The archive.

Protection against inflation appears here not as social relief but as a “curious monopoly” enjoyed by wage-earners and salaried employees. That reversal captures the standpoint of Eugen Peter Schwiedland’s 1923 review of Siegfried Strakosch’s book on Austria’s economic crisis. Strongly endorsing Strakosch’s practical and scientific authority, Schwiedland argues that socialist labour protections weakened production and burdened business. He also acknowledges the destructive effects of the peace settlement, new frontiers, trade barriers and currency instability. The interest of this short review lies in how these explanations are weighted: readers can see an economic indictment of labour policy taking shape around business uncertainty and middle-class losses, even while the reviewer describes pressures extending far beyond domestic legislation.

A reading society founded by Viennese jurists and officials in 1840 becomes, in this early study, a delicate instrument for registering the political pressures of the Austrian Vormärz. Engel-Janosi reconstructs the associational law of pre-1848 Austria, the natural-law background, the police suspicion of reading circles, the concession system, and shows how elite patrons such as Sommaruga shielded the club while Sedlnitzky, Kolowrat, and Metternich eyed it warily. Its history, he argues, is largely the chronicle of its skirmishes with the censorship: the struggle to obtain foreign political newspapers, to hold lectures, and to maintain a library under constant supervision and confiscation. Though the society never acted as a revolutionary body in March 1848, Engel-Janosi reads in its restrained conduct a loyal, sorrowful opposition to the imperial order.

Es liegt viel Schwäche darin, gewiß, aber auch Trauer und Treue.

English translation: “There is much weakness in it, to be sure, but also sorrow and fidelity.”

Could commerce acquire dependable money while the state continued to finance itself through inflation? Martha Stephanie Braun’s essay examines proposals of 1918–1922 to circulate gold-backed notes alongside depreciating paper currency. Taking Austria’s predicament as her starting point, she tests the promise that a privately managed issuing bank could insulate sound money from an unsound economy. Her sharpest insight concerns gold accounting: it can expose losses concealed by nominal profits, yet its widespread adoption can accelerate flight from paper money. Braun distinguishes the benefits of foreign credit from the supposed benefits of inventing a new currency. Readers encounter a concrete dilemma of monetary reconstruction: measures that protect individual balance sheets may undermine the currency in which wages, taxes, and debts remain payable.

Once the public stops believing that the inflation will halt, Mises contends, a paper currency financed by the note press is doomed to sudden collapse rather than to endless gradual decline—as the American continentals and the French mandats collapsed before it. The first step of any reform is therefore to shut down the printing press; the second is to bind the mark again to gold, whose quantity answers to mining profitability rather than to state decree. He refutes the balance-of-payments theory of the exchanges, insisting that inflation, not poverty or trade deficits, drives foreign-exchange rates upward, and proposes a monetary constitution forbidding any note issue not covered by gold or foreign exchange. The disorder, he closes, is at root ideological.

An die Stelle des Schlagwortes „Los vom Golde“ muß die Lösung treten: „Los von der staatlichen Beeinflussung des Geldwertes“.

English translation: “In place of the slogan "Away from gold" must be substituted the solution: "Away from state influence on the value of money.”

Contributed to the memorial volume for Max Weber, this essay refuses the abstract rational homo oeconomicus and grounds economy instead in the biological balance of intake and expenditure that humans share with organisms and animals. Economic life, for Thurnwald, emerges from instinct through intelligence, invention, and organization, driven as much by prestige, magic, luxury, and group feeling as by calculation. He distinguishes constant psycho-physiological factors from local geographic ones and from the progressive accumulation of technique, tracing production and exchange values from clan sharing to tribute, primitive money, and finally the coal-and-machine economy that shifts power from land toward finance, industry, and labor. The gathering of prestige objects, he cautions, is not yet capital formation. Economy is treated throughout as a life function shaped by biology, psychology, environment, technique, and politics.

Das Verhältnis der Menschen zum Boden bildet zu allen Zeiten ein Grundproblem der Wirtschaft und der Politik.

English translation: “The relationship of human beings to the soil constitutes at all times a fundamental problem of economy and politics.”

Does a stronger need explain an economic choice, or do we call the need stronger because that choice was made? This tension gives Felix Kaufmann’s 1923 study its critical edge. Drawing on Husserl’s distinction between material and formal concepts, Kaufmann asks what makes conduct economic, rather than what circumstances cause it. He challenges definitions grounded in scarcity or ranked purposes and treats marginal utility as a useful guide to empirical inquiry, not an independent psychological explanation. His alternative centres on behaviour that establishes an order of selection among goods, understood as relations to external things. The discussion of money sharpens the stakes: ranking goods does not yet mean measuring their values. Readers can discover where apparently explanatory economic concepts may merely redescribe the conduct they are meant to explain.

Formally reciprocal rules can distribute burdens very unequally. In this review of Arthur Nussbaum’s study of the Versailles clearing procedure, Helene Lieser foregrounds the costs to Germany of settling cross-border debts as the mark depreciates. Her comparison with Austria makes the issue concrete: should the state absorb exchange-related losses, or should private debtors bear them according to their means? She also endorses Nussbaum’s criticism that the Mixed Arbitral Tribunals favor Allied claimants through selective treaty interpretation. The review’s interest lies in Lieser’s connection of legal machinery to financial incentives—and in her insistence that decisions admitting no appeal nonetheless demand scholarly scrutiny.

Political defeat need not settle the question of public merit. In this 1923 obituary, Richard Reisch defends Ernst Plener’s pursuit of national accommodation and constitutional government while locating his more durable achievements in currency and tax reform. Reisch writes not only as an admirer but as a former young finance-ministry official who witnessed the painstaking deliberations behind personal-tax legislation. His recollections give concrete substance to the tribute: revenue needs, provincial interests, and parliamentary demands had to be negotiated, not simply resolved by technical expertise. Read as a sympathetic assessment rather than a neutral biography, the obituary shows how Reisch measured a statesman’s achievement—and why he contrasted the patient legislative work of the 1890s with the haste of his own time.

A stronger currency need not mean a more prosperous economy. In this 1923 article, Alfred Amonn weighs appreciation against stabilization, chiefly through the difficulties facing Czechoslovakia. His distinction between foreign exchange value and domestic purchasing power exposes the limits of apparent gains: cheaper imports can accompany damaged exports, while lower prices increase the burden of domestic debts. Yet he also identifies a concrete case for appreciation. Where political resistance keeps housing rents below levels compatible with building costs, lowering other prices might restore a workable relationship. The article’s interest lies in this uneasy comparison of adjustment paths: Amonn acknowledges the risks of business failures and unemployment without assuming that stabilization can resolve every inherited imbalance.

When capital moves between industries, what actually moves: machinery, or money that redirects production? In this separately signed supplement to the encyclopedia entry on capital, Schumpeter uses that distinction to expose the limits of theories confined to physical goods. Disagreement over definitions, he argues, can conceal substantive differences about how capitalism works. His alternative identifies capital with money and purchasing power available to enterprises, including purchasing power created through credit—not simply the monetary value of their equipment. Yet he preserves the achievements of older capital theories rather than dismissing them. This compact intervention offers a concrete way to see why treating money as a passive veil leaves important processes of investment and resource allocation unexplained.

A miner changing districts could lose pension rights; an autonomous insurance fund could still deny workers effective influence. Such practical tensions anchor Wilhelm Röpke’s 1923 encyclopedia article on miners’ insurance in Germany and Austria. Röpke distinguishes the origins of these institutions in miners’ privileged occupational status from their later justification as protection against industrial risk. His account connects secure benefits not merely with contribution levels, but with portable entitlements, meaningful representation, and funds large enough to withstand uneven regional fortunes. The proposed German national organization remains a proposal, not an accomplished reform. Read alongside Austria’s differing arrangements, it makes this article a concrete study of the difficult balance between local administration and collective financial security.

Satisfying a need is not necessarily consuming a good: this distinction anchors Hans Mayer’s 1923 encyclopedia entry on consumption. By defining consumption as the depletion of goods in immediate use, Mayer explains why even an economy with unchanged needs must continually produce replacements—and why present enjoyment can erode future productive capacity. His account brings household choice into contact with the material limits of production, while refusing to treat market demand as a transparent measure of human need. Wealthier households can command resources for less urgent wants while poorer households lack necessities. Readers can discover how this precise definition changes the interpretation of expenditure, overconsumption, and consumption statistics: neither money spent nor goods purchased straightforwardly measures how well a population’s needs are met.