The archive.

Böhm-Bawerk had claimed that even a solitary Robinson, storing grain and shaping tools, would already harbor the core of interest in the swelling value of goods prepared for the future. Sax sets out to refute that positive theory point by point—the temporal gap between need and provision, the alleged systematic underestimation of the future, the productivity of roundabout production—while preserving the marginal-utility theory from which Böhm-Bawerk wrongly thought it followed. His counter-concept is Wertperspektive: future goods carry lower present value because anticipated needs are felt more faintly, a valuation shift that mirrors planned welfare but generates no surplus. Interest, he concludes, is neither natural nor technical but a private-economic exchange gain, rooted in the unequal possession of present goods and absent alike from Robinson's island and a socialist commonwealth.

Die Wirtschaft Robinson’s kennt den uns geläufigen Zinsbegriff nicht.

English translation: “Robinson's economy does not know the concept of interest familiar to us.”

Military control of production need not mean the end of private enterprise. In this 1916 essay, Emil Lederer argues that Germany’s wartime industrial mobilization strengthens rather than supersedes organized capitalism. Raw-material allocation, factory conversion, and military procurement bring firms under state direction, yet cartels and employers’ associations make that direction possible by carrying it out themselves. The tension lies in who gains from this coordination: arrangements that sustain production can also increase large firms’ profits and accelerate the displacement of smaller enterprises. Lederer offers a concrete way to distinguish administrative control from changes in ownership, while tracing how emergency cooperation between government and industry might outlast the war.

So war die deutsche Industriekriegswirtschaft Regelung privater Unternehmerstätigkeit.

English translation: “Thus Germany’s industrial war economy was the regulation of private entrepreneurial activity.”

Factories can be busy, profits high, and the nation poorer: this contradiction anchors Emil Lederer’s 1916 essay on Germany’s wartime economy. He examines industrial adaptation without mistaking successful military provisioning for the creation of national wealth. War loans circulate money, but do not replace consumed goods or neglected capital; state regulation coordinates supplies, but does not necessarily socialize production. His attention to unequal burdens sharpens these distinctions: an equal bread ration demands greater sacrifice from poorer households that cannot afford substitutes. Written during the war, the essay offers a concrete way to distinguish financial success from material depletion—and to ask who benefits from wartime demand and who must eventually pay for it.

A spirit hall’s paired divisions, distinctions between social and biological fathers, and kinship names that assign duties rather than measure genealogical distance give Richard Thurnwald concrete grounds for questioning familiar accounts of family and state. In this revised German version of his Bánaro study, based on fieldwork in New Guinea in 1913–15, he treats marriage, sexual relations, kinship, and political membership as intersecting but distinct arrangements. His detailed attention to reciprocal obligations also exposes the adjustments required when births, deaths, and infertility disrupt an ideally symmetrical order. Readers can follow how observations of buildings, naming practices, and ritual responsibilities become arguments against a simple evolutionary sequence from family to state—and distinguish that ethnographic evidence from Thurnwald’s more speculative historical reconstructions.

Die Verwandtschaft wird gruppiert nicht berechnet.

English translation: “Kinship is grouped, not calculated.”

Equal bread rations need not mean equal sacrifice: workers who depended heavily on bread lost more than households able to buy other foods. This tension gives Emil Lederer’s 1916 article on Germany’s wartime food supply its sharp social focus. He argues that price ceilings cannot secure affordable nourishment unless authorities also organize consumption and allocation. His analysis follows the connections that piecemeal controls overlook: rationing bread shifts demand to potatoes, while cheap grain can become expensive meat through livestock feeding. Distinguishing public control of distribution from socialism’s reorganization of production, Lederer asks what wartime administration actually accomplishes. The article offers a concrete account of why interconnected food markets resist isolated remedies—and why formally equal entitlements can leave unequal deprivation intact.

Restoring credit in occupied Belgium also meant making German military demands payable. Felix Somary examines this tension from inside the reorganization he helped design: a separate note-issuing department within the Société Générale de Belgique. His 1916 article explains how inaccessible reserves, frozen payments, and proliferating local currencies could paralyse banks whose assets appeared sound. It also defends arrangements that converted requisition claims into spendable francs and financed compulsory contributions through provincial borrowing. Somary’s technical attention to reserve backing and institutional liability sits alongside his justification of occupation policy. Readers can discover how safeguards for noteholders were negotiated against fiscal demands—and how financial reconstruction could serve both everyday exchange and the authority imposing the payments.

A home intended to secure a veteran’s family can become a trap if its legal protections prevent borrowing or departure. In this 1916 report, Karl Pribram makes that tension central to his proposals for soldiers’ homesteads. He distinguishes farms, which must generate their own livelihood, from residential homes supported by earnings elsewhere: they cannot sensibly share identical rules of debt, inheritance, and tenure. His approach joins family protection to economic viability, preserving foreclosure where credit requires it while seeking safeguards against speculation and arbitrary eviction. The reader encounters welfare reform in its concrete legal choices—who may inherit, when a creditor may enforce payment, and whether a widow can retain a tenancy—and discovers why secure possession need not mean unrestricted ownership.

How can private fortunes grow while an economy loses the means to produce? Writing in 1916, Emil Lederer makes this discrepancy central to the transition from war to peace. Money and war bonds can preserve owners’ claims even as machinery, raw materials, and inventories are exhausted; restoring financial confidence is therefore not the same as rebuilding productive capacity. His distinctive concern is how reconstruction’s material requirements interact with class distribution. Foreign borrowing sacrifices future income, while indirect taxation can weaken the workers’ purchasing power on which industrial recovery depends. By separating financial claims from real resources, Lederer shows why debt cancellation cannot undo wartime destruction—and why the choice of who must consume less shapes both the pace of recovery and the social order that emerges from it.

Scarcity alone cannot explain wartime inflation. In this 1916 lecture to the Hungarian Economic Society, Schlesinger tracks how war finance moves through the monetary circuit: reduced output lifts prices only once, but state spending met by newly created money returns as income, is spent again, and drives a progressive depreciation—an indirect tax that quietly strips a portion of purchasing power from every holder. Against this he sets the offsets, arguing that war loans neutralize nothing on their own but merely register private holders refraining from pressing their claims on goods. The agio, likewise, is no separate mystery but follows from domestic prices rising faster than foreign ones, with export prohibitions aggravating it and repatriated foreign assets braking the fall. Stabilizing the currency, he concludes, matters more than restoring any old parity.

Innerhalb einer kurzen Studie kann die wirtschaftliche Entwicklung nicht in all ihren Windungen verfolgt werden; darum kann ich hier nur ein stark stilisiertes Bild der Kriegswirtschaft bieten, dessen Konturen mit denen der Wirklichkeit in keinem einzigen Punkte übereinstimmen.

English translation: “Within a short study the economic development cannot be traced in all its windings; therefore I can here offer only a strongly stylized picture of the war economy, whose contours coincide with those of reality at not a single point.”

Industrial freedom and economic subordination to the state sit side by side in Karl Pribram’s programme for Austria’s postwar reconstruction. Published in 1916 from a wartime lecture, this article argues that competition, agricultural reform, taxation, and social protection must serve imperial cohesion and strategic security. Pribram advocates closer economic integration with Germany on geopolitical rather than ethnic grounds, while confronting the pressure German competition would place on Austrian producers. His proposals expose a concrete dilemma: the state needs productive initiative, yet debt, food security, and obligations to workers and war victims demand greater intervention. The reader encounters not a simple choice between markets and planning, but an attempt to assign both their place within a politically directed economy.

How can legal education foster independent judgement without leaving the ordinary, willing student unguided? In this joint 1916 reform pamphlet, five Graz professors—Otto von Dungern, Armin Ehrenzweig, Max Layer, Adolf Lenz, and Joseph A. Schumpeter—connect that question to the practical organization of Austrian university study. They challenge Roman law’s dominance and mechanical lecture transcription, arguing for sustained engagement with economics and public law alongside private law. Their distinctive concern is that intellectual freedom needs institutional support: fewer compulsory lectures, prepared discussions, specialist courses, and examinations that encourage continuous work. The proposal exposes a productive tension between guidance and autonomy, showing why changes in teaching methods cannot be separated from decisions about what students study, in what order, and how their understanding is tested.

Wealth can enlarge a nation’s power without securing its future—or its citizens’ well-being. In this expanded 1917 edition, Eugen Peter Schwiedland connects imperial rivalry with the domestic costs of industrial competition, arguing that accumulated riches cannot substitute for the human capacities that sustain them. Overseas dependence makes industrial states vulnerable to blockade; at home, rising production can coexist with unemployment, monopoly and the erosion of independent livelihoods. His perspective combines admiration for technical achievement with anxiety about acquisitiveness and weakened communal bonds. It also carries explicit imperial commitments, racial stereotypes and a partisan indictment of Britain’s wartime policy. The pamphlet offers a concrete encounter with the tension between seeking security through larger imperial formations and recognizing that economic expansion alone supplies neither social stability nor a shared purpose.