3,422 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
A rule requiring healthier workrooms can leave homeworkers poorer if they must pay for improvements themselves. This tension drives Else Cronbach’s 1912 examination of industrial homework legislation, centred on the Austrian government’s draft for clothing, footwear, and linen production. Comparing international experiments with Austrian proposals, she argues that protection depends on enforceable wages, not simply additional restrictions. Her distinctive concern is how legal categories fit actual livelihoods: rules suited to urban workshops may obstruct rural household production, while formally representative wage commissions may be designed to deadlock. The study shows how apparently technical choices—calculating piece rates, allocating votes, or allowing collective agreements to override statutory standards—determine whether legislation strengthens isolated workers or burdens them in the name of reform.
Reisch trains his 1912 offprint on a narrow but consequential dispute: whether the Austrian state, now a vast industrial entrepreneur through its railways, mines, post, and monopolies, may keep accounts no private firm would tolerate. The quarrel between cameralistic and commercial bookkeeping, he argues, is not one of formal preference but of economic adequacy — cameralistics merely compares budget estimate to outturn and calls any overshoot a success, while commercial accounting measures whether wealth has been preserved or consumed. Fixing on the state railways' refusal to depreciate rolling stock, he shows how omitted depreciation manufactures fictional surpluses, inflates the buyout burden at nationalization, and lets the state consume its own capital unawares. His remedy: genuine asset accounting and enterprise balance sheets, with parliamentary budget rights left intact.
Die Insuffizienz des Vermögens gibt gewiß nicht das Recht, auf eine Verrechnung des Vermögens überhaupt zu verzichten!
English translation: “The insufficiency of assets certainly does not confer the right to dispense with the accounting of assets altogether!”
Where the profit-seeking merchant and the ordinary banker once stood between small producers and the market, the cooperative interposes collective self-help. Schwiedland's second edition anatomizes the whole family of Wirtschaftsgenossenschaften: purchasing and consumer societies in the Rochdale tradition, agricultural sales and machinery associations, building cooperatives, mutual insurance funds, and the rival credit systems of Schulze-Delitzsch and Raiffeisen, analyzing their share capital, their three grades of member liability, and their tendency to displace the entrepreneur's profit. He is candid about limits: nineteenth-century hopes that productive cooperatives would abolish wage labor were largely disappointed, since such ventures still demand capital, discipline, and commercial skill. Throughout, cooperation appears as both economic instrument and moral education, a movement toward an order governed by shared interest rather than gain alone.
Die Produktivgenossenschaften sind daher keine Vorbilder für die Aufhebung der Lohnarbeit.
English translation: “Productive cooperatives are therefore not models for the abolition of wage labor.”
The Methodenstreit was supposedly settled by a truce granting that induction and deduction are both necessary — yet the settlement, Böhm-Bawerk observes, is honored officially while deductive theory is treated in practice as an unwelcome guest. Writing for a sociological review, he sets out to give the compromise experiential force. His illustrations run from Franz Exner's radium research, where invisible α- and β-particles are known only by inference, to the law of diminishing returns to land, which he shows can be established more securely by indirect empirical reasoning than by tangled farm statistics. Deduction, he insists, is not aprioristic speculation but controlled abstraction, warp to induction's weft. The closing warning is aimed at a young sociology: suppress theory and its unavoidable work falls to untrained dilettantes — to Fouriers and Bellamys rather than Ricardos.
Es gibt nämlich gewisse Wahrheiten, für die die allgemeine Meinung zweimal erobert werden muß; einmal offiziell, und ein zweites Mal tatsächlich.
English translation: “For there are certain truths for which general opinion must be won twice: once officially, and a second time in actual fact.”
What does a gold-export threshold mean when private traders cannot obtain gold to export? In this 1912 reply to Federn, Ludwig von Mises turns a dispute over terminology into a concrete question about central-bank operations. Austria-Hungary lacked an operative upper gold point, yet Mises used an “ideal” upper point to compare its exchange-rate policy with arrangements in countries maintaining gold redemption. His distinction separates what the law permits, what traders can actually do, and what the Bank must supply. He argues that an exchange-rate ceiling can be maintained only through unrestricted sales of foreign exchange at that price. This short rejoinder offers a focused view of Mises reasoning from feasible transactions rather than monetary labels.
A rejected gift, a threatened chief, a bride refusing a political marriage: the songs collected in Richard Thurnwald’s first volume make social obligations audible as grievances, boasts, and appeals. Recorded principally in Buin, southern Bougainville, these oral texts are presented with glosses, translations, and commentary. Thurnwald treats them not merely as descriptions of custom but as interventions in public opinion—ways to expose misconduct, defend dignity, or press a claim. Legends extend his inquiry to explanations of death and landscape. The collection’s central tension is between his demand for people’s own judgments and the evolutionary categories through which he interprets them. Reading the texts alongside his commentary reveals both the force of particular voices and the editorial decisions that shape their ethnographic meaning.
In Buin, on Bougainville, Thurnwald gathered the sociological materials of 1906 and 1909 that fill this third volume on people, state, and economy — presenting them as documentary reporting that leans on the islanders' own accounts to hold theory and observer bias at bay. Genealogical tables, 1,672 persons across thirty-seven of them, become instruments for reconstructing kinship, mortality, and a fertility decline he ties to venereal disease and colonial contact. Shell money, he shows, serves not commerce but bridewealth, alliance, and compensation, the bride-price matching what is paid for a slain life, while exogamy reads as peace-making between once-hostile groups. The chief, wealthy but no judge, rules as a primus inter pares, and every punishment is cast in the form of revenge.
Das Individuum ist oft wichtiger, als die Institution.
English translation: “The individual is often more important than the institution.”
Why should capital yield interest if its productive power is already reflected in its price? In this 1912 article, Siegmund Feilbogen approaches Böhm-Bawerk through that difficulty, tracing how the preference for present over future goods connects valuation with the time required for production. His portrait is sympathetic but not uncritical: he reads Böhm-Bawerk’s explanation as recovering elements of the productivity, use, and abstinence theories it appears to displace. A machine built over five years makes the stakes concrete: entitlement to a future product is not necessarily entitlement to its completed value today. Readers can discover both the logic of Böhm-Bawerk’s attack on exploitation theory and Feilbogen’s insistence that refuting a particular socialist theory does not dispose of socialism itself.
What does a school of economics inherit from its founder: settled principles or unfinished problems? In this 1912 article, Siegmund Feilbogen presents Menger’s successors, chiefly Böhm-Bawerk and Wieser, as independent thinkers confronting gaps in a shared framework. If productive resources derive their value from consumer goods, how is that value divided among the resources that jointly produce them? And how can interest be explained before it is defended or condemned? Feilbogen’s emphasis on these difficulties makes intellectual succession a matter of analytical work rather than allegiance. His account also catches a prospective shift in Wieser’s thinking: from treating individual wants as given to investigating how customs and collective traditions shape them. Readers encounter Austrian economics here as a research programme whose common premises leave substantial questions open.
A duchess buys diamonds while an attendant cannot afford medical care for her child: what, then, does a market price measure? In this installment of his study of Wieser, Siegmund Feilbogen presents subjective value theory without treating market outcomes as verdicts on social need. Prices register the valuations of those able to trade, not the interests of everyone affected. His exposition connects this economic argument with Wieser’s account of political authority, in which effective leadership depends on popular adherence rather than command alone. The distinctive tension lies between explaining existing institutions and judging their results. Readers can discover why, in Feilbogen’s account, criticism of unequal purchasing power remains compatible with marginal utility theory—and why public or socialist provision would still require careful economic calculation.
Common ownership would abolish private property, but would it abolish rent, interest, or the need to value scarce resources? In this 1912 continuation of his study of Wieser, Siegmund Feilbogen explores a tension within natural value: it preserves economic calculation while providing grounds for criticizing prices shaped by unequal wealth. His exposition is also an intervention. Distinguishing a productive factor’s value in its absence from its contribution through its presence, he clarifies the difficulty of dividing a joint product among complementary inputs. Education, subsidized transport, and alcohol production then expose the gap between commercial returns and social benefit. The article offers a concrete encounter with Austrian value theory as neither a simple defence of existing prices nor a promise that collective ownership would dissolve allocation problems.
Rural depopulation, in this 1912 Vienna lecture, is neither moral decay nor the inevitable price of progress but a structural failure of property distribution. Schwiedland joins attraction and expulsion: where large estates or dwarf holdings dominate, the ambitious young see no credible path from wage labour to ownership, and so they leave. He reframes the rural labour question as a land question, surveys the lesser remedies — cooperatives, credit institutions, rural schools, better housing — and subordinates them all to Besiedlung, inner colonization on the Prussian Rentengut model, where a holding is acquired through long-term rent rather than crushing capital debt. The purpose is not to furnish hands to landlords but to anchor capable labourers as owning citizens, giving them a visible prospect of ascent.
Für diesen Abzug kamen also nicht bloß die Reize der Städte, sondern auch die verhältnismäßige Erschwerung der Existenz auf dem Lande in Betracht: die Stadt zieht die Leute seelisch an, während zugleich das Land sie wirtschaftlich abstößt.
English translation: “For this exodus, then, not merely the attractions of the cities came into consideration, but also the comparative aggravation of existence in the countryside: the city attracts people psychologically, while at the same time the countryside repels them economically.”