The archive.

Could an association advising governments on labour protection also promote workers’ collective bargaining without compromising its neutrality? This question gives Karl Přibram’s 1911 report on the Lugano assembly its distinctive tension. International agreements promised to prevent protective legislation from placing domestic firms at a competitive disadvantage; low-paid home workers, however, needed more than restrictions on working conditions. Přibram follows the association’s contested move toward union organization and legally supported wage agreements, interpreting it as a possible turning point from reform imposed above to reform sustained by workers’ participation. Writing for Austrian reformers, he shows both the leverage international cooperation could provide and the limits of uniform safeguards where protection threatened livelihoods. The report offers a concrete view of how legislative expertise and workers’ self-help became competing—and potentially complementary—approaches to labour reform.

Economic recovery need not weaken employers’ solidarity: in this chronicle of German and Austrian employers’ organizations in 1910–1911, Emil Lederer argues that established associations could consolidate their power even as membership growth slowed. His concern is how that power worked—in lockouts, control over recruitment, and interventions in social insurance. Reading organizational statistics against conflicting press reports, he distinguishes public declarations of unity from the evidence of collective discipline. He also challenges claims that insurance contributions impose excessive burdens: comparing them with distributed profits, he argues, cannot establish their effects on production or profitability. The result is a concrete account of how disputes over wages become struggles over workplace authority, and how apparently technical choices in accounting and welfare design enter the politics of employer influence.

When does mathematical abstraction clarify economic choice, and when does it change the object being explained? In this 1911 review of Schumpeter’s Das Wesen und der Hauptinhalt der theoretischen Nationalökonomie, Hans Mayer tests equilibrium theory against concrete difficulties: possessions valued without any desire to acquire more, needs that end abruptly, and goods whose usefulness disappears when divided. Defending Austrian marginal-utility theory while acknowledging its unfinished work, he challenges the identification of subjective value with demand price and the requirement that equilibrium equalize marginal utilities. His objection is not to quantitative analysis itself, but to assumptions that cannot be relaxed without losing the proposed explanation. The review offers a precise encounter between two conceptions of theoretical economics: functional interdependence and explanation grounded in needs, valuations, and choices.

A national economy, on this account, is no mere sum of households but an organism of interdependent economic units bound by territory, law, and language. Conceived as a study aid for German-speaking universities, this compendium moves from the anatomy of needs and goods through a long historical survey, Greek and Roman antiquity, mercantilism, physiocracy, Adam Smith and the classical school, socialism from Owen to Marx, and the cooperative movement, before building its theoretical core on subjective value and marginal utility (Grenznutzen). Schullern-Schrattenhofen follows Menger in deriving money from the needs of exchange rather than from legislation, defends metallic currency against token theories, treats price as the meeting of subjective valuations, and closes on credit. Objective in method, yet frank about its own commitments.

Aus dem Gesagten dürfte sich wohl ergeben haben, daß jede von den aufgezählten Besitzkategorien ihre bestimmte Aufgabe zu erfüllen, daß aber die wichtigsten die den mittleren Gruppen angehörenden sind.

English translation: “From what has been said, it should be evident that each of the enumerated categories of property has its particular task to fulfill, but that the most important are those belonging to the middle groups.”

Can a theory of subjective value defend the entrepreneur’s income without ruling out social reform? In this second article on the Austrian school, Siegmund Feilbogen follows Karl Menger’s analysis from scarce goods to the valuation of productive services, showing why consumers’ needs, rather than production costs alone, govern economic value. His exposition is sympathetic but not uncritical: he detects a risk of circularity in calculating each productive factor’s return by subtracting the returns of the others. The political applications are distinctly Feilbogen’s. He argues that employment benefits both parties, yet allows compulsory worker insurance to transfer part of the employer’s gain to labor. Readers can thus distinguish Menger’s analytical method from the contested social conclusions that an engaged interpreter draws from it.

Abstract value theory can seem remote from strikes, wages, and economic change; Feilbogen argues that faulty theory can distort their interpretation. Writing for French readers in this first installment on the Austrian school, he defends subjective valuation without treating it as a substitute for historical and statistical inquiry. His account places theoretical innovation within concrete conflicts: German historicism’s suspicion of deduction, the challenge of Marx’s value theory, and Austrian resistance to German scholarly dominance. The result is a qualified defense, attentive both to Menger’s achievement and to the school’s unfinished explanatory work. An embedded letter from Menger adds personal evidence about his reading and intellectual formation. Readers can discover why Feilbogen thought Austrian abstraction necessary—and why he refused to regard it as sufficient.

An accounting unit without a circulating coin poses a pointed challenge to a theory that defines money chiefly through exchange. In this third article on the Austrian school, Siegmund Feilbogen uses the Hamburg mark banko to question whether Menger’s explanation of money’s origins adequately establishes its essential function. His broader assessment is similarly sympathetic without being deferential: Menger secures an independent place for economic theory, but individual motives and exchange relations do not, Feilbogen argues, exhaust its subject. The article offers a concrete encounter with the uses and limits of abstraction—why simplified assumptions can explain economic relations without describing actual conduct, and why collective institutions and human well-being still demand attention beyond those assumptions.

Could Switzerland honour its international railway commitments without binding its entire network to perpetual foreign privileges? In this 1911 article, Siegmund Feilbogen defends rejection of the proposed Saint-Gothard convention while resisting both financial retaliation and disruption of European transit. His distinction is precise: material concessions may be negotiable, but permanent limits on political independence are not. Reading the earlier treaties against demands for repayment of foreign subsidies, he argues that state acquisition need not extinguish existing guarantees—or enlarge them into rights over all Swiss railways. The article offers a concrete encounter with treaty interpretation under unequal diplomatic pressure, showing how an ambiguous provision about railway mergers could, in Feilbogen’s view, turn a limited infrastructure obligation into an indefinite constraint on national autonomy.

Industrial growth need not eclipse agriculture, nor commercial expansion displace concern for national independence: these are the balances Siegmund Feilbogen values in his short review of A. de Navay de Földeak’s study of Hungary’s economic role. He praises the author’s statistical precision and restraint, drawing on Levasseur’s preface to place industrial gains alongside the country’s continuing dependence on the land. His strongest endorsement, however, goes to the connection between material development and the preservation of national rights. Five French-backed industrial enterprises give concrete support to his approval of Földeak’s appeal to French merchants. The review shows how Feilbogen’s judgement of an economic survey joins measured assessment of development to sympathy for Hungarian autonomy and Franco-Hungarian trade.

Ranged across a season's new books—methodology, Marx and Christianity, money, capital, Australian policy, the history of note-issuing banks—these review-notices double as a manifesto for how economics should be done. Schumpeter judges each work by whether it solves problems rather than parading method or ideology: every theory, he holds, must be known by its fruits, and declaring allegiance to theory is not itself theoretical work. He defends marginal utility against the charge of being capitalist in tendency, praises Davenport's Value and Distribution for its unadorned analysis and its treatment of capital as an unspecialized loan-fund, and admires Fisher's Rate of Interest for binding theory to statistics—while denying that time-preference alone can explain interest, since interest must also depend on the growing stream of future goods. Ruhland's moralized system, which reduces capital to greed, he sharply rejects.

Es gilt Probleme zu lösen, nicht Methoden zu diskutieren.

English translation: “The task is to solve problems, not to discuss methods.”

Extensive documentation does not necessarily make a movement intelligible. In this short review of Anton Acht’s Der moderne französische Syndikalismus, Emil Lederer credits the book with bringing French syndicalist sources—especially Pouget’s writings and movement periodicals—to German readers. Yet he finds that Acht’s collection of statements fails to form a coherent picture, while his criticism of syndicalist theories remains shallow. The interest lies in Lederer’s measured distinction between access to evidence and understanding: he recognizes the usefulness of Acht’s compilation without mistaking breadth of coverage for interpretation. This compact assessment shows what Lederer expected beyond a source-based account of revolutionary and reformist syndicalism: systematic orientation and searching criticism.

In this brief 1911 review, Emil Lederer values Alfred Manes’s Sozialversicherung for keeping an introductory handbook abreast of expanding insurance provision and pending legislation. He notes its attention to widows and orphans, salaried employees, and unemployment alongside established workers’ insurance, and particularly welcomes its clear account of the draft Reich Insurance Code. The notice offers a compact glimpse of Lederer’s practical judgement: breadth of coverage matters here together with legislative currency and clarity of exposition.