The archive.

Why should an economy that adjusts continually undergo sudden, general crises? This is Schumpeter’s decisive question in his 1909 joint review of studies by Ira Ryner, Minnie Throop England, and W. G. Longworthy Taylor. He welcomes Ryner’s and England’s historical evidence as indispensable to crisis theory, but devotes most attention to Taylor’s account of development driven by changing valuations and expectations, rather than simply by changes in existing goods. Schumpeter’s sympathy sharpens his objection: describing crises as readjustments does not explain why adjustment becomes acute instead of remaining gradual. The review offers a compact encounter with his standards of economic explanation—receptive to a theory linking credit, valuation, and development, yet unwilling to mistake an account of accumulating tension for an explanation of its sudden release.

A filled cigar box may count as capital—but does that tell us what capital does? In this 1909 review of Irving Fisher’s The Nature of Capital and Income, Joseph A. Schumpeter uses the contrast between physical goods and the monetary sums in business accounts to press a conceptual objection: capital must be understood through purchasing power and economic power, not merely material possessions. Yet his disagreement leaves room for admiration. He praises Fisher’s techniques of capital and income calculation and his distinction between a stock of wealth and a flow of services. This brief review lets readers see Schumpeter separate the practical gains of accounting analysis from the still-unsettled question of what capital is.

Can a history of value theory explain its subject without examining what economists use it to explain? This is Schumpeter’s sharpest objection in his brief review of Rudolph Kaulla’s survey of some 150 value theorists. He welcomes Kaulla’s account of the philosophical settings of earlier doctrines, especially the interplay of labour-value and use-value explanations before Adam Smith, and appreciates the attention to practically minded thinkers such as Davanzati and Barbon. Yet intellectual context alone is not enough: as economic theory develops, Schumpeter argues, doctrines of value become inseparable from the results they support. The review offers a compact distinction between tracing a doctrine’s origins and understanding its theoretical function.

With Schmoller presiding, two Austrian-school scholars address the Verein für Sozialpolitik on productivity and changes in the value of money—a reversal that Carl Menger makes the starting point of this 1909 newspaper article. Why had an association long resistant to economic theory begun to welcome it? Menger locates the pressure for change within historical and social-policy research itself: accumulated description demanded intellectual organization. Defending theory without dismissing empirical inquiry, he considers what this opening might mean for university teaching and younger economists. His response is less a declaration of victory than a call for impartial methodological debate. The article offers a pointed account of how theoretical independence might renew an academic institution and clarify policy disputes without becoming the instrument of a predetermined practical programme.

Society shapes what people desire, but it is not itself a wanting organism—so social value, Schumpeter argues, has no natural meaning in a competitive economy. Only a community that consciously acts as one, as under communism, could possess social utility curves and social marginal utilities. His real target is the optimistic distributive doctrine of Clark, Wieser and Carver, which holds that competition pays each factor what its service is worth to the community. Competitive prices, he counters, rest on individual valuations, ownership, bargaining position, and above all the given distribution of wealth; they cannot be read as the disguised verdict of an organized society. To fix values is not yet to fix prices, he insists, and social value survives only as a scientific fiction outside the communistic case.

For only individuals can feel wants.

Adolescence is neither childhood nor adulthood but a vulnerable passage, bodily growth, sexual maturation, emotional volatility, unfinished judgment, and industrial society, Schwiedland argues, throws working-class youth into adult labour, lodging-house life, drink, and disease before they can withstand them. He reads juvenile mortality, delinquency, and institutionalization as effects of environment rather than innate depravity, and faults courts and prisons for deepening the damage they claim to correct. Against this he sets a coordinated Jugenddienst: vocational guidance matched to health and aptitude rather than mere vacancies, placement offices, youth homes serving as substitute family, medical supervision, thrift schemes, and legal protection. The Jugendhort must feel like a large family, not a school or barracks. Care for the earning young, he closes, matters more than relief for those already broken, because the future lies with them.

Was in erster Linie benötigt wird, ist also ein Nachweis nicht der Stellen, sondern der richtigen Berufe.

English translation: “What is needed first and foremost, then, is a placement not of positions, but of the right occupations.”

Cannons, soldiers, and offices are only instruments; what makes them obeyed is habit, loyalty, prestige, and belief. Across six Salzburg lectures, Wieser corrects both liberal and revolutionary thought by refusing to treat power as the mere enemy of right: social life depends on organized powers—monarchy, army, church, press, capital, labor, public opinion—and the real evil is Übermacht, the point where necessary leadership hardens into oppression. Beginning from Lassalle's claim that constitutions rest on actual force, he deepens it into a sociology of inner power, of leadership and following, of the law of the small number. Law emerges not as power's negation but its ordering, and freedom, against Manchester individualism, becomes a means to the general welfare rather than an absolute principle.

Zur vollen Macht gehört das Recht, zum vollen Recht gehört die Macht.

English translation: “To full power belongs right; to full right belongs power.”

Can a theory of value explain enduring purchasing power rather than merely the outcome of current supply and demand? In this short review, Robert Zuckerkandl examines Bernhard Rost’s attempt to supplement subjective value theory through socially shaped valuations and a concept of lasting exchange value. He separates his appreciation of Rost’s history of economic doctrines from his doubts about the proposed theory. His objection concerns exposition as well as conviction: complicated terminology, compressed reasoning and missing examples leave the reader unsure whether the central claims have even been understood. The review offers a compact encounter with the difficulty of distinguishing lasting value from fluctuating prices—and with a critic who withholds assent without claiming to have supplied a full refutation.

Can the premise that labor alone creates value support a defense of rent and interest against socialism? Robert Zuckerkandl singles out this tension in his review of G. W. Schiele’s account of the “natural” origins of distributive incomes. His concise exposition makes especially clear Schiele’s proposed wage benchmark: what workers could earn in small independent enterprises rather than wage employment. Zuckerkandl appreciates the book’s coherence but distinguishes clarity from proof, observing that its avoidance of controversy leaves disputed claims insufficiently defended. The review offers a compact encounter with an unusual labor-based justification of property income—and records Schiele’s further attempt to use his wage theory to justify reserving employment on German soil for German workers.

Austria-Hungary maintained gold payments without legally obliging its central bank to redeem notes. In this 1909 article, republished here in 2012, Ludwig von Mises asks what that gap between law and practice actually allowed the Bank to do. Its holdings of foreign bills earned interest and economized on bullion, but did they also permit lower interest rates and independence from international money markets? Mises argues that they did not: foreign-exchange management reorganized gold payments rather than escaping their constraints. His concrete account of bill purchases, gold exports, and discount-rate decisions distinguishes an economical reserve technique from monetary autonomy. The case for compulsory redemption consequently turns less on changing banking operations than on making an existing commitment credible to foreign creditors.

High prices can encourage new investment long after enough productive capacity is already under construction: this is the mechanism Emil Lederer examines in his short review of Albert Aftalion’s account of general overproduction. He credits Aftalion with clarifying how lengthy production processes delay the appearance of excess supply, turning apparent scarcity into a stimulus for crisis. Yet Lederer’s approval has a concrete limit: an explanation that assumes free competition leaves the effects of cartel formation unexamined. The review brings into focus the gap between a persuasive account of industrial timing and a theory adequate to the actual organization of markets.

Damaging allegations are not yet a political argument. In this brief 1910 review of Fritz Stephan Neumann’s Die Sozialdemokratie als Arbeitgeberin und Unternehmerin, Emil Lederer objects both to unverifiable citations and to the assumption that reported facts can substitute for a critique of Social Democracy’s principles. His sharper turn concerns persuasion: even an agitation pamphlet, exempt from scholarly expectations, defeats its purpose by underestimating its readers. Against fleeting electoral effects, Lederer sets the sustained influence he attributes to Lassalle and Bebel—writers read by German workers precisely for their intellectual substance, without free distribution by employers. The review offers a compact distinction between circulating hostility and making an argument that lasts.