economic disputes. The comparison offers a concrete account of how argumentative order, evidence, and a focus on production can turn dispersed insights into a science—rather than merely a collection of anticipations.

Can a fairer distribution of wealth durably relieve poverty without a substantial increase in production? This tension anchors Siegmund Feilbogen’s 1891 review of the first half of N. G. Pierson’s second textbook volume. Feilbogen admires Pierson as an independent reader of Menger who combines theoretical judgement with experience as director of the Netherlands Bank. His approval centres on a discriminating position: unrestricted self-interest leaves needs unmet, yet neither redistribution nor the abolition of private capital ownership offers, in Pierson’s account, a sufficient lasting remedy. The review shows what Feilbogen values in economic criticism—openness to reform coupled with scrutiny of its productive effects—made concrete in Pierson’s resistance to protective tariffs and support for English-style tenant protections.

Marginal utility may explain how people economize, but can it also explain how legal institutions develop? In this brief review of Emilio Cossa’s Le forme naturali dell’Economia Sociale, Siegmund Feilbogen welcomes an account that connects population pressure with increasingly economical conduct, rather than assuming a uniform propensity to economize. His approval sharpens the reservation that follows: where political or religious forces intervene, marginal utility cannot retain the status of a first cause. William the Conqueror’s redistribution of English land supplies one concrete test. The review offers a compact encounter with a sympathetic critic of economic explanation, attentive both to its reach beyond prices and to the historical forces that limit its causal claims.

What makes methodological discussion useful in teaching economics? In this brief 1891 review, Siegmund Feilbogen assesses the first installment of the second edition of F. W. Neurath’s textbook through its promise of conceptual clarity. He singles out the precise definition of induction, the examination of inner intuition as a source of knowledge, and the exposure of a common fallacy in applying the law of large numbers. His praise remains provisional: one installment suggests a substantially new work but cannot establish the character of the whole. The review offers a compact view of Feilbogen’s pedagogical priorities—accessible explanation and methodological distinctions that can support lectures and stimulate further inquiry.

Can a statesman depart from private moral rules while remaining answerable to morality’s highest purpose? In this brief review of F. W. Neurath’s 1891 pamphlet, Siegmund Feilbogen isolates precisely that distinction. He reports Neurath’s proposed end—a realm of perfected spirituality and love—and places it within an idealistic worldview grounded in Kantianism and Darwinism. Feilbogen offers exposition rather than sustained criticism; the review’s interest lies in this compact account of a position that separates political judgment from individual moral prescriptions without abandoning an ethical goal.

How could two thinkers arrive at nearly identical ideas while only one founded a science? Feilbogen builds his whole inquiry on that contrast between Adam Smith and Turgot, Smith's most advanced predecessor, arguing that the practical individualism usually blamed on Smith was in fact stated more radically by the Frenchman—that so-called Smithianism is a moderated Turgotism. Against reducing the Wealth of Nations to laissez-faire, he insists its organizing principle is labor, not freedom or egoism, and that Smith's liberty is social and conditional rather than an absolute natural right. Drawing on Menger, Roscher, and Hasbach and applying Mill's method of difference to intellectual history, he locates Smith's true superiority in the transformation of the physiocratic revenu net into the net product of labor.

Die Arbeit rühmen heisst das Volk rühmen; die Arbeit belauschen heisst das Volksleben belauschen.

English translation: “To praise labor is to praise the people; to listen in on labor is to listen in on the life of the people.”

A decade after the Methodenstreit, Feilbogen registers a shift: abstract theory, so often declared dead by the historical school, is undergoing a renaissance in the value and price work of Gossen, Jevons, Menger, Walras, and Clark. This sketch situates the historical school itself historically, as a necessary phase whose anti-theoretical reflexes are now spent, and argues for the mutual control of induction and deduction rather than the victory of either. It weighs the growing use of mathematics while warning against false precision in measuring pleasure and value, defends marginal utility against Lexis, and faults Jevons for neglecting entrepreneurial profit—an omission, Feilbogen suggests, that left theoretical openings for socialist doctrines of surplus value and crisis.

Auf die Thatsache der Werthschätzung allein kann nur eine Statik, nie eine Dynamik der Volkswirthschaft gegründet werden.

English translation: “Upon the fact of valuation alone only a statics, never a dynamics, of the national economy can be founded.”

A wealth of historical examples is not yet a history of property rights. In this brief 1895 review of Parts II and III of Ludwig Felix’s Entwicklungsgeschichte des Eigenthums, Siegmund Feilbogen tests the relation between cultural breadth and legal precision. Felix’s accounts of custom and religion—from changing attitudes toward enslaved people to sacred protection of possessions—earn praise for their range and humane judgment. Yet Feilbogen asks how such material connects to ownership’s legal content, limits, and protections. His criticism cuts both ways: jurists, too, risk losing sight of the living purposes behind their concepts. The review offers a compact account of what cultural and legal approaches to property need from one another, while reserving final judgment for Felix’s projected volume on law and the state.

Proudhon’s declaration that property is theft was not his last word on private ownership. This complication anchors Siegmund Feilbogen’s 1895 review of the first two parts of Karl Diehl’s study: how can a thinker’s position be established when his writings repeatedly revise it? Feilbogen values Diehl’s careful excerpts and comparisons for making those changes legible, particularly Proudhon’s rational acceptance of property despite his continuing emotional resistance. He also highlights Diehl’s question of whether Proudhon belongs among the socialists, while explicitly attributing to Diehl the judgement that reconciling individual freedom with modern social demands is hopeless. The review offers a concise encounter with Proudhon beyond the familiar slogan—and distinguishes a dependable guide to his economic thought from an accessible introduction to his life.

Commerce, Siegmund Feilbogen argues, needs a route to higher learning that neither abandons occupational usefulness nor reserves academic standing for the traditional learned professions. His privately printed memorandum of 1898 proposes such a route for Vienna, extending beyond the Export Academy’s specialized mission. Its distinctive tension lies between institutional ambition and financial restraint: a comprehensive commercial university is the goal, but teacher guidance, bank-supported specialist instruction and evening lectures provide the starting points. Feilbogen treats access for students without classical secondary schooling and study compatible with employment as concrete organizational problems. The memorandum shows how a claim for commerce’s intellectual and social standing becomes a practical negotiation over examinations, employer recognition, shared facilities and limited funds.