The archive.

Rather than assail Marx from without, this 1906 essay tests Capital against its own foundations, isolating four connected pressure points: the law of value, the analytical bracketing of competition, the derivation of a uniform profit rate, and the split between industrial and merchant capital. Lederer's wedge is Marx's own admission that labor creates value only in the right quantity and proportion relative to social need — a concession that, he argues, already pushes the labor theory toward marginal utility, demand, scarcity, and monopoly power. Following Böhm-Bawerk, and invoking Menger against explaining social facts from individual motives, he charges that Marx assumed capital's equalizing competition rather than proving it, and that merchant capital shapes prices exactly as industrial capital does. Exploitation may be a historical fact; it cannot be deduced from labor as the sole source of value.

Nicht die Arbeit an sich ist es also, welche Werte schafft, sondern nur die in bestimmter Proportion und Quantität auf die gesellschaftlichen Bedürfnisse verwendete Arbeit.

English translation: “It is thus not labor as such that creates values, but only labor applied in a definite proportion and quantity to the needs of society.”

A harmful policy is not necessarily a cause of economic crisis. That distinction sharpens Schumpeter’s 1906 joint review of Bernhard Rost and Otto Karmin: trade treaties blamed by one author are credited by the other with limiting the damage. Schumpeter tests both accounts without offering a finished crisis theory of his own. Against Rost, he separates speculation, agricultural weakness, and stock-exchange restrictions from an adequate explanation of the disturbance; against Karmin, he asks whether a mismatch between production and consumption explains anything until its causes are established. The review offers a compact encounter with Schumpeter’s standards of economic argument: historical description, political grievance, and proposals for socialist coordination must each do more than name the problem they claim to solve.

An unchanged tax rate can conceal a decisive change in burden. In this 1906 journal article, Frank Albert Fetter examines New York’s replacement of an annual half-percent mortgage levy with a one-time recording charge. He distinguishes practical relief from sound tax policy: the new charge costs less, but retains what he regards as the conceptual defect of taxing paper claims on income. His account connects legislative pressure with delayed payments, divergent interests among lenders, and evidence that even widely evaded taxes can raise borrowers’ interest rates. Readers can discover why weak initial receipts did not necessarily mean a tax was uncollectible—and why repeal attracted opponents anxious to act before government became dependent on its revenue.

The recording tax is qualitatively as bad as the annual tax, but imposes a very much lighter burden.

An insurance contribution affordable to industry as a whole may still alter competition between firms. This tension drives Felix Somary’s 1906 article on Austria’s proposed old-age and invalidity insurance. Using German company accounts as a benchmark, he distinguishes modest aggregate costs from the heavier relative burden on smaller, less profitable, or labor-intensive enterprises. His statistical approach also exposes the limits of its evidence: inconsistent reporting narrows the sample, while balance sheets cannot show who ultimately bears the expense. Somary expects little reduction in aggregate profits but argues that reform could accelerate industrial concentration in Austria. The article offers a concrete way to examine how social insurance can be economically manageable overall yet consequential for particular firms, especially when profits fall.

Japan had won its rank among the great powers by force of arms — but was the far-off empire now an economic world power as well? Prompted by Suke Yoshi Ito's World Year-book and the Russo-Japanese War, Inama-Sternegg answers with careful balance. Reading Meiji trade as a modernization sequence — early import surpluses buying Western machinery, later export surpluses built on silk and disciplined production — he denies that totals alone confer world-economic rank, and dismisses fears of a closed, race-based East Asian bloc as fantasy, with China, not Japan, as the region's true center of gravity. The essay then hardens into theory: Weltwirtschaft is no evolutionary stage beyond the national economy but a field of standardized goods, routes, capital, and central markets whose prices command production — and Britain's rejection of Chamberlain's imperial preference becomes its decisive proof.

Es ist also klar: die Rolle, welche irgendein Staat in der Weltwirtschaft spielen kann, hängt ab von dem Einsatz, den er in die Gemeinschaft der durch die Weltwirtschaft verbundenen und auf einander angewiesenen Staaten einbringen kann.

English translation: “It is therefore clear: the role that any state can play in the world economy depends on the contribution it can bring into the community of states linked together and mutually dependent through the world economy.”

A corporate survey can count companies accurately and still misrepresent a depression. In this 1906 review of Prussia’s joint-stock company statistics for 1899 and 1902, Felix Somary asks what official figures actually measure when they equate dividends with profits and leave bankruptcy losses out of account. His criticism is concrete: such choices make depressed conditions look healthier and blur the contrast with prosperity. Yet he also finds evidence worth interpreting, distinguishing capital growth from mere incorporation and ordinary borrowing from dangerous indebtedness. The review offers a compact encounter with Somary’s economic judgement: neither company counts nor debt ratios explain much without attention to industrial conditions, financing structures, and failed enterprises. His qualified appreciation of the survey shows how statistical usefulness can coexist with serious methodological defects.

Prometheus, the metal ages, Aristotle's fabled automatic looms, Gutenberg's press, the steam engine — the standard trophies of progress are marshalled here only to be turned against the myth that technology drives history. Inama-Sternegg argues that every technical advance is the accompaniment of a broader cultural movement, not its cause, and that whether an invention creates an epoch or merely lets one become effective must be tested case by case. Slavery, he insists, ended with the spread of Christian civility, not with the mechanical loom; only the nineteenth century earns a genuinely technical stamp. The polemical target is Ulrich Wendt, who made technology the beginning and end of human development. Against him the essay reverses the hierarchy: it is the inquiring human mind that sets technology its problems, never the reverse.

„Es gibt kein höheres geistiges Leben ohne technische Entwicklung, aber auch keine höhere Technik ohne geistige und moralische Fortschritte."

English translation: “There is no higher intellectual life without technical development, but neither is there any higher technology without intellectual and moral progress.”

Can an account of skilled labour improve Marxist value theory without answering objections to its foundations? In this brief 1906 review of H. Deutsch’s Qualifizierte Arbeit und Kapitalismus, Joseph A. Schumpeter carefully separates those judgements. He singles out Deutsch’s distinction between the teacher’s production of instruction and the apprentice’s productive consumption of it: learning becomes a separate process, not simply the teacher’s manufacture of skilled labour-power. Yet approval of this refinement does not imply acceptance of Marx’s premises, or of Deutsch’s prediction that complete mechanization will reverse the displacement of skilled workers. The review offers a compact example of Schumpeter’s critical discrimination: recognizing an advance within a theory while leaving its underlying vulnerabilities exposed.

Two ancient states, Meiji Japan and Porfirian Mexico, threw themselves into modernization within a single generation — an experiment, as the essay puts it, performed on the living body of an entire people. Inama-Sternegg sets the two side by side: railways, post, telegraph, banking, foreign trade, and above all merchant shipping. Mexico's advance under Díaz is real and, emerging from fifty years of civil war, deserving of admiration; but Japan rises faster, denser, and more intensely, building its own fleet where Mexico must ship through foreign carriers. The decisive line is drawn not by infrastructure but by sovereign economic agency — active trade conducted in one's own right rather than mere appearance on the world's markets. The parallel closes over the Pacific ports that might one day bind the two.

Mexiko erscheint wohl mit seinen Produkten auf den Weltmärkten, aber nicht im aktiven Handel.

English translation: “Mexico does appear with its products on the world markets, but not in active trade. Quite different has the economic situation in Japan always been. The country is in the highest degree active and enterprising.”

Written for the centenary of John Stuart Mill's birth, this commemorative essay measures a thinker by his continuing force rather than by novelty. Menger's Mill is a systematizer, not a revolutionary: in both logic and political economy he found abstract compendia on one side and a rich monographic literature on the other, and his gift lay in gathering, ordering, and returning scholarship to practical use. The System of Logic clarified the aims and errors of empirical inquiry, though Menger faults its overreach in extending natural-scientific method to the moral sciences. The Principles modernized English economics, carried it back from Ricardian abstraction toward Adam Smith, and drew money, foreign trade, colonization, and the social question into its frame. In the end Mill appears as neither forgotten classic nor revolutionary founder, but a philosophically trained mediator whose decisive move was to bring dispersed research into clear form.

Die Lebensarbeit John Stuart Mills war in erster Linie der Methodologie und der National-Oekonomie gewidmet.

English translation: “John Stuart Mill's life work was devoted primarily to methodology and political economy.”

When does an explanation of economic value become a prescription for economic justice? In this brief review of Johannes Leonhard, Schumpeter credits an account of utility and scarcity while disputing its claimed novelty after Jevons. His sharper objection concerns Leonhard’s move from explaining value to declaring production and consumption “correct” under conditions of freedom and mutual accommodation. Schumpeter insists that exact economic theory investigates facts rather than establishes ideals of justice. The review offers a compact instance of his critical discrimination: agreement with parts of a value theory does not mean accepting the social prescriptions attached to it.

To answer the socialist charge of exploitation with a theorem rather than a sermon—that is the ambition Schumpeter reconstructs in John Bates Clark's theory of distribution, presented here in deliberately uncritical exposition. In Clark's static state, abstracting from population growth, accumulation and technical change, free competition awards each factor the share of product it creates: to labor, capital and land its own. The argument turns on a distinctive capital concept—a durable, mobile fund embodied in perishable capital-goods, with land folded in—and on extending the law of diminishing returns from land to capital and symmetrically to labor, so that final productivity governs wages and interest alike. Schumpeter lets the assumptions show plainly, for the promised unity of wages, interest and rent depends on treating equal factor-units as equal productive contributions.

Clark's These ist nun die, daß in diesem statischen Zustande jeder Produktionsfaktor beim Walten freier Konkurrenz jenen Anteil am Produkte erhält, den er hervorbringt, daß also der Arbeit, wie dem Kapital und dem Lande, ihr, beziehungsweise sein Produkt zufällt.

English translation: “Clark's thesis is now this: that in this static state every factor of production, under the reign of free competition, receives that share of the product which it brings forth—so that to labor, as to capital and to land, its respective product falls.”