The archive.

Criticism can do greater justice to a thinker than discipleship: this is Schullern’s striking judgement on Bernhardi’s treatment of Adam Smith in his brief 1901 review of Fritz Demuth’s monograph. Schullern welcomes Demuth’s recovery of an economist often named but seldom studied, stressing the connection between Bernhardi’s theoretical doctrines, historical understanding, and social-policy views. His interest is not merely retrospective. The significance of different sizes of landed property, he argues, has become a pressing question again, giving researchers a concrete reason to reconsider Bernhardi. The review offers a compact account of why Schullern regarded this recovery as useful to economic inquiry, rather than simply a correction to a neglected scholar’s reputation.

International trade can increase wealth without making unrestricted competition indispensable: this distinction drives Hermann von Schullern zu Schrattenhofen’s 1901 review of Heinrich Dietzel’s Weltwirtschaft und Volkswirtschaft. Respecting Dietzel’s intellectual force, Schullern nevertheless rejects free trade as a universally valid doctrine. His criterion is the nation’s capacity for independent economic and cultural development, not enrichment alone. Scientific and technical change, he argues, can alter what a country is fitted to produce; international price equalization can favour rich countries at poorer producers’ expense. This compact polemic makes clear why Schullern’s defence of tariff protection is not a rejection of foreign commerce: the disputed question is how much protection preserves national agency without cutting off useful exchange.

A theorist may deserve attention even when his theories fail to convince. In this brief 1901 review, Hermann von Schullern zu Schrattenhofen praises J. H. Curran’s account of Francis A. Walker for combining clear exposition with criticism rather than homage. He declines to judge Walker’s doctrines himself, focusing instead on how well Curran makes their reasoning accessible. His particular welcome for Curran’s recognition of Mangoldt’s work on entrepreneurial profit adds a pointed concern: scholarly contributions can fall into undeserved neglect. By closing with Curran’s verdict that Walker’s theories merit gratitude even for inviting refutation, Schullern gives readers a compact case of critical reception in which intellectual usefulness and theoretical adequacy remain distinct.

Could cooperative organization keep Belgian cottage industries alive under worsening market and wage conditions? This practical concern gives Hermann von Schullern zu Schrattenhofen’s brief review of the Belgian Office du travail’s second volume its particular interest. He praises the centuries of legislative history assembled in the study of Flemish wool weaving, but his sharpest judgement concerns straw plaiting: without extensive cooperative organization, especially consumer associations, he expects its disappearance. In domestic shoemaking, he sees more cautious grounds for hope in cooperatives already taking shape. The notice offers a compact glimpse of a reviewer weighing statistical and historical evidence against the possibilities of collective action, rather than treating industrial decline as inevitable.

A reliable record of labour legislation can also document how little is changing. In this brief 1901 review of the Belgian Labour Office’s yearbook for 1899, Hermann von Schullern zu Schrattenhofen praises its coverage of worker protection and insurance but finds legislative development stalled in most states. His attention to the yearbook’s explanation of Germany’s revised invalidity-insurance law contrasts with his pointed complaint about Austria’s legislative sterility. The notice offers a compact encounter with Schullern’s reformist expectations: accurate documentation earns his approval, but a succession of minor regulations does not satisfy his demand for substantive change.

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.