3,015 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
The itinerant peddler had become a screen onto which liberals and anti-liberals, settled shopkeepers, manufacturers, poor migrants, and officials each projected rival fears, and the answer offered here is to dissolve the single figure into a set of economic functions. A Hausierer might be an impoverished independent, a producer selling his own goods, a commission agent for village craftsmen, a wage-dependent seller, or part of a regional migration system. Tracing Habsburg policy from Maximilian I through Maria Theresa and Joseph II, repeated prohibitions giving way to licensing and passport systems, Schwiedland argues that mobility belongs to the essence of commerce rather than to its abuse. He records the overcharging and shoddy goods, yet favours targeted restriction over abolition, and closes on how little is actually known.
Der Hausierer sucht sein Publikum auf, während der sesshafte Händler auf das Publikum wartet.
English translation: “The peddler seeks out his public, while the settled merchant waits for the public to come to him.”
Between the impulse to gamble and the discipline to save, Sieghart finds the Austrian population fatefully unbalanced, and his widest treatment of public games of chance turns that diagnosis into a program of reform. He classifies lottery contracts by organizer, prize, and access, then follows them from Italian and canonist origins through French, Dutch, English, and German forms to the Habsburg lands, where public gambling appears as a byproduct of mercantilism, a device to keep money at home and to bankroll ventures like the Oriental Company. Class lotteries, goods raffles, the numbers lotto, estate and premium lotteries, and the promesse trade each come under scrutiny, and each is judged corrosive of thrift. His remedy is a state-run interest lottery attached to the Postsparcasse, meant to bend the Spieltrieb toward a Spartrieb.
Der Unternehmer der Spiele in Rom wollte eine Volksbelustigung, der der modernen Glückspiele will eine Volksbesteuerung, einen Ertrag.
English translation: “The organizer of the games in Rome sought a public amusement; the organizer of modern games of chance seeks a public taxation, a revenue.”
One empirical premise carries Böhm-Bawerk's whole theory of interest: that longer, more roundabout methods of production usually yield larger physical products. To his surprise, critics such as Lexis, Philippovich, and Horace White had questioned the fact itself, so here he sharpens it. A Produktionsumweg is measured not by the absolute time back to the first tool or mine but by the average waiting interval between productive input and consumable output; more capital per worker simply means more labor already embodied in tools and stocks, and thus a longer such interval. Conceding that some inventions both raise output and shorten production, he argues these are sporadic and quickly exhausted, whereas lengthening opportunities remain practically inexhaustible because they demand scarce capital. The rule need not hold universally; it is enough that more profitable lengthening opportunities exist than existing capital can finance, sustaining the agio of present over future goods.
Verkürzung der Productionsperiode und Verkürzung der Arbeitszeit sind also zwei vollkommen voneinander verschiedene Beweisthemen.
English translation: “Shortening the period of production and shortening working time are thus two entirely different propositions to be demonstrated.”
Attention to historical circumstances can sharpen economic judgment—but can it also become an excuse for preserving privilege? Richard Schüller’s 1899 monograph tests the historical school’s policy commitments against concrete disputes over peasant emancipation, guild restrictions, taxation and worker protection. He argues that appeals to inherited rights and local exceptions often obstruct reform without supplying defensible criteria for choosing among competing interests. His defence of classical economics is not a defence of unrestricted laissez-faire: he distinguishes Smith and his German successors from later free-trade dogmatists, recovering their combination of general principles and practical qualifications. The resulting critique makes methodological disagreement tangible: readers can examine how apparently cautious or neutral reasoning determines whose obligations remain enforceable, whose freedom expands and whose protection is deferred.
No entrepreneur can measure the length of the social production period, which is precisely why Lexis thought Böhm-Bawerk's theory of interest rested on a magnitude no one could know. The reply is a small essay in market epistemology. The division of labor into legally separate firms does not dissolve the real unity of production; each stage remains a link in one temporally extended whole. He concedes that absolute production periods are unknowable and average ones only estimated, but denies his theory needs exact figures: it claims a directional tendency, that more roundabout methods are generally more productive. The immediate regulator of interest is the gain on the last permissible investment, yet under competition that marginal return reflects the rentability of the whole process, so partial calculations no participant could aggregate are coordinated through prices and the ruling rate of interest.
Das Stück bleibt Stück und kann nur lebensfähig sein als Theil eines lebensfähigen Ganzen.
English translation: “The part remains a part, and can only be viable as a portion of a viable whole.”
A larger customs territory could shelter small trading states from foreign tariffs—but who would set its rules? In this 1899 article, Siegmund Feilbogen weighs proposed Dutch, Belgian, and Swiss customs unions with Germany against the economic dependence and political concessions they would entail. His analysis separates gains in collective bargaining power from the interests of farmers, manufacturers, and ports that might obstruct agreement. Dutch access to German markets, for example, does not resolve Dutch fears for national independence; nor does greater commercial strength settle the question of representation in a common customs parliament. Judging immediate unions unlikely, Feilbogen nevertheless sees scope for more liberal treaties. The article offers a concrete examination of why economic advantage alone cannot secure integration between unequal states.
Because poverty and market power can themselves coerce, no simple contrast between state compulsion and natural freedom will do — and economic policy, in this reworked fourth edition, becomes the conscious intervention of organized communities in an economy always 'in constant flux.' The agrarian book judges farm size economically rather than ideologically, defending Anerbenrecht, Rentengüter, and inner colonization as adaptive instruments rather than fixed property models, while conceding that peasant emancipation stripped rural households of older securities. The industrial book follows the passage from guild regulation through Gewerbefreiheit to factory, cartel, and organized labor, insisting that formal contractual liberty no longer describes the real bond between employer and worker. Philippovich rejects both laissez-faire individualism and absolute statism: policy is justified precisely where it makes freedom institutionally real, welfare-oriented yet centered on productive capacity.
Der freie Arbeitsvertrag ist eine Fiktion.
English translation: “The free labor contract is a fiction.”
Domestic glove sewing around Dobrisch was not simply a surviving craft: workshops had been dismantled and machines moved into women’s homes to save business costs. In this study, first published in 1899, Robert Zuckerkandl asks what those savings actually achieved. Following work from Prague manufacturers through local intermediaries to crowded household rooms, he measures earnings against deductions, irregular orders, and the scarcity of other employment. Women’s sewing emerges not as pocket money but as many families’ principal cash income. His distinctive concern is both social and economic: he argues that competition dissipated employers’ initial savings while workers lost protections and production suffered delays. The study makes concrete the difference between a low piece rate and efficient production—and explains why Zuckerkandl favoured restoring workshops without removing local women’s livelihoods.
Working at home does not, for Ernst Seidler, identify a single economic condition. In this regional survey of Upper Styria, originally published in 1899, he distinguishes dependence on a commercial intermediary from an occupation’s subordinate place in household income. The distinction becomes concrete in tailors accepting low piece rates for assured orders, rural makers selling wooden implements directly to customers, and an Aussee association supplying embroiderers with materials and access to markets. Seidler’s classificatory perspective makes apparently similar livelihoods diverge: even widespread loden weaving need not count as home industry when weavers work in their customers’ houses. The survey offers a precise way to examine how workplace, ownership of materials, seasonal earnings, and control over sales combine—or fail to combine—in domestic production.
When does a statistical abstract suffice, and when must a researcher consult the detailed reports behind it? In this brief 1899 joint review of four British Labour Department publications, Hermann von Schullern zu Schrattenhofen makes that practical distinction central. He notes the Abstract’s expanded coverage of women’s textile work and children’s employment after leaving school, but reserves a particular caution for Miss Collet’s evidence on women and girls in flax and jute centres: historical data provide starting points for inquiry that must reckon with substantial local differences. His notice offers a concise contemporary assessment of what these overlapping publications could supply—general orientation in the Abstract, evidence for closer investigation in the specialized reports.
Cooperatives, cartels, and trade unions complicate the liberal picture of independent producers meeting only in the market. In this 1899 article, Eugen von Philippovich asks how organized economic interests can give individuals greater control over their livelihoods without sacrificing equal citizenship or occupational freedom. He rejects both centralized socialism and a restoration of hereditary estates as necessary destinations of association. His distinctive concern is institutional: speaking for an interest is not the same as administering shared affairs. Austrian agricultural councils, industrial chambers, and obstructed workers’ organizations expose the unequal opportunities behind apparently parallel forms of representation. Readers encounter a liberalism prepared to relinquish automatic market harmony while retaining individual initiative—and a concrete inquiry into who may represent economic interests, with what authority and responsibilities.
Factories appear in Oskar Engländer’s study of southeastern Bohemian household manufacture as both a threat to livelihoods and a possible escape from poverty. This contribution, first published in 1899, makes that tension concrete through weaving and shoemaking: machinery displaces some domestic tasks while factories continue to send others into workers’ homes. Engländer tests employers’ earnings estimates against wage books and household observation, exposing the unpaid family assistance, supply costs, and delivery time hidden within nominal wages. His distinctions matter: carpet weavers face different technical competition from linen weavers, while shoemakers’ formal employment status offers little protection against irregular orders. The study shows why working at home could preserve discretion over hours without securing either economic independence or an adequate living.