The archive.

No single psychological impulse, neither abstinence nor Böhm-Bawerk's alleged underestimation of future needs, can carry the weight of interest. Working at the crossroads of Austrian capital theory, marginal productivity, and monetary economics, Mahr rebuilds the theory around the productivity of roundabout production, distinguishing horizontal expansion, which repeats existing methods, from vertical expansion, which lengthens production through new stages. Whether longer methods pay depends on technology, market size, and above all wages. He then abandons the fiction of one capital market and one rate: money markets, bond markets, and stock markets communicate imperfectly, their rates parting over the cycle. Modifying Wicksell, he locates the trigger of booms not in a single natural rate but in a discount rate held below the normal money-market level. The result fuses Böhm-Bawerkian roundaboutness with institutional and monetary realism.

Die Kenntnis der Gesetze des Produktionsertrages ist eine unentbehrliche Voraussetzung der Zinstheorie wie überhaupt jeder Einkommenstheorie.

English translation: “Knowledge of the laws of the yield of production is an indispensable prerequisite of the theory of interest, as indeed of any theory of income.”

A binding obligation need not be a contract. In this 1929 encyclopedia article, Richard Thurnwald makes that distinction the basis of a comparative inquiry into what secures agreements: ritual acts, prescribed words, political authority, or dependence on another’s resources. Against Mauss and Davy, he rejects customary gift obligations as a universal origin of contract. His cattle-leasing examples give the problem a concrete edge: an arrangement for subsistence can also sustain political subordination, blurring the boundary between private agreement and public authority. The article offers readers a way to examine consent alongside rank, kinship, and enforcement, while its ethnographic comparisons expose tensions within Thurnwald’s own proposed progression from binding acts through verbal formulas to consensual agreement.

What distinguishes regular administration from the exercise of authority? In this brief 1929 encyclopedia entry, Richard Thurnwald sets a precise threshold: an archaic state must have developed an officialdom with assigned functions that constitutes a distinct social stratum. The entry offers a compact definition rather than an extended argument, making specialization and social differentiation—not merely rule—the criteria for administration, before directing readers to “Staat” for fuller treatment.

Marriage prohibitions and sexual conduct do not necessarily coincide: this distinction opens Richard Thurnwald’s brief encyclopedia article, Verwandtenheirat (1929). He tentatively connects restrictions on marriage between relatives with alliances among communities, rather than explaining them by blood relationship alone. Maternal or paternal right and neighboring customs further shape the permitted unions. The entry offers a compact glimpse of his comparative approach to kinship: marriage rules emerge through relations both within communities and between them, while their existence does not establish how people actually behave.

Somary, lecturing at Heidelberg in the war's long aftermath, argues that 1918 recast not merely currencies and trade routes but the very axes of economic politics: state construction, market scale, and world-power position now cut across the old party labels. Liberalism and socialism, once international programs, have both curdled into national interest parties. From this his German survey moves through spaces rather than doctrines, a Britain sunk from ingenious solver to land of unsolved problems, a United States crossing from colonial periphery to world power as the Federal Reserve and New York displace London, a Europe fragmented by tariff walls into a caricature of itself. His boldest proposal is a Franco-German economic union marrying French capital to German labor; his sharpest observation, that the great capitalist organizer and the socialist planner converge in their appetite for monopoly and stabilization.

Das Europa von heute ist eine Karikatur dessen, was es sein sollte.

English translation: “The Europe of today is a caricature of what it ought to be.”

Nineteenth-century England supplies the model: there fiscal reordering, tariff change, and industrial expansion moved as a single process, proof that public finance is never neutral bookkeeping but an invisible tariff running through the economy. From that premise Schumpeter attacks Weimar's stagnation—two years of unemployment and high interest that no ordinary downturn explains—and traces it to a fiscal structure that taxes future productive capacity. His organizing concept is Kapitalbildung: reserves are not hoarding or privilege but the fund from which equipment is renewed and output extended, and progressive income and business taxes fall hardest on the margins where reserves form. A real reform must shift burden toward tobacco and alcohol consumption, as Stolper's plan proposes; even a limited change, well placed, could lower interest rates and unblock recovery. Doing nothing, or replacing private saving with state compulsion, he rejects outright.

Jede Finanzpolitik ist auch Wirtschaftspolitik, bewußte oder unbewußte.

English translation: “Every fiscal policy is also economic policy, whether consciously or unconsciously.”

A mechanism can work and still demand unbearable sacrifices. This distinction anchors Wilhelm Röpke’s 1929 conference report on German reparations: explaining how payments generate an export surplus does not establish that Germany can afford the adjustment. Röpke shifts attention from an alleged shortage of purchasing power abroad to concrete mismatches between what German industries can supply and what creditor countries want to buy. Imported raw materials limit the net proceeds of export growth; tariffs obstruct the changes that payment requires. His distinctive combination of classical trade theory and attention to industrial constraints makes the report an inquiry into costs rather than a categorical verdict on feasibility. Readers can discover why, in his analysis, creditors’ resistance to imports could make collecting their reparations harder.

Markets without centralized states, wealth accumulated for obligatory generosity, and shared food alongside individually owned tools unsettle familiar divisions between economic systems. In this 1929 encyclopedia article, Richard Thurnwald asks how subsistence, exchange and work become intelligible through the social relations that organize them. Drawing on ethnography, Oceanian observations and ancient history, he resists both a compulsory sequence of economic stages and the assumption of universal acquisitive self-interest. Festival markets on the lower Augusta River and the circulation of Kula valuables give concrete substance to his distinctions between profit, prestige and obligation. His hierarchical terminology and broad cultural generalizations require critical scrutiny, but his comparisons offer a precise question to pursue: when does control over goods become authority over people?

The household, rather than the individual craftsman, anchors Richard Thurnwald’s explanation of craft guilds in this compact encyclopedic entry. He asks how skills guarded by families and concentrated in particular settlements become the basis of corporate organization. His comparative perspective links kinship and technical mastery to political obligations: artisan communities owe collective payments in kind to the state, with their head responsible for delivery. Yet organization need not bring prestige, as his South Arabian examples suggest. Read as a proposed genealogy rather than a continuous institutional history, Zunft offers a way to distinguish occupational specialization, social standing, and corporate authority without assuming that the familiar arrangements of medieval European crafts were guild organization’s original form.

More intensive cultivation need not make a farm more viable. In this report of a 1929 Heidelberg institute excursion to Pomerania, Emil Lederer, Käthe Bauer-Mengelberg, and Svend Riemer examine estates whose technical efforts collide with poor soils, costly transport, depressed prices, and debt. Estate visits and accounts—given particular prominence by the Pommerscher Landbund’s invitation—support a crucial distinction: preserving existing owners is not the same as securing agricultural production. The authors also test proposed remedies against their human costs. Smallholdings may survive through unpaid family labor; estate economies may depend on low wages and restrictive employment arrangements. Readers encounter agricultural rescue as a conflict among profitability, property, and livelihoods, rather than a simple choice between efficient large estates and independent peasant farms.

What distinguishes international trade from exchange within a country: different currencies, or also the conditions governing the movement of labor and capital? In this brief review of E. Melchinger’s study of international price formation, Gottfried Haberler credits the book’s intellectual ability while challenging its narrow monetary definition of international trade. His phrase “alleged immobility” treats barriers to factor movement as something to investigate, not simply assume. He also finds a gap between Melchinger’s conceptual discussion and his treatment of concrete trade problems. The review offers a compact glimpse of Haberler’s critical priorities: broader explanatory scope, clearer exposition, and a stronger connection between theoretical distinctions and their applications.

Can sociology seek recurring patterns without reducing human purposes to mechanical causes? In this brief encyclopedia entry, Richard Thurnwald presents Thomas Achelis as a thinker who combined inductive inquiry into social structures with psychological explanation. Thurnwald argues that Achelis’s opposition to prevailing Hegelianism left his sociology less influential than it deserved, while his philosophical-psychological anthropology drew attacks from the Berlin school. The entry’s interest lies in this compact methodological portrait: biological conditions provide a starting point, but motives and purposes require an additional kind of explanation. Readers encounter Thurnwald’s appreciative assessment of an approach that sought regularities in human association without treating those regularities as exhaustive.