The archive.

A grain price is not a stable historical fact when the measure, currency, and rules of quotation change beneath it. In this study of Vienna’s eighteenth-century grain prices, Karl Theodor von Inama-Sternegg publishes recovered municipal market records while making their difficulties of comparison explicit. A larger grain measure introduced in 1752 and uncertain shifts in circulating coinage require reconstruction before prices can be compared across decades. His converted wheat series suggests alternating periods of scarcity and abundance rather than continuous inflation, with harvest conditions carrying particular explanatory weight. Readers can examine both that interpretation and its evidentiary basis: the accompanying tables retain historical units, while Inama distinguishes recorded quotations from his own calculated averages. The result offers a concrete encounter with how archival prices become economic evidence.

Compressing economics into a school textbook is not the same as making it intelligible. In this short 1887 review of W. Neurath’s Elemente der Volkswirthschaftslehre, Carl Menger distinguishes the abundance of compact manuals from the scarcity of original, scientifically sound introductions. His praise turns on a precise standard: Neurath teaches economics itself and makes its doctrines connected parts of a coherent whole, rather than assembling an eclectic compilation. Without assessing particular theories, the review offers a concise glimpse of Menger’s expectations for economic instruction: accessibility should preserve independent thought and the internal connections that give the subject its explanatory shape.

Political economy, Sax charges, had built its entire apparatus on private exchange while leaving the economic life of the state unexplained. Setting out to found an exact theoretical science of state economy, he derives its categories—need, good, labor, value, capital, cost—from the same marginal-utility analysis that Menger and Wieser applied to individual valuation, extended now to Gemeinbedürfnisse, the collective needs experienced by real members of a community. Taxes become collectivist value phenomena governed by the same law as the isolated economy, yielding an economic case for progressive rather than proportional rates. Along the way he dismantles the exchange, consumption, and productivity theories of taxation, and the state-as-capital constructions of Dietzel, Wagner, and Stein, insisting that public enterprises, institutions, and fees rest on distinct revenue principles.

Eine vollständige Theorie der ökonomischen Erscheinungen muss daher auch die gemeinwirthschaftlichen Phänomene in systematischer Gleichbehandlung mit den privatwirthschaftlichen umfassen.

English translation: “A complete theory of economic phenomena must therefore also comprise the phenomena of the collective (public) economy in systematic parity of treatment with those of the private economy.”

What becomes of good research produced in university seminars if it never reaches print? In this short 1887 review, Carl Menger welcomes Ludwig Elster’s Staatswissenschaftliche Studien as an answer to that practical problem. He values the series not only for rescuing seminar scholarship from oblivion but also for its educational purpose, which he affirms without elaborating. His interest falls on the conditions that sustain research rather than on the economic arguments of the first three installments. Readers encounter Menger endorsing a broad publishing programme: economics and statistics alongside agricultural and industrial technology and jurisprudence, provided their subjects are treated in relation to the sciences of the state.

Defending economic theory need not mean asking it to explain everything. In this 1887 review of Eugen von Philippovich’s published inaugural address, Carl Menger welcomes a defence of abstraction that also sets limits to theoretical ambition. He credits the historical school’s resistance to misguided speculation, yet objects when historical inquiry threatens to displace the search for general economic laws. His appreciation of Philippovich turns on a concrete distinction: describing particular economies, explaining general relations, and guiding economic action are different tasks. Menger also adds a qualification of his own: economists who develop their discipline’s methods must learn from existing epistemology. This brief review shows how his defence of theory accommodates historical research without making either approach answer every economic question.

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.

What looks at first like a dutiful review of Gustav Schönberg's collaborative Handbuch der politischen Oekonomie is really a compact manifesto on method. Menger praises the volume's historical breadth and administrative competence, then turns it into evidence of German economics' unresolved disorder: its authors treat only the empirical laws of economic life and neglect the laws of rational economizing, its Wirtschaftlichkeit. A discipline that fuses history, statistics, pure theory, and policy into one 'universal science of the national economy' commits, he argues, not merely a blunder but an impossibility, since these tasks answer different kinds of question. Real prices and incomes are mixtures of calculation, error, coercion, and habit; exact theory isolates the inner logic against which such deviations become intelligible. Naming Böhm-Bawerk, Walras, Wieser, Marshall, and Jevons as fellow reformers of pure theory, Menger sets the terms for economics' future.

Die Wahrheit liegt offenbar in der Mitte, in der Anerkennung der Eigenart und Bedeutung beider Richtungen theoretischer Forschung.

English translation: “The truth evidently lies in the middle, in the recognition of the distinctive character and importance of both directions of theoretical research.”

Can public finance become an explanatory science rather than a collection of rules for administrators? In this 1887 review of Emil Sax’s Grundlegung der theoretischen Staatswirthschaft, Carl Menger weighs the promise of that project against the dangers of premature system-building. He highlights Sax’s attempt to explain citizens’ ability to pay, rather than merely invoke it as a principle of taxation, while examining Sax’s claim that states and other compulsory associations require theoretical treatment distinct from private economic activity. Menger’s appreciation does not suspend his methodological demands: comprehensive theory needs detailed investigations to support it. The review offers a focused encounter with his standards of economic explanation, showing why an ambitious programme can deserve recognition without its synthesis or particular conclusions being accepted as settled.

Private reflections face a different test once an editor puts them into print. In this brief 1888 review of Armand de Diffret’s posthumous aphorisms, Böhm-Bawerk distinguishes an intelligent amateur’s personal insights from a contribution to economic knowledge. Even Diffret’s apt observations, he argues, offer the specialist nothing new. Yet his verdict is not a personal rebuke: he acknowledges Diffret’s refined character and stresses that the author himself left these occasional notes unpublished. The review offers a compact example of Böhm-Bawerk’s critical standards, showing how he separates sympathy for a writer from the scholarly claims implicit in publication.

Can subjective value theory explain taxation without displacing questions of justice? In this 1888 review of Emil Sax’s Grundlegung der theoretischen Staatswirtschaft, Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk welcomes the extension of marginal utility analysis to collective needs while resisting its claim to explanatory exclusiveness. His central example is taxation according to ability to pay: contributions to public purposes must be considered alongside the private wants taxpayers would otherwise satisfy. Yet an economic rationale does not make ethical and political motives irrelevant to tax legislation. Writing as a participant in the development of subjective value theory, Böhm-Bawerk distinguishes its productive application from Sax’s weaker analogy between taxes and differentiated service prices. The review offers a concrete encounter between value theory and fiscal judgement, showing both what economic analysis can explain and where its authority ends.

A critic of Marx can still share the premise he appears to reject. That is Böhm-Bawerk’s pointed objection in this 1888 review of Georg Adler’s study of Marx: Adler, too, explains returns to capital and land as appropriated unpaid labour. Böhm-Bawerk argues that only the sketchiness of Adler’s alternative protects it from revealing contradictions under detailed application. Yet he warmly credits Adler’s concise exposition with making Marx’s theories accessible. This brief review separates the merits of explaining a doctrine from those of refuting it, and exposes what Böhm-Bawerk sees as an uneven allocation of critical rigour—to Marx, to rival critics, and to Adler’s own claims.

Can an economics textbook teem with life yet leave its central questions unanswered? In this review of Gustav Cohn’s Grundlegung der Nationalökonomie, Böhm-Bawerk praises the connections Cohn draws between economic activity, politics, religion, and culture, while questioning whether such breadth produces adequate explanation. His objection is not to historical inquiry but to the use of historical complexity as a reason to abandon precise reasoning. A concrete analogy sharpens the point: uncertainty about a building’s eventual cost does not excuse careless arithmetic in estimating it. The review offers a compact account of what Böhm-Bawerk expects from economic theory—arguments pursued to their conclusions, open to empirical correction without confusing fallibility with permission to remain vague.