1,549 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Legislation cannot undo an injury, Mataja begins, but it can decide who bears the unavoidable loss—and that allocation, he argues, is at bottom an economic question. Turning the law of damages over to national economics, he attacks the Roman-derived dogma that accidental loss simply falls where it lands and that liability outside contract requires proven fault. Where an enterprise generates risks borne by others, non-liability produces a false valuation of goods, since the owner reaps the benefit while the harm is externalized; better, he contends, to ground liability in enterprise risk, control, and benefit. The book carries the case into employer liability, compulsory accident and old-age insurance, and the subjective value theory of Menger, Böhm-Bawerk, and Wieser, distinguishing damnum emergens from lucrum cessans.
Ökonomisch muß aber hier schon deshalb eine irgendwie geartete Verantwortlichkeit gefordert werden, weil andernfalls durch das Recht eine volkswirtschaftlich falsche Wertschätzung der Güter hervorgerufen wird.
English translation: “Economically, however, some form of responsibility must be demanded here, if only because otherwise the law would produce an economically false valuation of goods.”
For all the attention lavished on industry and its workers, trade and the merchant had gone strangely unstudied—an imbalance Mataja corrects by turning to the department store as the sharpest symptom of a commercial revolution. Expanded from an 1891 Dresden lecture, the study surveys the new giants—the Bon Marché, the Louvre, and Printemps in Paris, Wanamaker and A. T. Stewart in America—and reconstructs the Bon Marché's costs down to horse maintenance and catalog postage. He asks whether these establishments mark genuine progress over dispersed small shops, concluding that their strength lies in fixed public prices, rapid turnover, and transparency rather than in always being cheaper. Setting them within a broader drift toward large-scale concentration, he defends them against punitive-tax campaigns while weighing their cost to shopkeepers and clerks.
Wer den Absatz in der Hand hat, hat auch den Lebensnerv der Industrie in der Hand.
English translation: “Whoever holds sales in his hand also holds the lifeblood of industry in his hand.”
Educated people like to think themselves immune to advertising; the opening move here is to deny it, since publicity works beneath conscious scrutiny through repetition, imagery, and mere familiarity. Beginning from the premise that distribution completes what production only starts, this wide-ranging study treats advertising as a social power and anatomizes its media and economics—costs and prices, agencies and copywriters, the branded-goods system and retail substitution, mail-order houses, and the department store as a psychology of the female shopper. Mataja asks whether advertising is genuinely productive, refusing both blanket condemnation and the boosters' optimism, and closes on the state: unfair-competition law, the disfigurement of townscapes by posters, and the vexed question of an advertisement tax.
Die Reklame schafft einen Zustand, der einem Markte vergleichbar ist, auf dem die Waren zur Schau und Auswahl bereitgestellt werden, nur wirkt sie viel ausgedehnter, weil unabhängig von bestimmten Zeitpunkten und vom Erscheinen der Interessenten.
English translation: “Advertising creates a condition comparable to a market on which goods are set out for viewing and selection, only it operates far more extensively, since it is independent of particular points in time and of the appearance of interested parties.”
This brief foreword introduces another author's history of advertising, and Mataja uses it to make a case for the subject itself. Advertising, he observes, is rich in history but poor in historians—an institution in constant contact with the economy, public life, technology, and art, yet rarely traced across its own development. He commends the volume for following each advertising medium along its course from the simple and artless toward the composite and mass-produced, for drawing together sources that lie unusually scattered, and above all for its rich pictorial apparatus. The whole, he suggests, reveals how great a sum of thought, ingenuity, and craft has already been placed in advertising's service, and he offers the book as a spur to its technical, artistic, and ethical advancement.
Die Reklame ist reich an Geschichte, weniger reich an Geschichtsschreibern.
English translation: “Advertising is rich in history, but less rich in historians.”
A handwritten card, dated 23 January 1927, carries the thanks of Viktor Mataja — economist, former minister, and retired president of Austria's federal statistical office — to the journalist Ignaz Grünberg, who had reviewed favorably the idea of advertising treated as a science. The tribute is apt. Mataja had habilitated in political economy in 1884, taught at Vienna and Innsbruck, and earned his reputation as a pioneer of the subject with 'Die Reklame' (1910), which held that publicity was a proper object of scholarly and statistical study rather than mere commercial noise. Written from Italian soil, where Grünberg's essay reached him only belatedly, this small autograph binds a founder of advertising theory to the daily life of the Viennese press.
Seit geraumer Zeit von Wien abwesend u. auf italienischem Boden habe ich Ihren Aufsatz ‚Die Reklame als Wissenschaft‘ erst verspätet zu Gesicht bekommen.
English translation: “Having been away from Vienna for some time and on Italian soil, I only belatedly caught sight of your essay 'Advertising as a Science.'”