The archive.

Paris was said to offer little to the social sciences; Feilbogen replies by mapping a landscape crowded with rival schools. He tracks liberal individualism across three generations—Passy, Molinari, Levasseur, and then the systematic Leroy-Beaulieu—and the socialism that Guesde and Lafargue imported from German Marxism before it fractured into reformism and revolutionary syndicalism. Georges Sorel draws the sharpest scrutiny as the theorist of violence and the general strike, whose cult of myth the author judges barbarizing and historically naive. Between the extremes stand the mediating currents—academic economics, the Le Play school, Catholic social thought, Durkheim's sociology, and above all Léon Bourgeois's solidarism, which grounds each individual's debt to society in a quasi-contract while preserving liberty and property.

Ein Mythos ist ein Volksmotiv. Er braucht nicht klar, er braucht nicht wahr zu sein, wenn er nur begeistert.

English translation: “A myth is a popular motive force. It need not be clear, it need not be true, so long as it inspires.”

Can a theory of subjective value defend the entrepreneur’s income without ruling out social reform? In this second article on the Austrian school, Siegmund Feilbogen follows Karl Menger’s analysis from scarce goods to the valuation of productive services, showing why consumers’ needs, rather than production costs alone, govern economic value. His exposition is sympathetic but not uncritical: he detects a risk of circularity in calculating each productive factor’s return by subtracting the returns of the others. The political applications are distinctly Feilbogen’s. He argues that employment benefits both parties, yet allows compulsory worker insurance to transfer part of the employer’s gain to labor. Readers can thus distinguish Menger’s analytical method from the contested social conclusions that an engaged interpreter draws from it.

Abstract value theory can seem remote from strikes, wages, and economic change; Feilbogen argues that faulty theory can distort their interpretation. Writing for French readers in this first installment on the Austrian school, he defends subjective valuation without treating it as a substitute for historical and statistical inquiry. His account places theoretical innovation within concrete conflicts: German historicism’s suspicion of deduction, the challenge of Marx’s value theory, and Austrian resistance to German scholarly dominance. The result is a qualified defense, attentive both to Menger’s achievement and to the school’s unfinished explanatory work. An embedded letter from Menger adds personal evidence about his reading and intellectual formation. Readers can discover why Feilbogen thought Austrian abstraction necessary—and why he refused to regard it as sufficient.

An accounting unit without a circulating coin poses a pointed challenge to a theory that defines money chiefly through exchange. In this third article on the Austrian school, Siegmund Feilbogen uses the Hamburg mark banko to question whether Menger’s explanation of money’s origins adequately establishes its essential function. His broader assessment is similarly sympathetic without being deferential: Menger secures an independent place for economic theory, but individual motives and exchange relations do not, Feilbogen argues, exhaust its subject. The article offers a concrete encounter with the uses and limits of abstraction—why simplified assumptions can explain economic relations without describing actual conduct, and why collective institutions and human well-being still demand attention beyond those assumptions.

Why should capital yield interest if its productive power is already reflected in its price? In this 1912 article, Siegmund Feilbogen approaches Böhm-Bawerk through that difficulty, tracing how the preference for present over future goods connects valuation with the time required for production. His portrait is sympathetic but not uncritical: he reads Böhm-Bawerk’s explanation as recovering elements of the productivity, use, and abstinence theories it appears to displace. A machine built over five years makes the stakes concrete: entitlement to a future product is not necessarily entitlement to its completed value today. Readers can discover both the logic of Böhm-Bawerk’s attack on exploitation theory and Feilbogen’s insistence that refuting a particular socialist theory does not dispose of socialism itself.

What does a school of economics inherit from its founder: settled principles or unfinished problems? In this 1912 article, Siegmund Feilbogen presents Menger’s successors, chiefly Böhm-Bawerk and Wieser, as independent thinkers confronting gaps in a shared framework. If productive resources derive their value from consumer goods, how is that value divided among the resources that jointly produce them? And how can interest be explained before it is defended or condemned? Feilbogen’s emphasis on these difficulties makes intellectual succession a matter of analytical work rather than allegiance. His account also catches a prospective shift in Wieser’s thinking: from treating individual wants as given to investigating how customs and collective traditions shape them. Readers encounter Austrian economics here as a research programme whose common premises leave substantial questions open.

A duchess buys diamonds while an attendant cannot afford medical care for her child: what, then, does a market price measure? In this installment of his study of Wieser, Siegmund Feilbogen presents subjective value theory without treating market outcomes as verdicts on social need. Prices register the valuations of those able to trade, not the interests of everyone affected. His exposition connects this economic argument with Wieser’s account of political authority, in which effective leadership depends on popular adherence rather than command alone. The distinctive tension lies between explaining existing institutions and judging their results. Readers can discover why, in Feilbogen’s account, criticism of unequal purchasing power remains compatible with marginal utility theory—and why public or socialist provision would still require careful economic calculation.

Common ownership would abolish private property, but would it abolish rent, interest, or the need to value scarce resources? In this 1912 continuation of his study of Wieser, Siegmund Feilbogen explores a tension within natural value: it preserves economic calculation while providing grounds for criticizing prices shaped by unequal wealth. His exposition is also an intervention. Distinguishing a productive factor’s value in its absence from its contribution through its presence, he clarifies the difficulty of dividing a joint product among complementary inputs. Education, subsidized transport, and alcohol production then expose the gap between commercial returns and social benefit. The article offers a concrete encounter with Austrian value theory as neither a simple defence of existing prices nor a promise that collective ownership would dissolve allocation problems.

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.