The archive.

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.

A balance sheet need not disclose the full extent of a company’s obligations. This is the point Felix Somary endorses in his brief 1906 notice of the commemorative volume for Reichsbank President Koch. While noting Rießer’s study of supervisory-board reform, he concentrates on Simon’s distinction between legal rights and liabilities and their recorded accounting representation. Giro liabilities provide the concrete example of what a balance sheet leaves undisclosed. The notice captures Somary’s interest in a precise boundary between law and economics: what accounts record is not necessarily everything a company owes.

Can gains for exporters justify an optimistic account of currency depreciation? In this brief 1906 review of Mitjavile’s study of Spain’s exchange-rate crisis, Felix Somary endorses a sharply different balance sheet: benefits for a narrow group set against dearer food, speculative commerce and heavier foreign debt payments. His judgement combines approval of Mitjavile’s fiscal explanation—government dependence on advances from the note-issuing bank—with appreciation of his caution about evidence. Tariff changes and returning colonial capital complicate even apparently striking exchange-rate data. The review offers a compact view of what Somary values in monetary analysis: attention to who gains and loses, institutional causes, and restraint in attributing economic effects.

A single-family house can offer worse sleeping conditions than a much-criticized tenement. In this 1906 review of a Bremen housing survey, Emil Lederer tests an architectural ideal against measurements: 44 percent of living rooms were no larger than eight square metres, and subdivision squandered already scarce space and air. His criticism targets the assumption that homeownership or small buildings necessarily produce healthy accommodation. Yet he also separates the improvement of housing from the explanation of rents, asking how tenants’ opportunities to buy constrain what landlords can charge. This brief review offers a concrete encounter with Lederer’s differentiated approach to housing reform: neither architectural labels nor a single account of speculation can explain both unhealthy rooms and costly shelter.

Reliable tables can outlast an unsuccessful introduction: that distinction anchors Felix Somary’s brief 1906 review of Wagon’s study of German joint-stock companies. Somary praises the annual financial tables, whose accuracy he tested by spot checks, while stressing their restriction to shares listed in Berlin. His interest is comparative rather than merely descriptive. Drawing on his own comparison with Austria, he singles out borrowing, higher average profits, and greater sensitivity to economic fluctuations among German companies. The review offers a compact example of how Somary evaluates statistical evidence: separating the quality of compilation from that of exposition, and asking what international comparisons the available figures can support.

A sugar manufacturer who stood to gain from protection yet campaigned as a consistent free trader, refused the cartel, and quietly diverted his unavoidable trust profits into a pension fund for his clerks—Rudolph Auspitz is memorialized by Schumpeter as both a public man of rare disinterest and a first-rate mathematical economist. The obituary weighs his work on taxation and the 1896 fiscal reform, then turns to the 1889 Untersuchungen über die Theorie des Preises, written with Richard Lieben. Auspitz, it argues, held marginal value theory to complete and partly correct Ricardo rather than overthrow him, and from the parallel treatment of production and consumption drew the consumer's rent, the producer's rent, and the gain of the community.

It is, generally, a characteristic point, which deserves to be noted, that during his whole political life he was not only completely free from any personal aspiration, but also from class interest.

How can economics build theory from historical evidence without mistaking local conditions for timeless laws? In this 1906 review of Gustav Schmoller’s Grundriß, Karl Theodor von Inama-Sternegg defends historically bounded generalization while challenging the priorities of a work he admires. His sharpest objection concerns production: an economics centred on distribution risks neglecting how wealth is created and how its productive foundations are exhausted. Following destructive exploitation from farming and forestry into mining, industry, and colonial commerce, he makes depletion a problem for economic theory rather than merely technical management. The review offers an internal critique of historical economics, showing how commitment to collective phenomena and detailed evidence can support theoretical ambition without requiring either universal laws or an all-embracing sociology.

A city counted in anticipation of a siege is not necessarily a city counted in ordinary life. In this article, Karl Theodor von Inama-Sternegg uses fifteenth-century enumerations from Nürnberg, Straßburg, Freiburg im Uechland, and Nördlingen to challenge inflated estimates of medieval urban populations—and to ask what their figures actually measure. Refugees could swell totals; “citizens” did not constitute a uniform age group; “servants” could include journeymen and apprentices. His distinctive concern is the boundary between recorded evidence and editorial reconstruction, making access to original lists essential to checking demographic claims. Readers encounter both an argument that relatively small cities could wield substantial political and economic power and a concrete demonstration of why counting inhabitants is more secure than reconstructing their social composition.

Rejecting mathematics in economics does not protect social complexity; it only deprives theory of its most adequate logical language. Schumpeter argues that once economics reasons about value, price, exchange, labor, interest and time, it is already handling quantities, so the economist who states proportionalities and marginal changes in words is doing arithmetic while refusing the calculus his own arguments require. Mathematics, on this view, is a logical form that imports nothing foreign and can therefore introduce nothing false; it clarifies functional dependence, continuity, and maxima even where numerical data are missing. Drawing on Cournot's proof that monopoly price exceeds competitive price and Walras's system of exchange equations, he shows the method uncovering relations that verbal exposition confuses—while insisting it can never calculate a practical policy out of a formula.

Also: Arbeit, Ware, Zeit, Preis, Zins u. s. w. sind Quantitäten.

English translation: “Thus: labor, commodity, time, price, interest, etc., are quantities.”

Forty years of agricultural reports do not necessarily yield forty years of comparable evidence. In this 1906 assessment, Karl Theodor von Inama-Sternegg shows how British agricultural statistics changed as smaller holdings entered the returns, livestock counts shifted season, and voluntary participation became nearly universal. His praise centres on the practical machinery behind the figures: revenue officials with local knowledge, trained harvest estimators, and publication schedules that put results into farmers’ hands before the reporting cycle was complete. The expansion from ten tables to 160 matters less as an accumulation of numbers than as a widening capacity to answer agricultural questions. This concise article offers a concrete account of how statistical reliability is built—and why timely circulation belongs alongside accuracy in judging a public information service.