The archive.

A higher wage bill need not lead an employer to dismiss workers; it may instead make closure the decisive alternative. In this 1911 article, Richard Schüller examines why labor demand cannot generally be inferred from the value of a single additional worker. His focus is the enterprise as a working arrangement: cooperating employees, specialized machinery, overhead costs, and limited opportunities to redeploy capital. From this perspective, losing one worker can impair the profitability of the whole establishment, while cheaper labor need not justify expansion. Schüller’s critique of marginal-value explanations gives readers concrete grounds for distinguishing the value of an individual service from an employer’s willingness to retain a workforce—and for understanding why wage changes can produce thresholds rather than gradual adjustments in employment.

Workers confront economic power not only as employees but also as buyers. In this 1911 social-policy chronicle, Emil Lederer asks whether consumer cooperatives can turn that second dependence into collective leverage. Drawing on German organizational reports and statistics, with an Austrian comparison, he distinguishes worker ownership of production from production directed by organized consumers and their needs. Wholesale purchasing, cooperative factories, and agreements with trade unions give this distinction practical substance: purchasing power can support labour standards as well as cheaper provisions. Yet expansion brings tensions between fair wages and member rebates, local independence and centralized administration. Lederer’s account lets readers examine how everyday purchases might become an instrument of economic self-government—and why occupational divisions and concentrated industrial power could limit its reach.

A union’s membership figures and political declarations do not necessarily measure its power to represent workers. In this chronicle of Austrian trade unionism in 1910, extending into spring 1911, Emil Lederer tests organizational claims against strike funds, unemployment payments, bargaining achievements, and dependence on political parties. His scrutiny of statistics is especially revealing: a higher proportion of successful strikes may reflect greater caution in undertaking disputes rather than increased strength. National division sharpens the problem. Lederer argues that separate Czech organizations weaken collective action against increasingly unified employers, while examining how union conflicts themselves reshape party politics. The report offers a concrete account of the financial resources and institutional independence required to turn solidarity into effective economic representation.

Could an association advising governments on labour protection also promote workers’ collective bargaining without compromising its neutrality? This question gives Karl Přibram’s 1911 report on the Lugano assembly its distinctive tension. International agreements promised to prevent protective legislation from placing domestic firms at a competitive disadvantage; low-paid home workers, however, needed more than restrictions on working conditions. Přibram follows the association’s contested move toward union organization and legally supported wage agreements, interpreting it as a possible turning point from reform imposed above to reform sustained by workers’ participation. Writing for Austrian reformers, he shows both the leverage international cooperation could provide and the limits of uniform safeguards where protection threatened livelihoods. The report offers a concrete view of how legislative expertise and workers’ self-help became competing—and potentially complementary—approaches to labour reform.

Economic recovery need not weaken employers’ solidarity: in this chronicle of German and Austrian employers’ organizations in 1910–1911, Emil Lederer argues that established associations could consolidate their power even as membership growth slowed. His concern is how that power worked—in lockouts, control over recruitment, and interventions in social insurance. Reading organizational statistics against conflicting press reports, he distinguishes public declarations of unity from the evidence of collective discipline. He also challenges claims that insurance contributions impose excessive burdens: comparing them with distributed profits, he argues, cannot establish their effects on production or profitability. The result is a concrete account of how disputes over wages become struggles over workplace authority, and how apparently technical choices in accounting and welfare design enter the politics of employer influence.

When does mathematical abstraction clarify economic choice, and when does it change the object being explained? In this 1911 review of Schumpeter’s Das Wesen und der Hauptinhalt der theoretischen Nationalökonomie, Hans Mayer tests equilibrium theory against concrete difficulties: possessions valued without any desire to acquire more, needs that end abruptly, and goods whose usefulness disappears when divided. Defending Austrian marginal-utility theory while acknowledging its unfinished work, he challenges the identification of subjective value with demand price and the requirement that equilibrium equalize marginal utilities. His objection is not to quantitative analysis itself, but to assumptions that cannot be relaxed without losing the proposed explanation. The review offers a precise encounter between two conceptions of theoretical economics: functional interdependence and explanation grounded in needs, valuations, and choices.

A national economy, on this account, is no mere sum of households but an organism of interdependent economic units bound by territory, law, and language. Conceived as a study aid for German-speaking universities, this compendium moves from the anatomy of needs and goods through a long historical survey, Greek and Roman antiquity, mercantilism, physiocracy, Adam Smith and the classical school, socialism from Owen to Marx, and the cooperative movement, before building its theoretical core on subjective value and marginal utility (Grenznutzen). Schullern-Schrattenhofen follows Menger in deriving money from the needs of exchange rather than from legislation, defends metallic currency against token theories, treats price as the meeting of subjective valuations, and closes on credit. Objective in method, yet frank about its own commitments.

Aus dem Gesagten dürfte sich wohl ergeben haben, daß jede von den aufgezählten Besitzkategorien ihre bestimmte Aufgabe zu erfüllen, daß aber die wichtigsten die den mittleren Gruppen angehörenden sind.

English translation: “From what has been said, it should be evident that each of the enumerated categories of property has its particular task to fulfill, but that the most important are those belonging to the middle groups.”

Can a theory of subjective value defend the entrepreneur’s income without ruling out social reform? In this second article on the Austrian school, Siegmund Feilbogen follows Karl Menger’s analysis from scarce goods to the valuation of productive services, showing why consumers’ needs, rather than production costs alone, govern economic value. His exposition is sympathetic but not uncritical: he detects a risk of circularity in calculating each productive factor’s return by subtracting the returns of the others. The political applications are distinctly Feilbogen’s. He argues that employment benefits both parties, yet allows compulsory worker insurance to transfer part of the employer’s gain to labor. Readers can thus distinguish Menger’s analytical method from the contested social conclusions that an engaged interpreter draws from it.

Abstract value theory can seem remote from strikes, wages, and economic change; Feilbogen argues that faulty theory can distort their interpretation. Writing for French readers in this first installment on the Austrian school, he defends subjective valuation without treating it as a substitute for historical and statistical inquiry. His account places theoretical innovation within concrete conflicts: German historicism’s suspicion of deduction, the challenge of Marx’s value theory, and Austrian resistance to German scholarly dominance. The result is a qualified defense, attentive both to Menger’s achievement and to the school’s unfinished explanatory work. An embedded letter from Menger adds personal evidence about his reading and intellectual formation. Readers can discover why Feilbogen thought Austrian abstraction necessary—and why he refused to regard it as sufficient.

An accounting unit without a circulating coin poses a pointed challenge to a theory that defines money chiefly through exchange. In this third article on the Austrian school, Siegmund Feilbogen uses the Hamburg mark banko to question whether Menger’s explanation of money’s origins adequately establishes its essential function. His broader assessment is similarly sympathetic without being deferential: Menger secures an independent place for economic theory, but individual motives and exchange relations do not, Feilbogen argues, exhaust its subject. The article offers a concrete encounter with the uses and limits of abstraction—why simplified assumptions can explain economic relations without describing actual conduct, and why collective institutions and human well-being still demand attention beyond those assumptions.

Ranged across a season's new books—methodology, Marx and Christianity, money, capital, Australian policy, the history of note-issuing banks—these review-notices double as a manifesto for how economics should be done. Schumpeter judges each work by whether it solves problems rather than parading method or ideology: every theory, he holds, must be known by its fruits, and declaring allegiance to theory is not itself theoretical work. He defends marginal utility against the charge of being capitalist in tendency, praises Davenport's Value and Distribution for its unadorned analysis and its treatment of capital as an unspecialized loan-fund, and admires Fisher's Rate of Interest for binding theory to statistics—while denying that time-preference alone can explain interest, since interest must also depend on the growing stream of future goods. Ruhland's moralized system, which reduces capital to greed, he sharply rejects.

Es gilt Probleme zu lösen, nicht Methoden zu diskutieren.

English translation: “The task is to solve problems, not to discuss methods.”

Extensive documentation does not necessarily make a movement intelligible. In this short review of Anton Acht’s Der moderne französische Syndikalismus, Emil Lederer credits the book with bringing French syndicalist sources—especially Pouget’s writings and movement periodicals—to German readers. Yet he finds that Acht’s collection of statements fails to form a coherent picture, while his criticism of syndicalist theories remains shallow. The interest lies in Lederer’s measured distinction between access to evidence and understanding: he recognizes the usefulness of Acht’s compilation without mistaking breadth of coverage for interpretation. This compact assessment shows what Lederer expected beyond a source-based account of revolutionary and reformist syndicalism: systematic orientation and searching criticism.