The archive.

To explain emigration as normal is not to celebrate it—or to prescribe it as a cure for overpopulation. In this 1891 reply to Richmond Mayo Smith, Eugen von Philippovich defends that distinction while asking what governments can do about movements they cannot readily stop. His European perspective joins economic disparities to the practical means by which distant opportunities become imaginable: cheaper passages, family correspondence, and American newspapers reaching Black Forest cottages. Migration responds to hardship at home and employment abroad, but information travels unevenly and expectations can mislead. The article’s distinctive turn is from economic explanation to public responsibility: accountable information offices and cooperation between states should help prospective emigrants judge their chances without private agents’ incentive to encourage departure.

Marginal utility may explain how people economize, but can it also explain how legal institutions develop? In this brief review of Emilio Cossa’s Le forme naturali dell’Economia Sociale, Siegmund Feilbogen welcomes an account that connects population pressure with increasingly economical conduct, rather than assuming a uniform propensity to economize. His approval sharpens the reservation that follows: where political or religious forces intervene, marginal utility cannot retain the status of a first cause. William the Conqueror’s redistribution of English land supplies one concrete test. The review offers a compact encounter with a sympathetic critic of economic explanation, attentive both to its reach beyond prices and to the historical forces that limit its causal claims.

What makes methodological discussion useful in teaching economics? In this brief 1891 review, Siegmund Feilbogen assesses the first installment of the second edition of F. W. Neurath’s textbook through its promise of conceptual clarity. He singles out the precise definition of induction, the examination of inner intuition as a source of knowledge, and the exposure of a common fallacy in applying the law of large numbers. His praise remains provisional: one installment suggests a substantially new work but cannot establish the character of the whole. The review offers a compact view of Feilbogen’s pedagogical priorities—accessible explanation and methodological distinctions that can support lectures and stimulate further inquiry.

Austrian economics does not copy nature but idealizes it as a geographer's map does, sharpening vision amid the complexities of reality — with this defense against the German historical school's suspicion of abstraction, Wieser opens a compact survey of the young school's doctrine for English readers. Across six movements he lays out its architecture: value drawn wholly from utility, yet only marginal utility; the imputation of joint products to their determining factors, as a magistrate imputes a legal charge; capital, interest, and land value resolved through discounting; and price governed by marginal equivalence, where need meets unequal purchasing power. That last turn is critical — prices register power as much as need, so production follows wants backed by money. He closes by carrying value theory into progressive taxation.

There is no new principle to be discovered, none save utility.

By 1890 no field of German public life — taxation, schooling, local government, the relation of Church to State — could be conceived apart from the social question. Opening with Caprivi's reform bills, this essay presents the Verein für Sozialpolitik as both symptom and instrument of Germany's passage from Manchester liberalism to organized reform. Philippovich sharply distinguishes social reform, which raises the lower strata while preserving individual freedom and private property, from the social revolution preached by Social Democracy. He traces the younger historical school of Schmoller, Brentano, and Wagner, its rejection of abstract natural law for an ethical political economy, and the 1872 Eisenach meeting that cast the State as a moral force above class selfishness. His closing insistence is that insurance schemes leave untouched the kernel of the labor question: the labor contract itself.

The State must be the regulator and moderator of the contending industrial classes, “the greatest moral institution for the education of human kind.”

Changing a currency means deciding what old promises are worth in new money. In this 1891 Prague lecture, Friedrich von Wieser supports Austria’s adoption of gold but locates the hardest problem in converting existing gulden obligations. Austria’s suspension of private silver coinage in 1879 had already separated the gulden’s monetary value from its metal content; conversion at bullion value would therefore devalue claims. Yet choosing an exchange rate raises a further conflict: protecting creditors at recent valuations may unsettle exporters whose businesses depend on longer-established rates. Wieser’s distinctive contribution is to separate contractual justice from economic continuity without dismissing either. His analysis shows why monetary reform requires more than selecting a metal: legislation must reconcile inherited obligations, international exchange, and the calculations on which production depends.

Weighing how to set Austria-Hungary's currency on a sound footing, Landesberger enters the monometallism-versus-bimetallism quarrel with a strategist's caution. Rather than commit doctrinally to pure gold, which he holds would force ruinous silver sales, deepen the long price depression running since the 1870s, and sharpen a global scramble for scarce gold, he urges a French-type limping standard, saturated with silver yet legally equal to gold, that keeps open the path to a future international bimetallic union. His distinction between gold agio and gold premium lets him defend the Bank of France's practice of shielding reserves through a premium rather than punitive discount hikes. A second essay recasts the 'Relation' as a legal problem: how to convert debts contracted in depreciated paper into gold justly, by averaged conversion periods instead of a single reform-date rate.

Agreement on marginal utility does not settle how income should be taxed. That tension gives concrete force to Böhm-Bawerk’s 1891 review of Dutch, Italian, and German writings on value: economists can share a theoretical foundation yet derive different fiscal rules, especially when changes in utility cannot be measured securely. Writing as a defender of subjective value theory, he judges rival accounts by their capacity to explain economic relationships rather than refine definitions. His criticism is particularly pointed where supply and demand appear as quantities stripped of the intensity of buyers’ and sellers’ valuations. The review lets readers examine both the practical reach and the unresolved difficulties of marginal utility theory, while distinguishing Böhm-Bawerk’s own commitments from the varied positions he assesses.

Erudition does not guarantee objectivity: this distinction shapes Hermann von Schullern zu Schrattenhofen’s brief 1892 review of Adolf Jäger’s Die sociale Frage. Jäger reads biblical prophecy through imperial history and examines European social and monetary conditions from a strictly Protestant standpoint. Schullern credits his learning, ingenuity and perseverance while objecting to anti-Catholic polemic and the sacrifice of scholarly objectivity to theological premises. The review offers a compact example of critical discrimination: Schullern neither dismisses the historical detail nor endorses the framework, and finds ideas worth circulating in a work whose design and spirit, he fears, will obstruct its reception.

A statistical yearbook can count a nation’s resources without adequately describing how its people live. In this 1892 review of the Annuario statistico italiano 1889–90, Hermann von Schullern zu Schrattenhofen judges Italian statistics by their capacity to connect economic measurement with material welfare. He praises Luigi Bodio’s leadership and the yearbook’s explanations of how figures were collected, but reserves judgment on factory-level wage averages even when comparisons with wheat prices illuminate purchasing power. His attention to temporary migration, pellagra mortality, and silk production as a source of rural cash income gives this short review its concrete interest: readers encounter an economist asking which categories and comparisons make social conditions intelligible—and where abundant data still leave questions unanswered.

When a coin changes in value between the signing of a contract and payment, what counts as settling the debt? In this brief 1892 review, Hermann von Schullern zu Schrattenhofen commends Conigliani’s historical treatment of that legal problem. He highlights the competing claims of coins’ legal, intrinsic and current values, and reports Conigliani’s conclusion that modern monetary conditions warrant recognition only of legal valuation at the moment of payment. Schullern’s emphasis falls on the historical circumstances behind these doctrines: the review offers a compact glimpse of how he valued the history of economic thought as a means of clarifying conflicting claims over monetary obligations.

Does credit reduce the need for money, or enable transactions whose expansion demands still more cash? This tension anchors Hermann von Schullern zu Schrattenhofen’s favourable 1892 review of Carlo Francesco Ferraris’s Principii di scienza bancaria. Schullern singles out Ferraris’s argument that credit supplements insufficient circulating money rather than simply replacing it. His praise rests on a specific critical standard: precise definitions should clarify economic effects, not merely tidy terminology. Readers can see how that standard shapes his assessment of monetary requirements, consumption credit and price formation. His closing attention to the comparatively neglected writings of Arthur Jehan de Johannis also gives the review a purpose beyond recommendation: bringing Italian research on banking and agricultural credit to a German-reading scholarly audience.