3,801 works, 471 books, 3,267 articles, 60 other works, 3 awaiting classification, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
More productive tools can yield more goods—but does that explain why future goods are worth less than present ones? In this 1902 article, Frank Albert Fetter challenges Böhm-Bawerk’s appeal to longer, “roundabout” production as an explanation of interest. His criticism turns on a concrete difficulty: the monetary value of capital already depends on the rate used to discount its future income, so that value cannot independently explain the rate itself. Fetter redirects attention from past labor and average production periods to the present valuation of future services. Readers can discover why increased physical output and a surplus of value are different problems, and why, in Fetter’s account, interest belongs to comparisons across time rather than to any particular class of productive assets.
A large national debt can record resources destroyed by war or investments that generate future income. Moriz Dub makes this distinction central to his assessment of Austria-Hungary’s public credit, treating the monarchy’s two states as separate financial systems rather than a single borrower. Austria’s inherited military liabilities contrast with Hungary’s borrowing for productive assets, especially railways. Yet Dub’s comparison is no simple opposition: railway subsidies burden Austrian finances, while Hungarian debt figures remain explicitly approximate. His distinctive concern is what nominal totals conceal—interest costs, monetary credibility, creditor losses, and offsetting revenues. The article lets readers examine how financial rehabilitation could improve a state’s standing with investors without removing the social costs of its debts, including constraints on educational expenditure.
What happens to economics when its basic unit is neither goods nor value, but an enterprise comprising people and goods? In this short German review, Hermann von Schullern zu Schrattenhofen presents Alberto Zorli’s proposed reorientation while drawing attention to its terminological difficulties: even translating azienda economica requires a choice between Unternehmung and Betrieb. Schullern’s particular interest lies in the consequences for public finance. Zorli treats the state as a collective enterprise distinguished by coercion, drawing economic principles from economics and its governing norms from public law. Rather than testing this framework at length, the review isolates the connection between Zorli’s conceptual innovation and his account of state economic activity—a compact encounter with the problem of bringing private and public economies under one vocabulary.
Argentina’s currency question mattered to European grain producers as well as to those studying the destination of European emigrants. This connection frames Hermann von Schullern zu Schrattenhofen’s brief 1903 review of the first, monetary volume of Eteocle Lorini’s study of Argentina. Schullern judges the book chiefly as a source: he praises the care and objectivity of Lorini’s government-sponsored investigation and the breadth of documentation supporting its account of monetary affairs. Rather than endorsing a currency reform, the review shows what Schullern valued in economic research—local investigation, official evidence, and the placement of monetary conditions within a wider account of production, migration, and public finance.
Land improvement, insurance, hotels, and the drying of silk cocoons all fall within “industrial” enterprise in the handbook assessed by Hermann von Schullern zu Schrattenhofen. His brief 1903 review of Ferdinando Piccinelli’s work locates its chief interest for non-Italian readers in detailed descriptions of 617 joint-stock companies. Schullern distinguishes the handbook’s accessible, broadly liberal account of Italian law from the documentary value of its company survey: chronological ordering within groups offers clues to corporate development, while financial tables record the scale of capital and indebtedness. The review provides a compact contemporary judgement of a reference work whose expansive definition of industry brings agricultural and service enterprises into view alongside more familiar industrial activities.
Municipal self-government means more here than running waterworks or transport services. In this brief 1903 review of Francesco Invrea’s Il comune e la sua funzione sociale, Hermann von Schullern zu Schrattenhofen singles out worker protection for particular praise. His telling example is Brescia’s municipal labour office, charged not only with finding employment but also with promoting workers’ moral and material advancement—a broader remit than that of its German counterparts. Schullern also reports Invrea’s insistence that greater municipal autonomy requires popular oversight through the referendum. The review offers a compact glimpse of how local independence could be linked to expanded social responsibilities, with Schullern’s selective emphasis directing attention beyond public utilities to the institutions serving workers.
Does agriculture follow industry towards capitalist concentration—and what would that mean for socialist expectations? In this brief 1903 review of G. Gatti’s Le socialisme et l’agriculture, Hermann von Schullern zu Schrattenhofen singles out landownership as a decisive test of revised Marxist doctrine. Gatti expects capitalism and cooperation together to prepare socialism’s victory, yet concedes that agricultural concentration has barely begun and that transformation will take a long time. Schullern’s qualified praise turns on this restraint, not on agreement with the predicted outcome. The review offers a compact encounter between socialist confidence and economic caution: its distinctive interest lies in a reviewer’s willingness to recognize sober judgment in an author whose expectations he does not endorse.
Legal institutions and accounting emerge with unequal clarity from the archives of medieval Douai. In this brief 1903 review of Georges Espinas’s municipal financial history, Carl Menger makes that imbalance the key qualification of his favourable assessment, attributing it to the surviving evidence. He also singles out Espinas’s comparisons with northwestern German towns and his use of German historical and public-finance scholarship. The review offers a compact glimpse of Menger’s criteria for assessing archival research: attention to what the documents can support, and appreciation of comparisons that make a local history useful beyond its immediate setting.
Can family and private property change without ceasing to be the foundations of social life? In this brief 1903 review, Hermann von Schullern zu Schrattenhofen welcomes Giovanni Amadori-Virgilj’s answer: both institutions are primordial, not successors to an original communal order. Schullern draws attention to the book’s evolutionary method and scrutiny of evidence, but his strongest approval concerns its political implications—a vision of progress that preserves family and property while reconciling individual and social interests. He leaves particular theses open to disagreement, yet praises their challenge to partisan certainty. The review offers a compact encounter with Schullern’s standards of judgement, showing where methodological appreciation meets an explicitly sympathetic response to criticism of socialism.
Official trade totals need not measure the same things in comparable ways. In this brief 1903 review, Carl Menger welcomes Gustav Lippert’s scrutiny of the values assigned to international commodity transfers, stressing how inconsistent publication practices and inaccurate estimation methods compromise both comparison and reliability. His interest is practical as well as methodological: with commercial treaties being renewed and reshaped, the quality of statistical evidence matters for policy. The review offers a compact instance of Menger’s attention to the conditions under which official figures can support a sound judgment about actual trade flows.
Can clarity of exposition sustain a sweeping challenge to trade-balance theory? In this brief 1903 review, Carl Menger reports Leo Petritsch’s contention that payment surpluses and deficits are temporary and that the balance of payments is irrelevant to currency reform. Menger does not offer a detailed rebuttal: he praises the book’s clarity and diligence, then questions whether its author chose too complicated a subject for a first work. The interest lies in that measured distance between reporting an argument and endorsing it—a compact instance of Menger’s critical judgement on claims about international payments and monetary reform.
A mathematically ordered progressive tax can still leave too little income protected from taxation. That tension shapes Hermann von Schullern zu Schrattenhofen’s brief review of Mario Marsilj Libelli’s Per l’imposta progressiva. Libelli places collective needs below subsistence but above other private needs, deriving a continuous, diminishing progression and a narrowly measured subsistence exemption. Schullern finds the study worth considering for anyone examining the practical feasibility of a single progressive direct tax, yet reserves serious social-policy objections, particularly about the exemption’s level. The review offers a compact distinction between finding a tax scheme useful for practical inquiry and accepting the principles that determine how much taxpayers retain for basic needs.