The archive.

An idea’s first appearance does not explain its power to reshape a discipline. In this 1890 essay, Sigmund Feilbogen asks why Adam Smith transformed political economy when David Hume had already advanced many similar propositions. His answer shifts attention from priority to proof, conceptual organization, and economic judgment. Hume, he argues, defended commerce chiefly for its contribution to state power and cultural refinement; Smith made productive efficiency a criterion for assessing it. Feilbogen respects Hume’s humane opposition to slavery and commercial hostility while questioning whether refinement can settle economic disputes. The comparison offers a concrete account of how argumentative order, evidence, and a focus on production can turn dispersed insights into a science—rather than merely a collection of anticipations.

Trade in goods had exchanges and market reports; finding work still depended on scattered advertisements, workshop visits, and distrusted intermediaries. In this 1890 lecture, Viktor Mataja asks why employment placement remained so poorly organized—and why improving it could sharpen rather than settle conflict between workers and employers. Union control could protect workers against underbidding, while employers’ support kept unpopular intermediaries in business. His critical examination of the Paris Bourse du Travail turns on a practical difficulty: an office serving jobseekers cannot succeed unless employers also bring it vacancies. Neither dismissing worker participation nor accepting political agitation as a substitute for placement, Mataja argues for impartial institutions. The lecture shows how apparently technical choices about recruitment distribute power, disclose or conceal wage differences, and test the possibility of cooperation.

Can a new definition of money explain the Austrian agio, or does it merely redescribe the difficulty? In this brief review, Hermann von Schullern zu Schrattenhofen examines Eduard Hammer’s separation of supposedly unchanging units of value from the coins and notes that represent them. The practical test is Hammer’s account of the agio as a gap between money’s represented value and its market price, rather than a difference between metals or currencies. Schullern finds the proposal thought-provoking but doubts its agreement with the facts. His measured response brings a precise monetary dispute into focus: what must a conceptual distinction explain before it earns acceptance as an economic explanation?

A state powerful enough to wage repeated wars could still struggle to persuade its subjects to lend it money. In this 1891 review of Franz von Mensi’s archival history of Austrian finances from 1701 to 1740, Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk highlights the private credit, pledged assets and banking intermediaries that sustained precarious sovereign borrowing. He judges Starhemberg’s financial administration not by the debts it accumulated but by the catastrophe it averted. The review also makes a pointed methodological defence: Mensi’s dense documentary record, less polished narrative than ordered chronicle, preserves evidence that a more selective historian might discard. Readers encounter both a concrete account of the supports beneath public credit and Böhm-Bawerk’s reasons for valuing archival completeness over premature synthesis.

How can tax policy be studied when societies cannot safely be subjected to controlled experiments? In this 1891 review of Georg Schanz’s five-volume history of Swiss taxation, Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk finds an unusually promising resource in twenty-five cantonal systems: neighbouring jurisdictions whose similarities and differences permit careful comparison of laws and outcomes. His enthusiastic judgement rests on the connection between detailed institutional history and causal explanation. Yet the findings he highlights complicate any easy celebration of Swiss democracy: political freedom does not guarantee tax compliance, and greater municipal influence over assessment can allow local interests to obstruct broader fiscal aims. This short review shows what Böhm-Bawerk valued in historical research—and why he thought its evidence could challenge both administrative assumptions and taxpayers’ national prejudices.

Trade figures can identify an opening without explaining whether it will last. In this 1891 review of Josef Grunzel’s study of China’s commercial development, Hermann von Schullern zu Schrattenhofen tests statistical description against the needs of commercial judgment. Shanghai’s abrupt import fluctuations prompt his central question: do they reflect accidents or persistent causes? His European export perspective gives particular weight to German cloth and metal goods and Bohemian imitation gemstones and matches, yet he also recalls the violence of Europe’s introduction of opium. The review offers a compact, pointed account of what trade tables leave unresolved: Chinese demand, domestic production costs, and the conditions that make an apparent market opportunity viable.

Resemblance between doctrines need not prove intellectual borrowing. In this 1891 review of the second part of Karl Diehl’s study of Proudhon, Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk endorses Diehl’s defence against Marx’s plagiarism charge: similar conclusions may emerge from different lines of reasoning. He especially values the comparisons that place Proudhon’s bank projects alongside other experiments in monetary and credit reform. His favourable appraisal also brings a sharper tension into view. Diehl regards Proudhon’s attempt to combine socialist aims with individual freedom as his distinctive ambition—and argues that abolishing money, wages and interest cannot be reconciled with retaining private production. This compact review shows Böhm-Bawerk weighing historical comparison, intellectual independence and the feasibility of reform without collapsing them into a single verdict on Proudhon.

For Böhm-Bawerk, originality is no excuse for intellectual isolation. His 1891 review of the second, revised and enlarged edition of Walras’s Éléments d’économie politique pure acknowledges Walras as an independent discoverer of marginal utility while explicitly separating that achievement from his mathematical method. The point of friction is Walras’s pride in a doctrine fundamentally unchanged after fifteen years: has the system developed through engagement with other economists, or only from its own resources? Böhm-Bawerk offers a pointed assessment rather than a detailed theoretical rebuttal, balancing admiration with doubts about the adequacy of revision. This short review lets readers see how he distinguishes recognition of a shared economic insight from endorsement of either its mathematical presentation or its subsequent development.

Can unequal bargaining power explain capital income without a developed theory of prices? In this 1891 review of Otto Wittelshöfer, Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk accepts the distinction between capital goods and ownership rights but challenges the explanatory weight placed on owners’ power over workers. His objection is not that power has no economic effects: it is that Wittelshöfer has not shown how those effects interact with the causes determining particular prices and wages. The review’s sharpest distinction is between possessing a conception of value and supplying a theory of value. Readers encounter a focused dispute over what an explanation of profit must establish, conducted by a critic who acknowledges the book’s intellectual force while rejecting its principal conclusions.

Labour can figure in an agricultural textbook without agricultural workers receiving attention. This distinction gives the closing reservation of Julius Friedrich Gans von Ludassy’s brief 1891 review its point. He warmly praises Emilio Cossa’s Primi elementi di Economia Agraria for compressing a wide subject into some 200 clearly organized pages, and recommends a German translation for agricultural schools. Yet its treatment of production and institutions leaves the social position of farm labourers unexamined. The review offers a compact encounter with Ludassy’s standards for economic teaching: admiration for lucid, economical exposition, qualified by concern for what even a well-organized textbook leaves out.

Can a sound account of legislative procedure rest on a mistaken theory of sovereignty? Julius Landesberger’s 1891 review of Georg Meyer finds precisely this tension. He welcomes Meyer’s explanation of how Bundesrat, Reichstag, and emperor participate in imperial legislation, yet challenges the notion of a monarch or people as a distinct “bearer of state power.” For Landesberger, the historical importance of princely or popular sovereignty does not establish a legal authority beyond constitutionally defined organs. His objection becomes concrete in disputes over budgets and royal ordinance powers: what does presumed monarchical authority actually authorize? The review offers a pointed encounter between careful constitutional interpretation and inherited political vocabulary, showing why agreement about institutional duties need not imply agreement about the source of their authority.

If a public undertaking raises property values throughout a neighbourhood, should that shared benefit reduce compensation to the owner whose land is taken? This concrete difficulty anchors Julius Landesberger’s 1891 review of J. Sieber’s study of expropriation. He values Sieber’s survey of fragmented Swiss legislation but challenges the use of private-law measures of loss to determine a public obligation. For Landesberger, compensation must do more than repair an owner’s balance sheet: it must distribute the burdens of public purposes equitably, with the state bearing primary responsibility. The review shows how a seemingly technical question about valuation can alter the legal identity of the debtor, the proper forum for disputes, and the boundary between private property and public law.