The archive.

What does it mean to call income distribution a natural law? In this brief 1901 review of John Bates Clark’s The Distribution of Wealth, Hermann von Schullern zu Schrattenhofen singles out a crucial qualification: Clark’s law describes a static tendency, not an unconditional account of actual incomes. Schullern places Clark’s marginal-productivity theory near the Austrian school, while noting that fuller engagement with Böhm-Bawerk appears reserved for a projected work on dynamic distribution. Explicitly declining detailed criticism, he offers a compact theoretical orientation rather than a verdict. The notice lets readers see how a contemporary reviewer located Clark’s account of wages and interest within an ongoing debate over production, value, and the distinction between capital and capital goods.

Thanks, a scheduling conflict, and a matter left to an intermediary — the business of this autograph letter, signed at Vienna on 3 November 1901, is procedural rather than doctrinal. Philippovich records regret that a planned Monday attendance is impossible because of a clashing evening obligation and committee session, in a hand the transcription only partly recovers; several names resist reading. Yet the note's texture is telling: a parenthetical 'Farbenverbot!' hints at an agenda whose urgency displaces the proposed meeting. As archival evidence rather than economics, the letter shows one of Austria's leading political economists not as the author of doctrine but as a single node in the dense institutional traffic of Vienna around 1901, bound into committees, personal networks, and civic obligation.

Bester Dank für Ihre Bemühungen.

English translation: “Best thanks for your efforts.”

A tax that aims at a year's income faces a stubborn obstacle: the income cannot be known until the year has closed, by which time the taxpayer's ability to pay may already have changed. Meyer devotes this contribution to Austrian tax law and income theory to that temporal gap, dissecting the legal devices, prior-year assessment, three-year averaging, estimated current income, that substitute for the impossible simultaneity of income and tax. He is sharpest on the beginning and ending fragments of income, where sources that arise or cease mid-period escape or overpay tax, and he turns his critique against the Prussian source theory, which cannot handle successive income drawn from a single source. A redrafted paragraph 156 closes the argument, and behind it lies a claim about income's double meaning, whole and parts.

Die Identität des Wirtschaftsjahres und des Steuerjahres schwebt uns als kategorischer Imperativ vor.

English translation: “The identity of the economic year and the tax year stands before us as a categorical imperative.”

From the Dutch prohibitions on short-selling through England's Barnard's Act to the French campaigns against agiotage, the law has tried and failed for centuries to suppress speculative dealing on the exchanges. Rosenberg traces that comparative history to explain the German and Austrian 'gaming objection' — the doctrine, received into §764 of the new Civil Code, by which pure differential contracts settled only on price movements could be denied enforcement as mere wagers. He shows how the Reichsgericht and, more strictly, the Austrian Supreme Court inferred gambling intent from a speculator's wealth, occupation, and trading pattern, and dissects the 'pathological' commission agent who executes real trades yet hides the true price to skim a concealed cut. The doctrine, he concludes, is judicial self-defense that fails economically, and he ends by proposing to regulate commission houses instead.

Die Geschichte der die Börsengeschäfte betreffenden Gesetzgebung ist zugleich eine Geschichte der Nutzlosigkeit dieser Gesetze, soweit sie den Börsenverkehr beschränken wollten.

English translation: “The history of legislation concerning stock-exchange transactions is at the same time a history of the uselessness of these laws, insofar as they sought to restrict exchange dealings.”

In Prussia the income-tax reform of 1891 had uncovered unexpected reserves of taxable wealth; in Austria the first assessment of the new personal income tax merely met modest forecasts and fell short of every wider hope. Wieser's diagnosis is that the fault lies not in the tax but in its execution — administrative, statistical, and social. Visible urban incomes are reached while vast portions of rural and especially agricultural income escape, because officials and farmers alike confuse the income tax with the old cadastral land tax. Measuring Austria against the poorer eastern provinces of Prussia, he estimates that hundreds of thousands of rural taxpayers went unassessed and that honest valuation would have yielded far more. Conceived justly, he concludes, the tax is only half just — half unjust in execution — and falls hardest on the open, compliant urban taxpayer.

In Österreich ist das Ergebnis der neuen Personal-Einkommensteuer eine Enttäuschung.

English translation: “In Austria, the results of the new personal income tax are a disappointment.”

Moving work out of cramped homes could improve health—but could shared premises also secure better wages without costing workers their orders? In this 1901 article, Eugen Peter Schwiedland examines union-supported workshops in Switzerland and Vienna as a practical alternative to isolated home production. His focus is the distinction between sharing facilities and becoming an independent producer cooperative. Communal rooms, tools, and instruction could strengthen workers’ bargaining capacity while preserving their existing commercial ties; assistance conditional on independent production could instead provoke employers to withdraw orders. Drawing on municipal proposals and workshop experience, Schwiedland shows why rent subsidies and machinery were not enough: viable cooperation also required enforceable wage rates and dependable work. The article makes the institutional choices—and commercial vulnerabilities—behind a concrete labour reform unusually tangible.

A worker could own tools, employ assistants, and work at home yet remain dependent on a merchant for orders and access to markets. In this 1901 article, Eugen Peter Schwiedland asks why such formal independence should exclude workers in the putting-out system from compulsory sickness insurance. Focusing on Austria and comparing German legislation, he tests legal categories against concrete productive relationships, notably in Viennese furniture-making, where a small workshop might function as an external factory department. His reform proposal confronts the practical difficulties of dispersed employment: seasonal earnings, several employers, and payments that cover materials as well as labour. The article shows how an argument for social protection becomes a problem of identifying responsibility—and how insurance might follow economic dependence beyond the employer’s premises.

What political claims can income-tax figures support in a nationally divided society? In this 1901 article, Friedrich von Wieser uses Bohemia’s tax assessments to challenge population numbers as the measure of German and Czech political standing. His German-national perspective turns evidence of enterprise, skilled work, and taxable income into an argument for German influence. Yet the measurements exclude most low earners, while assigning wealth to national groups requires estimates, especially in mixed cities. Prague sharpens the tension: its growth as a Czech intellectual and organizational centre complicates any simple equation between German wealth and political power. The article offers a concrete case of economic statistics becoming political advocacy—and of the gap between what fiscal records measure and what an economist asks them to justify.

A cash payment for taxes or a loss through theft tests what double-entry bookkeeping actually explains: not every entry can be understood as an exchange of one value for another. In this jointly authored reply to Seidler’s criticism of their Bilanz und Steuer, Richard Reisch and Josef Clemens Kreibig defend two coordinated series of accounts—one recording the components of wealth, the other net wealth and results. Their central puzzle is why an increase appears as a debit in some accounts and a credit in others. Through concrete disputes over expenses, capital, and losses, they show why balanced postings require more than a rule of paired entries. The reply offers a focused way to examine how bookkeeping connects movements of assets with changes in wealth and profit.

Bostedo had claimed that saving, as commonly understood, has no influence whatever on the formation of capital; this reply, read here in an English rendering of Böhm-Bawerk's 1901 text whose German original remains unidentified, sets out to show why the denial mistakes money phenomena for real industrial relations. Saving, he argues, has two sides rather than two meanings: the negative act of not consuming, and the positive consequence as banks channel deposits into mortgages, railroads, factories, and machines. Against Bostedo's claim that universal thrift must contract production, Böhm-Bawerk insists that a fall in present consumption is not a fall in production generally, only a shift of demand from immediate enjoyment toward capital goods and longer, roundabout processes. Deferred consumption, illustrated by Crusoe's stored provisions and by the law of large numbers, becomes the capital structure through which later enjoyment is made possible.

I simply direct attention to the other side of the process, to the positive consequences of the negative first step, which is the not-consuming.

Delivered as a rectorial address that turns Adolf Exner's plea for political education into a wider sociology of power, this lecture denies that public life can be decoded from legal formulas or liberal slogans. Wieser's target is contract theory: the state, he argues, begins not in voluntary agreement but in domination, command, and the discipline that binds scattered persons into a public body. His organizing concept is 'mass technique' — the selection, leadership, and routine that render unwieldy crowds capable of action, so that even anti-authoritarian movements reproduce hierarchy the moment they become parties. From army and election to custom, class, genius, and the modern press, he charts the layered social powers that govern a people, closing with the moral task of subordinating industrial and military force to culture, rights, and education.

Der Staat ist Herrschaft, und die Herrschaft ist nicht durch Verträge in die Welt gekommen.

English translation: “The State is dominion, and dominion did not come into the world through contracts.”

Officials and legislators must judge economic questions without necessarily possessing specialist knowledge—or knowing where to find it. In this 1901 newspaper review, Carl Menger assesses economic encyclopedias against that practical difficulty. His praise for the revised Handwörterbuch der Staatswissenschaften centres on its organization of expertise: scholars and practitioners write on subjects they know closely, combining accessible consultation with substantial explanation. Menger writes as both reviewer and contributor, responsible himself for the article on money. His attention to Austrian participation adds a concrete test of comprehensiveness: does a German reference work adequately represent Austrian institutions and conditions? The review offers a view of Menger concerned less with expounding economic theory than with the editorial arrangements that make specialized knowledge usable in public life.