3,673 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Growing union membership did not necessarily mean greater bargaining power. In this chronicle of German and Austrian labor relations in 1911, Emil Lederer asks what enabled workers to confront increasingly coordinated employers. He connects membership figures and union finances to the practical consequences of religious rivalry, national division, and competing forms of organization. The contrast is concrete: divided Ruhr miners struggled to act together, while cooperation across union affiliations helped tobacco workers defend union recognition. In Austria, Lederer sees Czech separatism weakening solidarity as employers consolidate. His scrutiny of strike statistics also shows why counting disputes or nominal victories cannot establish who gained. The report offers a contemporary account of collective strength as something built through institutions and cooperation, rather than automatically supplied by economic recovery or shared interests.
When does a protective tariff enlarge production, and when does it merely enlarge producers’ receipts? Richard Schüller makes this distinction the test of Austria-Hungary’s commercial regime after 1906. In this article, preserved as an offprint, he credits industrial gains while questioning agricultural duties that raised food costs, made livestock feed dearer, and secured little-used export opportunities at industry’s expense. His perspective is neither a blanket defence of protection nor a rejection of it: tariffs must justify their burdens through productive expansion. Equally careful with trade deficits, he distinguishes raw-material imports supporting industrial growth from a shrinking manufacturing surplus. Readers can discover how tariff bargaining, consumer prices, and foreign-credit dependence enter an assessment that refuses to equate protected interests’ gains with public benefit.
An association can proclaim political neutrality while financing candidates, demanding electoral pledges, or excluding Social Democrats. In this 1912 journal article, Emil Lederer examines that discrepancy to ask how organized economic interests reshape parliamentary representation. Writing immediately before the Reichstag election, he looks beyond party programmes to the practical demands binding occupational groups to parties: union rights, food tariffs, salaries, and protection against competitors. His comparisons expose divisions within apparently unified constituencies, especially salaried employees and the urban middle class. They also reveal the limits of coalitions such as the Hansabund, whose claim to urban solidarity excludes workers. The article offers a concrete way to examine democratization through organizational bargaining, while leaving open how reliably associations can deliver their members’ votes.
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.