2,793 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
A mathematically ordered progressive tax can still leave too little income protected from taxation. That tension shapes Hermann von Schullern zu Schrattenhofen’s brief review of Mario Marsilj Libelli’s Per l’imposta progressiva. Libelli places collective needs below subsistence but above other private needs, deriving a continuous, diminishing progression and a narrowly measured subsistence exemption. Schullern finds the study worth considering for anyone examining the practical feasibility of a single progressive direct tax, yet reserves serious social-policy objections, particularly about the exemption’s level. The review offers a compact distinction between finding a tax scheme useful for practical inquiry and accepting the principles that determine how much taxpayers retain for basic needs.
Scholarly recognition need not imply agreement: Hermann von Schullern zu Schrattenhofen’s brief 1903 review grants Teresa Labriola’s arguments serious attention while explicitly distancing himself from her views on divorce. Reviewing three studies together, he draws out their connections to social policy, especially the gap between possessing rights and having the conditions needed to exercise them. His account of Labriola’s work on personhood makes that distinction concrete: political freedom remains incomplete if society does not enable individuals to attain personal dignity. The review offers a compact encounter with Labriola through a sympathetic but dissenting reader, whose appreciation of her learning remains distinct from endorsement of her conclusions.
Can sympathy for wage earners support a defence of existing income distribution? In this brief German review of the French translation of William Smart’s Distribution of Income, Hermann von Schullern zu Schrattenhofen singles out Paul Leroy-Beaulieu’s preface for attention. The prefacer welcomes Smart’s combination of concern for workers with support for the free movement of labour and capital, interpreting it as a vindication of economic liberalism. Schullern identifies that reading with Leroy-Beaulieu’s established convictions rather than developing a defence of his own. The review offers a compact view of how a prefacer frames an economic work: here, making its treatment of distribution serve an argument for productive growth and natural freedom over legislative intervention.
A nationality conflict poisoned by mutual suspicion can be clarified, Wieser proposes, by counting who pays the taxes and who receives the spending. His fiscal dossier on Bohemia finds that Germans, barely 37 percent of the population, contribute close to half the crownland's direct tax base — through industry, mining, banks, railways, and urban property that quietly extend German capital into Czech districts even as Czech workers move into German ones. Prague, small in German headcount but strong in house property, banking, and income, becomes the keystone. Economic power, he cautions, does not by itself confer political rule; and since provincial expenditure favors the Czech-feudal majority, a structural transfer of German tax money results. His remedy is not fiscal secession but parity — national financial curiae modeled on the Compromise of 1867 — so that neither nation disposes unilaterally of the other's money.
Nationale Finanzfragen sind nationale Lebensfragen, die in solcher Zeit nicht außer Streit gestellt werden können.
English translation: “National financial questions are national questions of life, which in such times cannot be placed beyond dispute.”
Komorzynski defines credit not as a loan of goods, nor of money, nor as mere trust or a time-separated exchange, but as Vermögensleihe—the lending of wealth itself, in which ownership of concrete goods passes to the borrower while the lender's wealth survives as a legally fixed claim yielding income. To ground this, the treatise, dedicated to Böhm-Bawerk, rebuilds the concepts of wealth, capital, and income from the foundation, treating wealth as the power to obtain recurring income and income as a primary concept rather than a circular 'return on wealth.' A second part turns to credit as a national-economic power—productive versus consumptive lending, the economic meaning of usury against the canonical prohibition, and how circulating claims, bills, and banknotes economize money and steady its value.
Credit und Tausch bilden zwei verschiedene eigenartige Gestaltungen dieses Verkehres.
English translation: “Credit and exchange constitute two different, distinctive forms of this intercourse.”
Falling imports need not mean weaker foreign competition: domestic producers may be defending their sales by cutting prices. Such distinctions animate Robert Zuckerkandl’s 1903 introduction to the Verein für Socialpolitik inquiry into the Austrian repercussions of Germany’s industrial depression. Rather than assume that Austrian distress originated across the border, he asks how it can be separated from domestic weakness and wider international pressures. His reliance on industrial practitioners brings buyers, export markets, and production decisions into view, while his discussion of paper manufacturing exposes a downturn driven by expanded capacity and weakening world demand. This introduction offers a concrete lesson in economic diagnosis: national trade totals can conceal severe losses within particular industries, and simultaneous declines do not by themselves establish cross-border causation.
Legal emancipation freed peasants, artisans, and workers from guild, feudal, and administrative restraints, yet Inama-Sternegg argues that this liberation did only half its work. Once the visible fetters fell, the isolated individual still faced markets, credit, factories, and taxation without collective means of resistance; a national and then international grain market fixed wheat prices no farmer could escape. Formal Erwerbsfreiheit, he contends, is not identical with real command over one's economic life. Against both liberal atomism and socialist subordination he advances the Genossenschaft, from Schulze-Delitzsch credit and purchasing unions to Raiffeisen rural societies with their joint liability and local trust, as a post-liberal institution that binds arbitrary individual action in order to strengthen the member's capacity to act. Freedom, on this account, becomes durable only when embedded in disciplined cooperative self-government against organized capital.
Nur die Form änderte sich, in der der Zwang des Lebens auf dem Einzelnen lastete, nicht die Sache selbst.
English translation: “Only the form in which the compulsion of life weighed upon the individual changed, not the thing itself.”
Counting farms and factories does not necessarily reveal who controls them. In this survey of the United States through its twelfth census, Felix Somary joins an explanation of economic expansion to a critique of its statistical record. Separately operated farms may share a landlord; nominally independent businesses may depend on larger enterprises for supplies, prices, and sales. Such distinctions sharpen his account of a country transformed by immigration, mechanization, and an integrated continental market. Writing from an Austrian perspective, Somary welcomes the opportunities America offers emigrants while questioning inflated corporate capitalization and misleading measures of independence. First published in 1903 and presented here in its [1904] offprint, the work shows how census categories can illuminate productive growth yet obscure the concentration of economic power.
Eclecticism is a virtue in Hermann von Schullern zu Schrattenhofen’s brief 1904 review of Augusto Graziani’s Istituzioni di Economia politica: drawing on competing schools can sharpen rather than dilute theoretical exposition. Schullern particularly praises Graziani’s treatment of subjective value, judging it both accessible and attentive to practical problems through its engagement with Menger, Böhm-Bawerk, Marshall, and their critics. His notice also records a pointed distinction in Graziani’s account of property: a general theory should explain the institution, not justify it. This compact, appreciative review shows what Schullern values in an economics textbook—conceptual clarity across theoretical allegiances, and careful separation of economic explanation from institutional defence.
Two economic logics pull against each other in the world politics of 1904, and Inama-Sternegg's aphorisms turn on the contradiction between them. Within their own borders, the cultural states hem in the peasant's holding and inheritance, wrap the artisan in corporative controls, and cultivate what he mockingly calls a policy 'for the little man' — a defensive localism born of distrust in ordinary economic initiative. Outward, imperial and commercial competition demands coordination on a far larger scale. He refuses to read British imperialism or American expansion as mere lust for domination, seeing instead a contest for secure shares in an expanding world economy, and rejects both doctrinaire free trade and isolated protection. His preferred path is institutional reciprocity — the 1892 Central European treaties, the Brussels Sugar Convention, American reciprocity — over fragmented, item-by-item tariff bargaining.
Der Bauer wird neuerdings unter eine strenge Vormundschaft gestellt; er soll sein Gut nicht zerteilen und beliebig vererben, über eine gewisse Grenze nicht verschulden.
English translation: “The peasant has of late been placed under a strict guardianship; he is not to divide his holding or bequeath it as he pleases, nor is he to encumber it with debt beyond a certain limit.”
Borrowed dishes, a borrowed samovar passed off as a family heirloom, a fur coat defended as the very emblem of one's credit: the Dobler household sustains its claim to be 'better people' entirely on appearances, while the father hides seven months of unemployment. This three-act Viennese comedy, written with Alexander Engel, sets the son Toni's philosophy of debt and strategic marriage against his sister Martha, who advertises herself as a piano teacher, refuses to snare a suitor by concealing the family's poverty, and insists that the better people are simply the better human beings. Around a widower's phantom inheritance and a chain of scheming courtships, the play turns the comedy of social masquerade into a quiet argument for honest labour over genteel pretence.
Der Pflanz, Martha, der ist ja eine soziale Notwendigkeit.
English translation: “Keeping up appearances, Martha — that's a social necessity.”
Wieser's Vienna inaugural lecture treats the value of money as a historical and institutional relation, not the value of an ordinary commodity. Starting from Menger's account of money's origin, he shifts from emergence to function: money splits the single barter act into independent sale and purchase, and gold stands in two economic relations at once, commodity when it serves personal needs, money when it circulates to open the whole traffic of goods to satisfaction. Money value, then, is an objective ratio between money and all goods entering exchange. Against a mechanical quantity theory, Wieser insists that credit substitutes, velocity and inherited prices make developed monetary systems elastic, so new gold works through institutions rather than in strict proportion. A third source of long-run change is the expansion of the money economy itself, as taxes, wages and military finance are drawn into monetary calculation.
Wenn Geld und Ware in ihrem Wesen einen Gegensatz zeigen, so müssen sie auch in ihrem Werte einen Gegensatz zeigen.
English translation: “If money and commodity show an opposition in their essence, they must also show an opposition in their value.”