2,793 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
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.”
Should public fire insurance be judged by objections to state enterprise or by how insurers actually operate? In this brief 1906 review, Felix Somary praises Alglave’s comparative evidence and attacks French liberal economists for neglecting it. A telling distinction anchors the discussion: Alglave favours compulsory insurance for buildings, linked to building regulation, but voluntary coverage for movable property, where valuation and concentrated urban risks complicate provision. Somary’s accompanying assessment of German insurance-law debates reveals a related concern: specialized legal differences should not obscure the common basis of insurance contracts or displace economic analysis. The review offers a compact encounter with Somary’s critical priorities—administrative costs, institutional comparison, and the practical relevance of foreign experience to Austrian reform.
Diligently collected statutes do not, for Felix Somary, amount to legal scholarship. His brief 1906 review of Derblich’s Das österreichische Versicherungsrecht acknowledges the scarcity of earlier studies but refuses to let that excuse confused organization or inadequate analysis. Particularly revealing is his ridicule of a section on insurance in French literature, where maxims about protection against misfortune take the place of legal reasoning. The review offers a compact, sharp-edged example of Somary’s critical standard: even a difficult and little-studied subject demands systematic treatment, not merely accumulated materials and quotations.
When does a merchant’s experience become economic theory rather than advice to his son? In this short, caustic review of Richard Ehrenberg’s Das Haus Parish in Hamburg, Felix Somary challenges the promotion of biographical detail into scholarly explanation. Parish’s meals, guests and wine consumption exemplify what Somary regards as misplaced emphasis; injunctions to rise early and attend the exchange hardly establish an original theorist. Somary acknowledges Ehrenberg’s diligence as a collector of material while denying that accumulation alone constitutes analysis. The review offers a pointed dispute over what business biography can explain—and what, in Somary’s judgement, it must do to earn its claims to theoretical significance.