3,673 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
A textbook must offer beginners settled truths, yet by 1890 political economy no longer possessed an uncontested doctrinal core, and it is through this pedagogical bind that Böhm-Bawerk reviews S. M. Macvane's Working Principles of Political Economy. He credits its clarity and independence while faulting its conservatism: Macvane retains cost as the ultimate regulator of value, rejects Jevons's route from utility to exchange value, and rests wages on a fund of contemporary savings scarcely distinct from the classical wages-fund doctrine. Against this, Böhm-Bawerk argues that the annual mass of consumable goods is not fixed in advance but shaped by saving, demand, and the division of production between consumption and capital goods. The review becomes a workshop in which Austrian capital theory emerges as a bridge between marginal productivity and distribution, labor priced by its Grenzprodukt.
Where shall we find nowadays a stock of undoubted, clear, and simple truths?
A controversy over smallpox vaccination becomes, in Inama-Sternegg's hands, an occasion to work out a theory of statistical proof. Following J. Koeroesi, he denies that the protective force of vaccination can be settled by physiological experiment alone and defends inference from mass facts. The essay dismantles the objection that vaccination statistics is worthless because the total living vaccinated and unvaccinated populations are unknown: many valid measures relate an event to its nearest causally relevant collective, not to the whole population. Koeroesi's method of relative intensity compares general morbidity and mortality against specifically smallpox morbidity, mortality, and lethality, using Budapest and Hungarian provincial-city material. Underlying all of this is a distinction between two directions of proof, progressive experiment moving from cause to effect and regressive observation moving from effect to cause, which makes statistics indispensable precisely where experiment cannot reach.
Bei der ersten Methode (Zerfällung der Gesamtheiten) scheidet man alle fremden Faktoren aus; bei der letzteren (Intensitätsberechnung) berechnet man den Einfluß eines unausgeschiedenen oder unausscheidbaren Faktors durch die gegebenen übrigen Werte.
English translation: “In the first method (decomposition of totals) one excludes all extraneous factors; in the latter (intensity calculation) one computes the influence of an unexcluded or inextricable factor by means of the other given values.”
Scarcity may explain why capital goods have value, but not why they yield a surplus beyond their own cost, and it is this wedge that Böhm-Bawerk drives into Professor Giddings's theory of interest. Writing in a short correspondence, he grants a narrow element of truth, that finite human laboring powers keep the supply of capital limited, then denies that the painfulness of overtime labor can be the root of interest. He rejects Giddings's cost-based account, since roundabout methods are adopted because they are cheaper per unit rather than dearer, and a circumstance that merely increases outlay cannot be the cause of gain. Behind the objection lies a careful separation of conditions from causes, and of scarcity-value from surplus-value, exposing the equivocations between labor cost, productive power, and the time-structure of production that let the puzzle of interest seem already solved.
"Limited supply" of capital is certainly a condition of the existence of interest; but interest is a long way from being explained by it.
In three Baden villages, physiocracy’s promise of a “natural order” became a practical problem: replacing existing levies with a single tax on the net produce of land. Robert Zuckerkandl’s biographical article places Johann August Schlettwein at this meeting point of economic doctrine and administration. Its interest lies in the distance between theoretical originality and the independence required to pursue reform. Zuckerkandl criticizes Schlettwein’s confidence in universal economic axioms and the inconsistencies of his emphasis on population and subsistence, yet credits his willingness to challenge established policy. This qualified portrait shows why a thinker later overshadowed by Adam Smith and the French physiocrats merits attention as a teacher, public advocate, and practitioner of economic change.
An idea’s first appearance does not explain its power to reshape a discipline. In this 1890 essay, Sigmund Feilbogen asks why Adam Smith transformed political economy when David Hume had already advanced many similar propositions. His answer shifts attention from priority to proof, conceptual organization, and economic judgment. Hume, he argues, defended commerce chiefly for its contribution to state power and cultural refinement; Smith made productive efficiency a criterion for assessing it. Feilbogen respects Hume’s humane opposition to slavery and commercial hostility while questioning whether refinement can settle economic disputes. The comparison offers a concrete account of how argumentative order, evidence, and a focus on production can turn dispersed insights into a science—rather than merely a collection of anticipations.
Can a new definition of money explain the Austrian agio, or does it merely redescribe the difficulty? In this brief review, Hermann von Schullern zu Schrattenhofen examines Eduard Hammer’s separation of supposedly unchanging units of value from the coins and notes that represent them. The practical test is Hammer’s account of the agio as a gap between money’s represented value and its market price, rather than a difference between metals or currencies. Schullern finds the proposal thought-provoking but doubts its agreement with the facts. His measured response brings a precise monetary dispute into focus: what must a conceptual distinction explain before it earns acceptance as an economic explanation?
A state powerful enough to wage repeated wars could still struggle to persuade its subjects to lend it money. In this 1891 review of Franz von Mensi’s archival history of Austrian finances from 1701 to 1740, Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk highlights the private credit, pledged assets and banking intermediaries that sustained precarious sovereign borrowing. He judges Starhemberg’s financial administration not by the debts it accumulated but by the catastrophe it averted. The review also makes a pointed methodological defence: Mensi’s dense documentary record, less polished narrative than ordered chronicle, preserves evidence that a more selective historian might discard. Readers encounter both a concrete account of the supports beneath public credit and Böhm-Bawerk’s reasons for valuing archival completeness over premature synthesis.
How can tax policy be studied when societies cannot safely be subjected to controlled experiments? In this 1891 review of Georg Schanz’s five-volume history of Swiss taxation, Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk finds an unusually promising resource in twenty-five cantonal systems: neighbouring jurisdictions whose similarities and differences permit careful comparison of laws and outcomes. His enthusiastic judgement rests on the connection between detailed institutional history and causal explanation. Yet the findings he highlights complicate any easy celebration of Swiss democracy: political freedom does not guarantee tax compliance, and greater municipal influence over assessment can allow local interests to obstruct broader fiscal aims. This short review shows what Böhm-Bawerk valued in historical research—and why he thought its evidence could challenge both administrative assumptions and taxpayers’ national prejudices.
Trade figures can identify an opening without explaining whether it will last. In this 1891 review of Josef Grunzel’s study of China’s commercial development, Hermann von Schullern zu Schrattenhofen tests statistical description against the needs of commercial judgment. Shanghai’s abrupt import fluctuations prompt his central question: do they reflect accidents or persistent causes? His European export perspective gives particular weight to German cloth and metal goods and Bohemian imitation gemstones and matches, yet he also recalls the violence of Europe’s introduction of opium. The review offers a compact, pointed account of what trade tables leave unresolved: Chinese demand, domestic production costs, and the conditions that make an apparent market opportunity viable.
Resemblance between doctrines need not prove intellectual borrowing. In this 1891 review of the second part of Karl Diehl’s study of Proudhon, Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk endorses Diehl’s defence against Marx’s plagiarism charge: similar conclusions may emerge from different lines of reasoning. He especially values the comparisons that place Proudhon’s bank projects alongside other experiments in monetary and credit reform. His favourable appraisal also brings a sharper tension into view. Diehl regards Proudhon’s attempt to combine socialist aims with individual freedom as his distinctive ambition—and argues that abolishing money, wages and interest cannot be reconciled with retaining private production. This compact review shows Böhm-Bawerk weighing historical comparison, intellectual independence and the feasibility of reform without collapsing them into a single verdict on Proudhon.
For Böhm-Bawerk, originality is no excuse for intellectual isolation. His 1891 review of the second, revised and enlarged edition of Walras’s Éléments d’économie politique pure acknowledges Walras as an independent discoverer of marginal utility while explicitly separating that achievement from his mathematical method. The point of friction is Walras’s pride in a doctrine fundamentally unchanged after fifteen years: has the system developed through engagement with other economists, or only from its own resources? Böhm-Bawerk offers a pointed assessment rather than a detailed theoretical rebuttal, balancing admiration with doubts about the adequacy of revision. This short review lets readers see how he distinguishes recognition of a shared economic insight from endorsement of either its mathematical presentation or its subsequent development.
Can unequal bargaining power explain capital income without a developed theory of prices? In this 1891 review of Otto Wittelshöfer, Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk accepts the distinction between capital goods and ownership rights but challenges the explanatory weight placed on owners’ power over workers. His objection is not that power has no economic effects: it is that Wittelshöfer has not shown how those effects interact with the causes determining particular prices and wages. The review’s sharpest distinction is between possessing a conception of value and supplying a theory of value. Readers encounter a focused dispute over what an explanation of profit must establish, conducted by a critic who acknowledges the book’s intellectual force while rejecting its principal conclusions.