The archive.

Falling wholesale prices need not mean cheaper bread or meat—but do unchanged shop prices prove excessive profits? In this 1889 critical survey, Eugen Peter Schwiedland tests contemporary price investigations against the practical conditions of retailing, drawing particularly on Viennese commerce. Stock bought months earlier, variable bread weights, confidence in a butcher, and the cost of serving small purchases all complicate the apparent gap between buying and selling prices. Schwiedland neither excuses retailers wholesale nor treats every persistent markup as profiteering: coal merchants unable to pass on rising costs provide a pointed counterexample. His distinctive contribution is to show what price statistics leave unresolved. Readers discover why an observed spread is not necessarily an earned margin, and how commercial records and selling practices can change the interpretation of a price curve.

A state budget can be read as a record of political transformation, and Baden's — traced from the near-sovereign fiscal year 1868/69 to the imperial order of 1888/89 — registers the passage of a German Land into the Reich. Foreign affairs, military command, and postal administration move upward; education, welfare, roads, and railways swell the accounts that remain. Philippovich shows how Matrikularbeiträge and imperial transfers made the budget dependent on decisions taken from afar, and how railways, which he refused to treat as ordinary profit-seeking enterprises, became the chief weakness in the state's balance through mounting railway debt. Successive tax reforms — capital-rent, the Erwerbsteuer, and the 1884 income tax — redistribute burdens, yet direct taxation stays the core of Baden's finances.

Man muß sich daran gewöhnen, die Eisenbahnen nicht als gewerbliche Unternehmungen zur Erzielung eines Geschäftsgewinnes anzusehen, sondern als unentbehrliche Grundlage des Volkswohlstandes unserer Zeit, als ein Mittel zum Zweck der menschlichen Gesellschaft.

English translation: “One must become accustomed to regarding railways not as commercial enterprises for the attainment of business profit, but as an indispensable foundation of the popular welfare of our time, as a means to the ends of human society.”

Setting exchange deliberately aside to observe what happens inside a single self-contained economy, this inquiry—dedicated to Carl Menger—seeks the root of value in the factual relation between scarce useful forces and recurring needs. Komorzynski develops a law of the continuity of needs and a 'steady state' of the stock of goods, then measures a force's economic significance by the permanent loss its disappearance would inflict on the least urgent satisfactions still secured. He credits Menger's marginal value theory with escaping the errors of the older German use-value school—concrete quantities, multiple needs, complementary production goods—yet faults it for leaving available quantities unexplained and for treating consumer and production goods inconsistently. Value, on his account, belongs only to continuously effective forces and always presupposes the economy's possible reorganization.

Das Product ist stets ungetheilt das Ergebnis der Wirksamkeit der aufgewandten Produktionsmittel.

English translation: “The product is always, undivided, the result of the joint action of the means of production employed.”

Can strikes create the conditions for industrial peace? In this 1889 article, Eugen Peter Schwiedland reads American labour conflicts through federal statistics for 1881–1886, arguing that strong organization can turn costly stoppages into durable bargaining institutions. His defence of unions rests on a sharp distinction: economic conditions constrain what workers can win, but collective power affects what they secure within those limits. He also questions the evidence itself, showing how counting establishments rather than disputes can transform one strike into many apparent observations and distort success rates. The Hocking Valley coal conflict gives this statistical inquiry a concrete institutional outcome: joint wage schedules and arbitration. Readers encounter both an argument against judging strikes solely by lost wages and a demonstration of how counting practices shape conclusions about labour conflict.

A shrinking tax base need not mean declining agriculture. In this 1889 study of Austrian cadastral returns, Karl Theodor von Inama-Sternegg distinguishes changes in taxable land from changes in its cultivation—and asks how reliably either records economic transformation. Owners have incentives to report the end of tax liability, but little immediate fiscal reason to register a pasture’s conversion to arable land. Reporting delays therefore complicate the apparent annual pattern. Against this administrative background, vineyard losses in Lower Austria and expansion in Dalmatia acquire sharper meaning than aggregate totals alone can supply. The study offers a concrete lesson in reading official statistics: land-use records can disclose agricultural change, provided their categories, incentives, and uneven timing remain part of the interpretation.

A legal limit on working hours offers little reassurance if an industrial downturn, rather than enforcement, keeps factories within it. This distinction shapes Viktor Mataja’s 1889 review of the French labour-inspection reports for 1887. Reading administrative findings against the safeguards they are meant to uphold, he welcomes declining employment of young children while questioning what inspection figures can establish. Exempt workshops, incomplete accident reports, and lenient courts leave protection uncertain even where legislation is precise. His comparisons with Austrian reporting sharpen an interest in what inspectors can observe, publish, and actually compel. The review offers a concrete encounter with the practical limits of labour law—and with the cautious reasoning needed to distinguish measurable improvement from merely apparent compliance.

Since 1879 the Austrian gulden had puzzled observers by circulating well above the market value of the eleven and a half grams of fine silver stamped into it — a premium the German thaler and the French five-franc piece could not explain, since those coins drew their value from gold circulating beside them. Here the anomaly is traced instead to scarcity: when the state suspended private silver coinage, it blocked the money supply from expanding as silver fell, and the coined gulden acquired a scarcity value resting on a mere unit of account. The outcome was a domestic measure of value steadier than most, yet exposed to grave danger, since a single administrative decree resuming coinage could cut the real worth of every claim by a fifth.

Der Zustand des österreichischen Geldwesens bietet seit ungefähr zehn Jahren das Bild einer volkswirtschaftlichen Anomalie dar, welche zu den interessantesten und merkwürdigsten in der Geschichte der Umlaufsmittel gehört.

English translation: “For about ten years the state of Austrian monetary affairs has presented the picture of an economic anomaly which belongs among the most interesting and remarkable in the history of the media of circulation.”

When Lujo Brentano told a Vienna audience in 1888 that classical economics had erected its doctrines on an abstract, gain-driven phantom of a human being, and that the abstract method itself had bred the labor theory of value, the wage-fund, and the iron law of wages, Böhm-Bawerk answered him here. He grants the two charges that stick: the classics did reason with abstract agents, and they did teach grave errors. But the causal link, he argues, is a post hoc fallacy, since marginal utility theory sprang from the same isolating analysis and fits self-interest better. Errors were the fault of individual theorists, not of method; abstraction remains the necessary first sketch, like a crude relief map awaiting detail. His closing motto refuses the whole quarrel: the future belongs to history and theory together.

Es gibt in ihrer Psychologie nur zwei Triebfedern menschlichen Handelns: nämlich das Streben nach dem größtmöglichen Gewinn und den Geschlechtstrieb.

English translation: “In its psychology there are only two mainsprings of human action: namely, the striving for the greatest possible gain and the sexual instinct.”

Delivered to the Gehe-Stiftung in Dresden on 10 March 1888, the day after Kaiser Wilhelm's death, this lecture drew an unexpectedly large audience for strict economic theory. Sax argues that German economics, for all its achievements in history and social policy, lacks the pure theory that stands to applied practice as physics and chemistry stand to technology. That foundation, he contends, is the psychology of scarcity: economics is applied psychology, the study of the mental processes by which dependence on limited external means motivates action. Value is no objective property of goods but a subjective excitation, measurable through exchange and money as heat is measured by a thermometer. From this single law of value he claims to derive prices, capital, interest, and public finance alike, treating fees and taxes as value phenomena rather than questions of justice.

Die Werthgröße ist umgekehrt proportional dem Güterbefiße, direct proportional der Stärke der fraglichen Bedürfnisse eines Individuums.

English translation: “The magnitude of value is inversely proportional to the possession of goods, and directly proportional to the intensity of the individual's needs in question.”

An inspector could identify an unsafe workplace without having the power to compel its repair. This gap between expert supervision and executive authority anchors Viktor Mataja’s 1889 examination of Austrian industrial inspection. Drawing on inspectors’ reports for 1884–1887, he asks what makes worker protection enforceable rather than merely statutory. His examples expose consequential administrative choices: a twenty-worker threshold could exclude small enterprises from stricter protection, while flexible overtime rules made violations difficult to prove. Mataja values technical advice and the trust inspectors developed, yet insists that conciliation needs credible enforcement behind it. The article offers a concrete account of how legal definitions, understaffed offices, reluctant authorities, and workers’ fear of retaliation shape the reach of protective legislation—and why apparently smooth compliance may conceal its weakness.

A birth entered in a parish book does not automatically become a reliable fact in national statistics. In this 1889 introduction to the Austrian Statistical Central Commission’s register survey, Karl Theodor von Inama-Sternegg examines the obstacles between record and count: mismatched ecclesiastical and political boundaries, divided supervision, missing volumes, and uncertain territorial coverage. He connects these administrative problems to a historical question: do apparent demographic regularities endure across centuries, or reflect particular social conditions? Older local registers could help answer it—but only if researchers know what survives and whom it records. His proposals for inventories, jurisdictional directories, and central access show how archival organization could serve both public administration and historical inquiry, without necessarily gathering every original register in one place.

A hundred years after Friedrich List's birth at Reutlingen, this commemorative essay separates his lasting insight from the protectionism later built in his name. Menger traces the phases of a life that did not run in the quiet paths of a German professor — the Württemberg liberal reformer prosecuted as a Demagog and driven into American exile, the railway promoter and Zollverein advocate, the author of the 1841 Nationales System der politischen Oekonomie. His central claim is that List invented a national conception of political economy for a fragmented Germany: free trade within, protective tariffs without, yet tariffs meant as a temporary schooling of productive forces rather than a permanent creed. Later economists, Menger warns, turned that national egoism into a mask for class privilege and particularism.

Die Bedeutung List's als bahnbrechender Reformator der volkswirtschaftlichen Ideen wurde erst nach seinem Tode erkannt.

English translation: “List's significance as a pioneering reformer of economic ideas was recognised only after his death.”