The archive.

Relative industrial peace can conceal a shift in the balance of power. In this 1913 chronicle of German employers’ organizations, Emil Lederer examines how the merger of two national employer centers, strike insurance, and employment exchanges strengthened coordination against organized labor without necessarily provoking immediate confrontation. His perspective is institutional rather than confined to the tally of strikes won or wages gained: a settlement favorable to workers might still consolidate employers’ longer-term position. Especially pointed is his account of employer-friendly workers’ associations, whose apparent ability to secure concessions, he argues, depends on the independent unions they seek to weaken. Attentive to incomplete statistics and failures of employer solidarity, Lederer offers readers concrete ways to distinguish organizational strength from membership totals, and negotiated calm from reconciliation.

Measures designed to protect independent craftsmen and shopkeepers can change what their independence means. In this 1913 social-policy chronicle, Emil Lederer examines that tension through Mittelstand politics in Germany and Austria. Cooperative bidding for public contracts promises work for small workshops while potentially placing them under centralized technical direction; fixed-price branded goods offer retailers security while reducing their control over price and quality. Germany’s partial accommodation to industry contrasts with Austria’s stronger protectionist demands, but Lederer finds dependence beneath both programmes of preservation. His distinctive concern is the gap between representative claims and practical organizational capacity. The chronicle shows how state assistance, commercial coordination, and political alliances might sustain small proprietors precisely by transforming the autonomy they seek to defend.

Calling society a “social body” does not make mechanics an explanation of social life. In this brief review of Haret’s Mécanique sociale, Schumpeter draws a sharp boundary between mathematical economic analysis and the borrowing of physical concepts without investigating social facts. His charge is not that Haret reaches false conclusions, but that he reaches no substantive conclusions at all: saying that balanced causes produce inactivity adds little to our knowledge. The review offers a compact view of Schumpeter defending precision against its imitation, asking what formal deductions can establish when the “forces” and “movements” they describe remain undefined.

Useful facts do not necessarily support the theory offered alongside them. That distinction governs Schumpeter’s brief 1913 review of T. Lloyd’s The Theory of Distribution and Consumption. He faults Lloyd for presenting familiar propositions about consumption and subjective value as discoveries, and questions why a subjective economics should necessarily require an inductive method. Yet he credits the book’s factual survey, particularly its treatment of education, resource conservation, and banking for farmers and small traders. The review offers a compact example of Schumpeter’s critical discrimination: theoretical inadequacy need not erase informational value, while neither usefulness to lay readers nor likely success with an imperial-minded public establishes theoretical merit.

The businessman takes it as self-evident that credit and available money govern the rate of interest; orthodox theory insists interest springs only from the scarcity of real capital. Schumpeter cuts between them. Defining the monetary constitution broadly, to include coinage, bank credit, central-bank policy, collateral, and crisis lending, he asks where money can actually move interest and locates it in one case: credit issued without prior saving. Such bank-created purchasing power works as a forced saving, letting entrepreneurs bid resources away from routine uses, so that interest becomes bound to the credit-financed process of development rather than to a timeless yield of capital. Banks emerge as gatekeepers authorizing which ventures command resources. He partly rehabilitates Locke, Law, and Montesquieu against Hume and Smith, while likening a lowered interest rate to morphine, relief without cure.

Gibt es eine Beziehung zwischen Kapitalzins und Geldverfassung oder, anders, kann der Kapitalzins durch die Geldverfassung beeinflußt werden?

English translation: “Is there a relationship between the rate of interest on capital and the monetary constitution—or, put differently, can the rate of interest on capital be influenced by the monetary constitution?”

Writing as a fellow textbook author, Hermann von Schullern zu Schrattenhofen finds in Bertrand Nogaro’s Éléments d’Économie politique a teaching aim he shares: clear, concise economics grounded in practical questions of money, banking, stock exchanges, and international trade. His brief 1914 review moves from this pedagogical approval to a more specific conceptual interest: how Nogaro connects individual economic activities with organized social life while setting aside the question of governmental intervention. Schullern offers no extended critique; instead, his selection of characteristic formulations lets readers see what he values in an introductory economics text, and how practical instruction can coexist with an explicit account of the discipline’s scope.

Can a shipowner’s pursuit of profit ever conflict with public welfare? In this brief 1914 review of the substantially expanded third edition of Camillo Supino’s La Navigazione dal punto di vista economico, Hermann von Schullern zu Schrattenhofen reports Supino’s categorical answer: private advantage and social welfare coincide. The rationale joins commercial growth to national wealth, military strength, and international standing. Schullern presents this alignment without objection, moving from the captain’s duty of self-sacrifice to the economic interests of shipowners. His appreciative assessment singles out factual and statistical evidence and current coverage of state subsidies. The review offers a compact encounter with an economic account of shipping in which enterprise, professional duty, and state power appear mutually reinforcing rather than competing.

Can technical progress postpone diminishing returns without abolishing them? This is the most pointed issue Hermann von Schullern zu Schrattenhofen selects in his brief, favorable review of Carlo di Nola’s agrarian economics. Schullern foregrounds di Nola’s account of production as an interaction among factors, rather than a question of land alone: changing their combinations can open new possibilities even as the usefulness of an individual factor declines. His selection also draws attention to a concrete distinction easily obscured in debates about land distribution—the difference between the size of a property holding and that of a working farm. The review offers an appreciative contemporary appraisal of these propositions, not an extended test of their validity.

Public work need not be invented when unemployment strikes; it can be scheduled before the crisis arrives. In this brief 1914 review of E. Bernhard’s book, Eugen Peter Schwiedland presents the case for moving ordinary public contracts into periods of weak business rather than resorting to costly emergency relief works. His emphasis connects workers’ continued earnings and occupational skills with the practical economies available to public purchasers. The revealing qualification is budgetary: prevention requires appropriations that remain available longer and reserves that make expenditure flexible. The review thus offers a compact account of how rules governing public money can enable—or obstruct—the timely use of public demand against unemployment.

Insurance for salaried employees appears here not simply as expanded social protection, but as a distinct policy for the middle classes. In this brief 1914 review, Emil Lederer presents Maurice Bellom’s comparison of German and Austrian insurance legislation as a sign of growing French interest in salaried employees. His emphasis falls on Bellom’s treatment of private-sector employees as a new constituency for middle-class policy, with insurance purposes sharply distinguished from those of workers’ insurance. Without explicitly endorsing that distinction, Lederer records how social classification shapes the case for protection.

Wages shared with kin and loans repaid through service give this brief review its central tension: reciprocity sustains social ties but can also enforce dependence. Reviewing volumes I and III of Richard Thurnwald’s South Sea research, Eugen Peter Schwiedland concentrates on the economic relations described in the ethnographic material. He highlights how common access to land coexists with ownership of plantations and produce, and how chiefly loans can bind a borrower’s children to labour obligations. His selection brings property, credit and political authority into the same frame without treating money as an independent source of power. The review offers a compact encounter with Schwiedland’s economic reading of Thurnwald, especially his attention to the point where mutual obligation becomes coercion.

Public employment offices could serve the very intermediaries whose abuses they were meant to curb. This is the tension Eugen Peter Schwiedland draws from Sigismund Gargas’s study of labour placement in Galicia. In his 1914 review, offices established in only 24 of 80 districts appear not merely understaffed or ineffective, but sometimes leased out or subordinated to private agencies while receiving public subsidies. Schwiedland’s concern is institutional independence: better provision requires provincial administration and the withdrawal of officials’ protection from powerful agents. His qualified appraisal—welcoming the study while faulting its omission of the law’s text and its unclear passages—offers a compact view of how scrutiny of local administration could inform concrete proposals for labour-market reform.