The archive.

When a coordinated strike closes ten workplaces, should statistics record one conflict or ten? In this 1897 article, Victor Mataja shows how counting rules can obscure the collective action they purport to measure. Comparing official strike statistics from five countries, he writes as the head of Austria’s ministerial statistical department, openly acknowledging his stake in the procedures he assesses. His scrutiny extends from the distinction between strikers and workers forced into idleness to the deceptive precision of monetary loss estimates: wages forgone are not necessarily actual losses, and damage to one firm need not mean damage to industry as a whole. The article offers a concrete way to examine how administrative categories shape accounts of industrial conflict—and where apparently exact figures outrun their evidence.

A lecture outline should not be judged as a self-contained treatise: this distinction governs Carl Menger’s 1898 review of Adolf Wagner’s outline of public finance. Menger combines admiration for Wagner’s scholarship with a concrete criticism of its scattered publication and difficult arrangement. He values the outline for making that research navigable, while also filling gaps in its treatment of taxation. The interest of this short review lies in Menger’s standards of judgement: teaching purpose, systematic clarity, and reliable references matter here more than agreement over fiscal doctrine. His attention to Wagner’s treatment of Austrian financial law and history further shows how he assesses usefulness for a particular readership rather than completeness in the abstract.

Economic crises, Böhm-Bawerk argues in this 1898 review, cannot be explained as isolated disturbances: every crisis theory depends on an account of how the economy’s processes interact. His appraisal of Eugen von Bergmann’s history of crisis theories thus offers a compact statement of his own standards of explanation. He praises Bergmann’s ordering of rival doctrines while asking what makes an explanation more than conjecture—comparing theories unsupported by economic understanding to accounts of disease without anatomy or physiology. Readers encounter a revealing distinction between admiration for historical scholarship and endorsement of theoretical conclusions: Bergmann has reserved his own crisis theory for another work, and Böhm-Bawerk’s favorable expectations remain explicitly provisional.

How can an economics textbook encompass rival schools without sacrificing independent judgement? In this brief 1898 review of the second edition of Eugen von Philippovich’s Allgemeine Volkswirthschaftslehre, Carl Menger praises precisely that balance: concise synthesis joined to critical assessment. His approval also turns on practical choices—what to include, and which subjects deserve fuller treatment. He singles out the revision of the money and credit chapters entrusted to I. Landesberger as enhancing the book’s teaching value. Rather than a doctrinal critique, the review offers a compact statement of what Menger valued in economic exposition: breadth, discrimination, and usefulness to students.

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.

A sewing machine bought on instalments could provide a livelihood; the same contract could leave its buyer facing repossession and the loss of payments already made. In this revised 1923 encyclopedia article, Viktor Mataja separates the usefulness of periodic payment from the abuses of its commercial organization. He examines how ownership clauses, accelerated debts and inconvenient courts turn unequal bargaining power into enforceable obligations, without assuming that high credit prices alone prove exploitation. His comparison of German, Austrian and Swiss protections is marked by caution: legislation does not establish its own effectiveness. The article offers a concrete way to think about consumer credit by asking not merely which contracts should be prohibited, but whether municipal, cooperative or nonprofit arrangements could meet buyers’ needs on better terms.

Origin is not concept: house or putting-out industry may grow from domestic work, wage labour, rural or urban craft, or even factory production, yet none of these births determines its essence. Across four forms, the dependent Kleinmeister who keeps his license but loses control of materials and market, the Zwischenmeister or sweater who profits from the wage difference, the isolated Heimarbeiter, and the Sitzgesellengruppe, Schwiedland tracks a single constant: production commanded by a Verleger rather than served for a customer. Against German and Austrian law, which sorted dependent home workers from supposedly independent Hausgewerbetreibende, he insists both are subordinate once the intermediary controls the outlet. Dependence, not poverty and not place, marks the boundary; independence survives as legal form after commercial capital has seized the market.

Da gibt es keine Krankenkasse und gar nichts.

English translation: “There is no sickness fund and nothing whatever.”

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.”

What does Menger value in another economist’s teaching? This brief 1898 review of the first two parts of Johannes Conrad’s Grundriss offers a concrete answer: impartial consideration of economic problems, attention to current practical questions, and the use of recent statistics. Menger finds more than a useful lecture outline here; he sees Conrad’s method and scholarly temperament at work, especially in agricultural policy, where he singles out Conrad’s research. The interest lies less in any theoretical dispute than in Menger’s criteria of praise—a compact glimpse of what he commends in economics addressed to students, fellow teachers, and readers beyond the university.

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.

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.

Surveying the theoretical economics of his decade, Böhm-Bawerk turns a set of book reviews, of Marshall, Dietzel, Stolzmann, Taussig, Wicksell, and others, into an Austrian program in disguise. Marshall's Principles earns admiration as the age's fullest synthesis, yet its blending of cost and utility, abstinence and roundabout production, remains too conciliatory to explain why interest arises at all. Dietzel draws the most sustained fire: once he defines costs through the utilities sacrificed by employing productive means elsewhere, no essential difference survives between his cost theory and marginal-value theory. Stolzmann's appeal to class power and coercion in distribution is taken seriously but judged an overcorrection, since social force cannot displace economic causation wholesale. Throughout, the essay refuses to let any single element, whether labor, cost, power, or productivity, become an all-sufficient cause, and defends the future of value theory against Gottl's skepticism.

Ich glaube nicht, dass Stolzmann für seine positive Theorie von den Arbeiter- und Capitalisten-Nahrungseinheiten viele Proselyten machen wird.

English translation: “I do not think that Stolzmann will make many proselytes for his positive theory of the workers' and capitalists' subsistence units.”