The archive.

A theory can predict the order of purchases correctly yet misidentify why consumers choose them. This is the tension driving Karel Engliš’s 1917 critique of Robert Liefmann’s law of equalized marginal returns. Engliš argues that the subjective value of money cannot independently explain an allocation when that value itself depends on the consumption opportunities available. Through numerical counterexamples, he separates utility per monetary unit from surplus over subjective sacrifice, then asks why allocating labor requires a different treatment from spending money already held. His criticism preserves parts of Liefmann’s insight while exposing circular valuation and the risk of counting sacrifice twice. The article offers a precise encounter with economic explanation: what must be compared, in which units, and relative to whose purposes?

Two 1917 lectures at Vienna's Technische Hochschule trace economic history as a movement from small, self-sufficient units toward ever wider and more fragile webs of dependence. Adopting Bücher's clean sequence of house, city, and national economy, Schwiedland argues that each stage requires an organizer — household head, municipal authority, modern state — and on that ground denies that a true Weltwirtschaft yet exists: world trade flourishes, but no universal authority orders it. The second lecture turns to specialization, which enriches humanity even as it binds every farmer, exporter, and official into a vulnerable net of contracts and credit. Against the liberal faith in a harmonizing international division of labour, he reads imperialism as a struggle for secure food, raw materials, and markets, and wartime controls as a possible route beyond economic anarchy.

Trägerin und Ernährerin des Lebens ist die Erde.

English translation: “The earth is the bearer and sustainer of life.”

How does collective life form, discipline, and yet depend on the individuals who compose it? These two 1917 lectures pose that question across sociology, ethics, law, and economics. The first, on social discipline, treats custom, morality, and law as graded forms of regulation distinguished by their sanction — conscience, public opinion, coercion — with law crystallizing from older custom once authority enforces it; the state, tellingly, demands morality of its citizens while suspending it in politics and war. The second turns to the forces that bind persons into associations — religion, homeland, common interest, the state — and argues that social processes, though interindividual, are supra-individual in their effects. Schwiedland resists both crude collectivism and unbound individualism, seeking instead a practical harmony between the happiness of the person and that of the whole.

Sitte ist äußere Übung, Sittlichkeit innerliche Gesinnung.

English translation: “Custom is outward practice; morality is inward disposition.”

Wartime labor scarcity could raise wages without shifting lasting power toward workers. In this 1917 social-policy chronicle, Emil Lederer examines that tension through employers’ organizations, principally in Germany. His distinctive concern is the institutional machinery that survives fluctuations in membership and production: strike insurance, recruitment networks, and welfare arrangements that preserve firms’ ties to their workforce. Collective agreements offer a particularly revealing reversal: terms once protecting workers against wage cuts become restraints on gains as prices rise and labor grows scarce. Lederer also asks how assistance to disabled veterans can reinforce employers’ control over placement and pay. By separating immediate bargaining advantages from durable organizational resources, he shows why wartime cooperation and declarations of national solidarity need not entail any sharing of managerial authority.

Does the state stand above its citizens, exist through them, or serve their purposes? In this 1917 essay, Karl Pribram connects that political question to the philosophical dispute over whether universals possess reality independently of particular things. His distinction between authoritarianism, nationalism, and individualism makes wartime disagreements over treaties, national self-determination, and moral responsibility intelligible as conflicts about who can act and whose purposes count. His associations of these outlooks with Russia, Germany, and Britain remain qualified wartime interpretations, not established national characteristics. The sharpest tension concerns nationalism: participation in a collective will can promise agency while demanding conformity. Readers can discover how apparently shared political language conceals incompatible understandings of obligation—and where Pribram himself recognizes the danger of turning sociological explanation into metaphysical speculation.

In the Serbia occupied by Austria-Hungary during the First World War, economic administration meant commanding labour, sowing, deliveries, prices, and rationing—an entire agrarian society, stripped of nearly its whole able-bodied male population, disciplined toward higher yields. Drawing on a wartime study journey, Pribram treats this coercive apparatus as both military necessity and a rehearsal for postwar policy, insisting that extraction must not destroy Serbia's future usefulness as neighbour, producer, and market. He credits the harvest-utilization agency and the licensing Warenverkehrszentrale, yet warns that a military office cannot replace merchants without severing the networks on which peacetime trade depends. Statistics, requisition, monopoly, and currency control here become instruments of empire, where economic policy and foreign policy flow together into one.

Eine verständnisvolle Organisation, welche die Kräfte des Handels nicht völlig unterbindet, kann der künftigen Friedenswirtschaft wenigstens diese Kräfte erhalten — ein überflüssiger Zwang kann sie völlig vernichten.

English translation: “An understanding organisation that does not entirely stifle the forces of trade can preserve at least these forces for the future peace economy — a superfluous coercion can destroy them completely.”

Wartime scarcity gives Eugen von Philippovich a concrete test for economic method in this 1917 review of the introductory volume of Karl Diehl’s Theoretische Nationalökonomie. Does the dependence of individuals on a legally organized economy make individual needs and incentives an inadequate starting point for theory? Philippovich accepts the importance of institutions but argues that wartime provisioning and price movements also reveal the force of scarcity and private interest. His defense of abstraction is selective, not a blanket endorsement of theoretical schools. Alongside this methodological dispute runs a teaching problem: a textbook rich in scholarly controversy may reward experienced economists while leaving beginners without a clear orientation. The review shows precisely where Philippovich’s appreciation of Diehl’s scholarship parts company with his assessment of its explanatory and instructional value.

In the winter of 1813, Austrian troops occupied Geneva, and a provisional government that 'governed nothing' found itself bearing the costs of another's army. Rappard reconstructs how the newly resurrected Republic financed its extraordinary military burdens between 1814 and 1816 — through Austrian war contributions, loans floated with the old Société Économique and private citizens, and a striking campaign of patriotic donations that drew gifts from children, rural communes, and Genevans abroad. His centerpiece is the wealth tax of September 1815, a progressive levy collected by secret honor declaration into a sealed 'coffre mystérieux,' a device whose novelty shaped later fiscal debate. Filling what he calls a strange gap in the history of a much-studied city, Rappard turns dry ledgers of loans and levies into a study of civic confidence under occupation.

Ce Coffre sera disposé de manière, à ce qu'on ne sache point, ce que le contribuable y versera.

English translation: “This chest shall be arranged in such a way that no one knows what the contributor deposits in it.”

An economist need not found a school to shape a discipline. In this 1917 obituary, Alfred Amonn locates Eugen von Philippovich’s achievement in bringing Austrian theory, historical research, and practical social reform into relation. His tribute centres on a productive tension: reform should substantially improve workers’ lives without revolutionary rupture, while economic policy must remain sensitive to circumstances rather than promise universal remedies. Amonn connects these commitments to Philippovich’s textbook, teaching, and work on social insurance and labour protection. Yet admiration leaves room for criticism of the textbook and recognition of his limited political influence. The result is a revealing account of what Amonn valued in an economist: not doctrinal allegiance, but disciplined judgment, sympathy informed by analysis, and the ability to make rival intellectual traditions cooperate.

A single analytical question organizes this 1917/18 journal reply to Franz Oppenheimer: does private ownership of land amount to a "Bodenmonopol"? Schumpeter deliberately brackets Oppenheimer's sociology, capital-interest theory, and reading of Ricardo to insist that land may be scarce, privately appropriated, historically bound up with force, and rent-yielding without being monopolized in any technical sense. Monopoly, he argues, is not mere ownership or unequal bargaining strength but a specific form of price formation—control of supply, by one actor or by tacit combination among sellers, producing a surplus that competition would exclude. He dismantles Oppenheimer's three supports in turn: the one-sided urgency of the landless, the non-reproducibility of land, and large landed property. Ground rent, he concludes, needs no monopoly theory; it follows from scarcity and marginal productivity alone.

Großeigentum mag ein Uebel sein; aber mit dem Monopolgedanken läßt sich die Natur dieses Uebels nicht erfassen.

English translation: “Large-scale landownership may be an evil; but the nature of this evil cannot be grasped by means of the concept of monopoly.”

Peace may end a war without ending its economic commands. In this lecture, delivered in 1916 and published in 1917, Karl Pribram asks what could turn emergency rationing, compulsory production, and centralized purchasing into permanent institutions. His distinctive concern is not simply whether administration works better than competition, but whose purposes economic life serves: individual welfare or the power and security of the state. Cartels created for private advantage become instruments of public allocation; profitable production need not meet the most urgent needs. Following these concrete tensions, readers can discover why Pribram makes lasting economic compulsion depend both on continued international hostility and on an ethic that teaches citizens to regard sacrifice as duty. His conditional argument keeps necessity distinct from endorsement.

Was das Eigeninteresse schuf, wird nun dem Staatsinteresse dienstbar gemacht.

English translation: “What self-interest created is now made to serve the interest of the state.”

Can economic independence be secured through dependence on distant colonies? In this 1917 article, Richard Thurnwald argues that Germany’s essential supplies must be protected from potentially hostile world markets, while less consequential commerce can remain international. His case turns on concrete connections: tropical oilseeds sustain livestock at home, and an Ottoman route toward East Africa promises access to colonial resources. Yet the security he envisages requires more than transport and agricultural investment. Compulsory indigenous labor and racially ordered schemes of supervision underpin his projected expansion of production. Read together, these proposals expose the tension within his program: reducing Germany’s vulnerability means extending control over other territories and peoples. The article offers a specific view of how wartime supply anxieties could become an argument for colonial coercion.