The archive.

Does giving altruism its due require rebuilding economics, or extending an unfinished science? In this short review of Lothar Dargun, Böhm-Bawerk welcomes closer study of altruistic economic conduct while rejecting the claim that economics has understood only self-interest—and already understood it completely. His concrete test is household provision: economists’ relative silence about a father feeding his family, he argues, need not mean they have overlooked altruism; it may mean they find little there requiring explanation. That judgement makes the review worth examining: it exposes the distance between acknowledging a motive and treating it as a theoretical problem, while conceding that altruistic conduct deserves fuller attention.

Could freer competition eliminate ground rent without abolishing private ownership of land? In this brief 1887 review, Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk sharply rejects O. Wachenhusen’s affirmative answer. His compressed account isolates its crucial premise: that under genuinely free competition the cheapest producer would determine the market price. Wachenhusen consequently treats rent as an effect of concentrated landownership, removable through unrestricted disposal of land and the abolition of agricultural protective tariffs. Böhm-Bawerk’s skeptical asides and ironic rendering of the promised benefits reveal his opposition, but he offers no detailed refutation. The notice lets readers examine the precise connection between a contested pricing rule and a programme of land reform—not a developed alternative theory of rent.

Workers’ agitation, rather than legislative initiative, drives the account of American labor protection in Böhm-Bawerk’s brief 1887 review of W. Carl Tait. Judging Tait’s survey useful but incomplete, he contrasts the still-unrealized eight-hour day with gains in freedom of association, workplace safety, and protections for women and children. His closing comparison gives this compact notice its particular interest: he sees labor conditions, movements, and needs emerging rapidly in America that parallel those of “old” Europe. The review offers a concise glimpse of how Böhm-Bawerk connected legal reforms to workers’ pressure and read American developments through a European comparative lens.

Voluntary insurance could reach millions of workers without securing them against every risk. In this brief review of Wilhelm Hasbach’s history of English workers’ insurance, Böhm-Bawerk contrasts the self-help of friendly societies with the compulsory, state-supported provision emerging in Germany and Austria. He places their extensive membership alongside administrative abuses, insolvency, and inadequate resources for old age and disability. The interest lies in this measured juxtaposition: Böhm-Bawerk acknowledges the scale of workers’ own provision without presenting it as a remedy for all insurance needs or explicitly recommending it over continental arrangements.

A French five-franc piece could be legal tender in France without having that status in Belgium or Switzerland: this distinction anchors one of Robert Zuckerkandl’s objections to Alexander v. Hegedüs’s account of the Latin Monetary Union. In this 1887 review of the address in German translation, Zuckerkandl tests a monetary conference participant’s authority against treaty provisions, price movements and technical vocabulary. His criticism is concrete: confusing silver subsidiary coinage with full-value silver currency changes what an agreement appears to require; treating subsequent minting as a necessary consequence of the union substitutes assertion for explanation. This brief, sharply adverse review shows how seemingly narrow errors of terminology and chronology can undermine a monetary history, without attempting to supply a replacement history of its own.

A company’s wealth is not necessarily its capital—but what makes the difference legally meaningful? In this 1887 review of the second, revised and enlarged edition of Karl Knies’s Das Geld, Karl Theodor von Inama-Sternegg tests the boundary between economic definitions and legal institutions. He accepts Knies’s criticism of confused capital concepts yet proposes a distinction of his own: assets legally or contractually committed to an enterprise may warrant a specific juridical category. His response to monetary policy follows a similar pattern. Rejecting ambitious international bimetallic schemes need not rule out limited cooperation to stabilize gold and silver. The review offers a compact encounter with a critic who asks what constructive legal and political possibilities remain after persuasive objections have been conceded.

A claim may be secure without being quickly convertible into cash. This distinction drives Eugen von Philippovich’s 1887 review of Leonhardt’s proposal to admit warrants secured by warehoused goods into note-bank lending and note cover. Philippovich accepts that endorsers’ joint liability can give warrants security comparable to bills of exchange, but challenges the inference that they can therefore serve banks in the same way: selling the goods may delay payment precisely when ready funds are needed. His qualified endorsement leads to a proposed legal ceiling on warrant-backed notes. The review offers a compact encounter with a concrete banking problem: how legislation can make commercial collateral acceptable to a bank without removing the liquidity constraints on its use.

Economic instruction need not begin with definitions: Pierson’s textbook opens instead with protectionism, placing readers inside a policy dispute. In this 1887 review of its second edition, Viktor Mataja judges the experiment by its instructional clarity rather than by the scientific ambitions of Pierson’s larger treatise. His praise is strongest where concise explanation meets difficult institutional questions, notably money and coinage. Yet the positions he reports complicate any simple equation of economic liberalism with opposition to government action: Pierson combines free trade with regulated banking and progressive income taxation grounded in subjective value. Mataja’s review offers a compact encounter with these combinations while distinguishing admiration for an author’s teaching from agreement with every policy conclusion.

Before judging remedies for agricultural distress, what must a reformer know? In this paired review, Böhm-Bawerk assesses Miaskowski’s study of German inheritance and landownership alongside Reitzenstein and Nasse’s accounts of France and England. His emphasis falls on the labour of making evidence usable: assembling scattered German laws and statistics, weighing opposing arguments, and turning sprawling official inquiries into clear exposition. England receives particular attention for its concentrated ownership, tenant cultivation, and exposure to American competition after seven successive bad years. This brief review offers a concrete glimpse of Böhm-Bawerk’s standards as a reader of empirical research: he values these studies less as prescriptions for reform than as grounds on which proposed remedies can responsibly be judged.

Income is among the most familiar terms in economics and among the most treacherous to pin down, a difficulty Meyer makes the starting point of this inquiry. Tracing the dominant Hermann-Schmoller doctrine back to Adam Smith's notion of annual product, he argues that it never escaped Smith's contradictions between production, consumption, and capital maintenance. Against it he builds his own distinction: national income is a recurrent stock of first-order consumption goods, while individual income is a sum of money and purchasing power, the two related causally rather than identically. Recurrence, secured through labor and the reproduction of the means of production, becomes the organizing thread. An appendix turns on Boehm-Bawerk's critique of exploitation theory, recalculating the steam-engine example to expose an ambiguity between labor's product and equal pay for equal work.

Das Einkommen ist keine Ertragskategorie.

English translation: “Income is not a category of yield.”

How can an economy produce more while its businesses and workers experience depression? In this 1887 review-essay on Britain’s Trade Depression Commission, Eugen von Philippovich examines the gap between expanding output and falling profits, insecure employment, and diminished industrial predominance. He tests reassuring aggregate figures against divergent sectoral fortunes: agricultural and iron-industry distress can coexist with rising commercial incomes. His crucial distinction is between cheaper production that benefits consumers and competition that drives productive activity abroad. Neither business losses nor abundant goods, he argues, alone establish whether a nation is becoming poorer. Critical of the inquiry’s separation of monetary questions from economic conditions, and cautious about tariff remedies, Philippovich offers readers a concrete way to distinguish price changes, redistribution, and losses of productive capacity.

A certificate of release from citizenship is not a record of every departure. This distinction governs Karl Theodor von Inama-Sternegg’s 1887 article on admissions to and releases from Austrian citizenship in 1885. Because emigration could occur without notification, he treats administrative returns as evidence of documented legal changes, not a census of migration. His analysis and tables nevertheless reveal concrete contrasts: Lower Austria’s surplus of admissions against Bohemia’s excess of releases, and the importance of families covered by a single certificate. Reading the figures alongside their legal conditions shows both what these records disclose about the people changing citizenship and why unknown destinations, optional certification, and excluded routes to citizenship prevent a complete demographic balance.