The archive.

Agreement that taxation should be equal leaves almost everything to dispute: equal benefits, equal capacity to pay, or equal sacrifice? In this brief 1885 review of Robert Meyer, Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk connects these rival standards to concrete questions of progression, subsistence exemptions, and the treatment of different kinds of income. He singles out Meyer’s inclusion of tax certainty among the demands of justice, rather than merely sound administration—a distinction that makes delayed and supplementary assessments a matter of fairness. Böhm-Bawerk praises the reasoning behind most of Meyer’s conclusions without endorsing them wholesale, and objects when precision becomes excessive subdivision. The review offers a compact encounter with his critical standards: careful distinctions should clarify practical choices, not fragment them into isolated cases.

A surplus may arise from the gap between input costs and selling prices—but why does it belong to the entrepreneur? In this integrated 1885 review of books by Victor Mataja, Gustav Gross, and Eduard August Schröder, Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk separates the explanation of profit’s emergence from the explanation of its recipient. He takes Mataja’s account of unequal productive opportunities and Gross’s emphasis on bargaining advantage seriously, yet finds that neither identifies what distinguishes entrepreneurial profit from wages, rent, or interest. His objection to defining entrepreneurs as profit recipients is pointed: that definition cannot then explain their receipt of profit. Without offering a finished alternative theory, the review gives readers a precise test for theories of distribution: do they explain merely how a surplus forms, or also the economic relationship through which someone receives it?

Losing one unit of a stock is not the same as losing the whole stock—but how precisely should a theory of value distinguish them? In this 1885 review of Friedrich von Wieser’s book on economic value, Viktor Mataja combines sympathy for utility-based explanation with scrutiny of its conceptual boundaries. He explains why the least important use still served by an available stock governs the value of its interchangeable units, then questions whether Wieser sufficiently recognizes that the unit chosen for valuation is itself relative. His reservations about total-utility valuation sharpen rather than displace his endorsement. The review offers a compact encounter with marginal value theory through a reader who appreciates its practical account of scarce-resource allocation while testing the distinctions on which that account depends.

Explaining interest is not the same as justifying who receives it. This distinction sharpens Viktor Mataja’s otherwise warmly approving 1885 review of the first volume of N. G. Pierson’s economics textbook. Welcoming Pierson’s affinities with Austrian value theory, Mataja praises the treatment of rent, interest, profits, and wages within a common account of exchange value. Yet he insists that explaining interest as payment for capital’s use leaves open whether its benefits should accrue to private owners or to the community. His review offers a concrete encounter between theoretical sympathy and independent judgement: readers can see why he values a textbook’s synthesis of specialised research, while refusing to let an economic explanation settle a question about ownership.

A railway company refuses to carry a colliery owner’s coal after he complains about freight charges: in this collective review, such incidents test what economic freedom means under monopoly. Assessing works by Adolf Held, Lujo Brentano and Gustav Cohn, Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk distinguishes declared principles from practical results. He defends Ricardo against Held’s imputations of partisan motives, credits Christian Socialists with advancing workers’ education without accepting that they overcame class divisions, and endorses Cohn’s case for firm intervention against railway abuses. The interest lies in these discriminating judgments rather than a single programmatic position. This brief 1885 review shows how Böhm-Bawerk could defend fairness in theoretical controversy while recognizing circumstances in which private economic power made appeals to freedom an obstacle to effective protection.

Setting aside the familiar controversies over note issue and commercial banking, this study isolates a single thread: how the Bank of England grew from a private corporation of subscribers who lent the government £1.2 million in 1694 into the central organ of state cash and debt administration. Philippovich insists the transformation was never designed but emerged from fiscal crisis, banking practice, and the parliamentary settlement after 1688. He follows Exchequer Bills, the incorporation of creditors into the Bank, East India, and South Sea companies, and the nineteenth-century reforms that abolished the old Exchequer offices in 1834 and joined issue control to appropriation audit in 1866. The upshot, he argues, is the modern fiscal state as a banking organism, in which public administration, debt management, and the money market become interdependent.

Durch die bankmässige Geldverwaltung tritt die Staatswirthschaft aus ihrer Isolierung heraus.

English translation: “Through banking-style money management, the state economy emerges from its isolation.”

Recognizing workers’ distress does not settle whether collective ownership is its remedy. In this 1885 review, Carl Menger appreciatively presents Friedrich Kleinwächter’s critique of scientific socialism while explicitly withholding detailed criticism of its theoretical standpoint. The interest lies in the distinctions he brings forward: rejecting Marx’s theory of value does not establish communism’s impracticability, and acknowledging exploitation does not make every return to property illegitimate. Especially concrete is the separation of ownership from the organization of production, which allows communal property with individual cultivation—or private property with collective cultivation—to enter the discussion. Readers encounter an institutional question beneath the controversy over distribution: what could replace the coordinating and motivational functions Kleinwächter assigns to property and self-interest?

If nature cannot feel deprivation, does using it impose no economic cost? In this 1885 article, Hermann von Schullern zu Schrattenhofen challenges labour-only theories of production by locating the loss elsewhere: exhausted soil, depleted mines, and diminished forests cost something to the people who depend on them, whether resources are privately or collectively owned. His distinctive move is to separate the inputs of a particular productive act from their ultimate constituents: capital derives from earlier production, but nature cannot be reduced to labour. Combining criticism of economic doctrine with an account of scarcity and subjective valuation, Schullern makes resource depletion central to his anti-socialist argument. The article offers a concrete distinction to examine: human agency directs production without making labour its only economically costly element.

Marx the scholar and Marx the agitator must be told apart—that insistence runs through Groß's 1885 study, which grew from a commissioned article and draws chiefly on Marx's own writings, with information supplied by Engels. The opening chapters follow the young Hegelian from Trier through the Rheinische Zeitung, the Paris years, and the Communist Manifesto into the founding of the International, the defence of the Paris Commune, and the feud with Bakunin. The final chapter reconstructs the economic system—the labour theory of value, the circuit of money into capital, surplus value, the industrial reserve army, primitive accumulation—before Groß turns critic, faulting the objective theory of value for ignoring subjective valuation, use value, and nature's contribution, while granting Marx's originality on capital, machinery, and the division of labour.

Diese Partien des Marxschen Werkes gehören unstreitig zu dem Bedeutendsten, was in dieser Richtung je geschrieben worden ist.

English translation: “These portions of Marx's work belong indisputably to the most significant that has ever been written in this direction.”

A trader without fixed premises poses a genuine problem for tax collectors—but when does solving that problem become protection for established shopkeepers? Robert Meyer’s 1885 study locates this tension in German taxation of peddlers and temporary travelling sales establishments. Comparing state fiscal systems before and after liberal trade reforms, he distinguishes special collection procedures from exceptional burdens intended to restrain competition. His distinctive concern is the gap between commercial freedom under imperial law and the restrictive uses of taxation retained by individual states. Short-lived sales establishments make the stakes concrete: ordinary assessments could miss their earnings, yet corrective charges could become punitive. Readers can discover why formally similar taxes produced different burdens, and how appeals to fiscal equality could serve competing conceptions of economic fairness.

In this brief 1886 review, Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk recommends Georg Adler’s ninety-page study as a compact, critical introduction to Rodbertus’s social theory. His approval is specific: Adler combines concise exposition with numerous objections that Böhm-Bawerk judges mostly sound. The notice records a favourable but qualified assessment of Adler as a guide, without endorsing his title’s claim that Rodbertus founded scientific socialism or identifying which criticisms Böhm-Bawerk accepts.

Public accessibility and specialist usefulness coincide in Böhm-Bawerk’s brief joint review of M. Schraut’s books on credit organization and on trade treaties and most-favoured-nation treatment. He praises not novel doctrine but concise exposition, comprehensive coverage, and clear, measured, impartial judgment. This small notice records what Böhm-Bawerk valued in economic reference works: the capacity to orient general readers without losing scholarly value. It offers an appraisal of Schraut’s usefulness rather than an account of his substantive positions on credit or international tariff policy.