The archive.

Economists since Adam Smith had borrowed the everyday word Kapital and pinned it to artificial scientific categories, and the result, Menger argues, was not precision but systematic confusion. This offprint from the Jahrbücher für Nationalökonomie und Statistik dismantles three reigning definitions in turn — capital as income-yielding wealth, as means of production, and as Smithian products devoted to further production — showing that the distinction between nature, labor, and product belongs to technical genealogy, not economics: wild timber and cultivated timber of equal quality do the same work. In place of these aggregations he restores the Realbegriff, capital as money sums devoted to acquisitive enterprise, and demotes interest to one case within a wider theory of Vermögensertrag, the yield of wealth.

Der Weg zur Beseitigung der auf dem Gebiete der Kapitaltheorie herrschenden Verwirrung ist die Rückkehr zum Realbegriffe des Kapitals.

English translation: “The way to eliminate the confusion prevailing in the field of capital theory is a return to the real concept of capital.”

A logically consistent principle of justice is not yet a means of social reform. In this brief 1889 review of H. Delwaide’s La Crise Sociale et le Principe du Droit, Eugen Peter Schwiedland challenges the attempt to derive a solution to the social question from absolute right. He grants that demands for justice can educate, but asks how a state composed of people pursuing their needs could act through legal categories alone. His pointed analogy with physics distinguishes isolating a force for study from imagining that other forces cease to operate. The review offers a compact encounter with Schwiedland’s objection to this legal abstraction: reconciling liberty and coercion on paper does not explain what enables a state to act.

Sound evidence need not gain anything from a theoretical defence. That is Böhm-Bawerk’s pointed judgment in this short review of Heinrich Frommer’s study of workers’ profit-sharing. He praises Frommer for rejecting 73 of 100 surveyed cases as unsuitable for scientific inference and endorses the remaining evidence’s narrow conclusion: profit-sharing is advisable only where workers strongly affect business returns and technically preferable wage systems cannot be used. His objection concerns Frommer’s subsequent efforts to define who counts as a producer or entrepreneur. The review offers a compact instance of Böhm-Bawerk distinguishing a credible practical finding from conceptual arguments that, in his judgment, do nothing to strengthen it.

A forecast may prove correct without having been scientifically warranted. This distinction anchors Eugen Peter Schwiedland’s brief 1889 review of Karl Wasserrab’s account of German social policy. Schwiedland accepts historical explanations of Bismarck’s reforms but doubts that historical tendencies and Wilhelm II’s throne speeches establish what will follow. Wasserrab’s projected compulsory industrial associations—supposedly directed toward respectable rather than maximum profits—give this methodological objection a concrete institutional setting. Schwiedland’s sharpest preference is for firsthand evidence from industrial practice over theoretical speculation. The review offers a compact encounter with a critic separating useful observation from predictions whose confidence exceeds their grounds.

Vienna’s residents paid far more in taxes than Berlin’s, yet their city retained a much smaller share. In this 1889 review of Leo Munk’s comparative study, Eugen Peter Schwiedland draws attention to the gap between a population’s fiscal burden and its municipality’s spending power. Consumption duties and state monopolies help explain Vienna’s heavier burden; reliance on surcharges and uncompensated state duties compounds its municipal difficulties. Schwiedland values Munk’s connection of tax statistics with social and economic conditions, but finds his proposed remedy—reform of state taxation—insufficiently concrete. The review offers a compact case in how comparisons of tax rates can mislead unless readers also ask who receives the revenue and which government must perform the work.

An elementary economics textbook can be brief without becoming intellectually thin: that is the virtue Böhm-Bawerk finds in Luigi Cossa’s work. This short 1889 review concerns the theoretical volume of its thoroughly revised eighth edition, now separated from economic policy. Böhm-Bawerk’s praise reveals a specific standard of instruction: clear distinctions, concentrated substance, useful bibliographical guidance, and discriminating attention to new scholarship across languages and methodological schools. His call for a new German translation rests on substantive revision, not merely international popularity. The review offers a compact glimpse of what he valued in an introductory handbook—and why keeping such a book current required more than adding pages.

Can a theory built on subjective valuations remain firmly empirical? In this 1889 review of Robert Zuckerkandl’s study of price theory, Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk treats the two commitments as complementary. He praises Zuckerkandl’s history for showing how external conditions affect prices through human judgments, rather than acting mechanically. Yet agreement on this foundation does not prevent criticism: Böhm-Bawerk finds Zuckerkandl’s treatment of value, costs, and complementary productive factors misleading about existing marginal-utility research. The review offers a compact view of his standards for economic explanation—historically informed, attentive to distinct pricing situations, and answerable to reality. His closing claim that marginal utility was winning adherents even among historical-school economists also challenges a simple opposition between abstract theory and empirical inquiry.

Can a theory explain market prices through individual valuations and still need an independent category of objective value? This is the tension Julius Friedrich Gans von Ludassy identifies in his 1889 review of Böhm-Bawerk’s Grundzüge der Theorie des wirtschaftlichen Güterwerthes. A sympathetic interpreter of Austrian value theory, Ludassy turns Böhm-Bawerk’s success in explaining prices into an objection to his conceptual framework: purchasing power reflects other people’s valuations, not a force inherent in commodities. His criticism preserves marginal utility while challenging the division between subjective and objective value. Readers can discover an internal Austrian disagreement over what economic explanation requires—and why, for Ludassy, distinguishing value theory from price theory is more defensible than positing two independent kinds of value.

Can a theory grounded in personal wants consistently admit an objective or “natural” value? In this 1889 review of Friedrich von Wieser’s Der natürliche Werth, Julius Friedrich Gans von Ludassy tests the newer book against Wieser’s earlier subjectivism. His admiration for marginal-utility analysis sharpens rather than softens his objections: he questions whether an ideal communist economy explains actual valuation, and whether multiplying categories of value clarifies their common causes. The dispute becomes concrete when he turns to productive cooperation. A four-horse team and wine blending test how the value of a joint product can be assigned to its inputs. Readers encounter a sympathetic but exacting critic asking where Wieser’s conceptual innovations extend his theory—and where they compromise its foundations.

How far should criticism of a thinker’s speculative claims extend? In this 1889 review of Heinrich Dietzel’s account of Karl Rodbertus’s life and social philosophy, Gustav Gross welcomes critical scrutiny but contests several of its conclusions. An unproved theory of historical development may still yield insight; intellectual debts do not by themselves establish deliberate concealment. Gross applies the same caution to Dietzel’s distinction between socialism and communism, questioning whether sharply opposed principles can adequately classify inconsistent thinkers. His review offers a compact encounter with the problems of writing intellectual history: how to weigh influence, assess ambitious historical theories, and preserve distinctions without forcing a body of thought into doctrinal coherence.

A definition of income that casts doubt on workers’ earnings because they are insecure has a concrete difficulty to answer. In this 1889 review of Robert Meyer’s Das Wesen des Einkommens, Eugen von Philippovich tests economic categories against irregular wages, annuities containing repayments of capital, and the uncertainties of artistic work. He disputes Meyer’s decision to define national income before individual income, arguing that inquiry should begin with the individual, as in value and price theory. Yet he separates this methodological objection from an insight he endorses: income is better understood as a process of formation and receipt than as an isolated stock of goods. The brief review shows why that insight need not depend on requiring income’s recurrence to be assured.

Economists can reject abstraction in their manifestos yet practise it fruitfully in their research. This discrepancy animates Böhm-Bawerk’s 1889 review essay on recent British and American economics. He credits historical scholarship with renewing the discipline’s evidence, but argues that the German historical school’s methodological exclusiveness has stifled explanation. Across the Atlantic, he finds a less restrictive practice: economists associated with the historical movement are developing theories of consumption, capital, and wages. His sympathies do not make him an uncritical defender of formal reasoning; Wicksteed’s mathematics prompts a warning that deduction needs experiential foundations. The essay offers a concrete view of how Böhm-Bawerk judged rival schools—not simply by their declared allegiances, but by the explanatory work their methods actually accomplished.