2,793 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Equal representation does not necessarily mean equal power. In this 1897 introduction to Austria’s law on compulsory mining associations, Hermann von Schullern zu Schrattenhofen welcomes the inclusion of miners alongside mine owners as recognition of a partnership between labour and capital. Yet he tests that promise against the arrangements governing elections, staffing and employment regulations. Owners retain consequential powers, while management’s supervision of workers’ elections threatens the appearance of impartiality. Distinct from the official statute that follows it, this commentary combines confidence in social reform with scrutiny of its institutional safeguards. Readers can discover why Schullern regards public supervision as protection for workers, and why even carefully balanced representative bodies leave practical equality dependent on how employers and employees use them.
Small instalments could conceal obligations large enough to endanger a household or farm. In this 1897 introduction and commentary on Austria’s instalment-sales law of 27 April 1896, Hermann von Schullern zu Schrattenhofen asks when such risks justify overriding freedom of contract. Drawing on lawyers’ experience and reports of distressed peasant holdings in Tyrol, he connects unread printed agreements, reassuring oral promises, and inferior goods to the need for protections buyers cannot sign away. His account makes procedural details concrete: allowing oral evidence matters when a salesman’s assurances contradict the contract. Yet he distinguishes protecting purchasers from preventing harmful purchases. The legislative compromise strengthened remedies while abandoning preventive provisions—a limit that sharpens his assessment of what this law could accomplish.
Marx promised in Capital's third volume to reconcile the labor theory of value with a fact that plainly contradicts it: profit rates tend to equalize across industries regardless of how much labor each employs, so that railways and labor-heavy workshops earn alike. That reconciliation, Komorzynski argues, is self-defeating. Once Marx converts values into 'prices of production'—cost price plus an average profit on total capital—labor value forfeits its real economic force, and with it collapses the exploitation theory that profit is appropriated unpaid labor. Drawing on Böhm-Bawerk's pearl-stringing and wine-cellar examples, he insists that products spring from nature and capital no less than labor, that scarce natural goods carry value without embodied labor, and that Sombart's rescue on grounds of 'social labor' cannot repair the doctrine.
Die Ausbeutungslehre steht und fällt mit der Arbeitswerttheorie.
English translation: “The doctrine of exploitation stands and falls with the labor theory of value.”
A tax reform can leave total revenue largely unchanged while altering whose resources the state may legitimately claim. In this 1897 lecture, Friedrich von Wieser assesses Austria’s direct-tax reform by that distributive test. His defence of progressive income taxation rests on a concrete distinction: income needed for subsistence and dependants is not equivalent to income available for public purposes. Yet fiscal justice also requires attention to production; taxes that appear to burden property owners may discourage new housing and enterprises. Wieser’s qualified endorsement brings economic incentives into contact with constitutional obligations, asking whether moderate rates and taxpayer participation can make honest declarations credible. The lecture offers a precise encounter with the tension between equitable assessment, productive investment, and the stronger state authority that reform could sustain.
State control could strengthen the very agreements it sought to restrain. In this brief legislative commentary, Carl Menger examines an Austrian bill of 1897 that would subject cartels in production-taxed goods—such as sugar, beer, and mineral oil—to administrative supervision while granting their agreements legal force. His attention falls on this exchange of recognition for restriction, rather than on a general prohibition of cartels. The proposed grounds for intervention connect unjustified prices with damage to tax receipts and consumers’ purchasing power. With indirect taxes set to rise, Menger sees a particular need to protect consumers from additional cartel burdens. The piece offers a concrete view of how fiscal interests and consumer protection could converge in a selective scheme of economic regulation.
New Zealand appears here not as a colonial curiosity but as a working laboratory of administrative social policy, its Factories Act of 1894 and the tightening amendment of 1896 rendered into German so that European reformers might study the concrete legal machinery of labour protection. Schwiedland, offering the statute in translation alongside his own commentary, shows how registration, inspection, worker lists, accident reporting, and posted abstracts make the workplace countable and supervisable, while differentiated rules govern women, children, apprentices, and recent mothers. His sharpest attention falls on home work: labelling of goods from unregistered dwellings, restrictions on infected premises, and the 1896 ban on subcontracting textile work, meant to keep sweating from vanishing into the household. Publicity and sanitation, he concedes, cannot touch starvation wages; only worker organization can.
Der Geist thätiger Socialpolitik, welcher schon aus der Zahl dieser Arbeitergesetze spricht, durchdringt auch die übrigen Gebiete der öffentlichen Verwaltung Neu-Seelands.
English translation: “The spirit of active social policy, which speaks already from the sheer number of these labor laws, likewise pervades the other spheres of public administration in New Zealand.”
A lecture outline should not be judged as a self-contained treatise: this distinction governs Carl Menger’s 1898 review of Adolf Wagner’s outline of public finance. Menger combines admiration for Wagner’s scholarship with a concrete criticism of its scattered publication and difficult arrangement. He values the outline for making that research navigable, while also filling gaps in its treatment of taxation. The interest of this short review lies in Menger’s standards of judgement: teaching purpose, systematic clarity, and reliable references matter here more than agreement over fiscal doctrine. His attention to Wagner’s treatment of Austrian financial law and history further shows how he assesses usefulness for a particular readership rather than completeness in the abstract.
Economic crises, Böhm-Bawerk argues in this 1898 review, cannot be explained as isolated disturbances: every crisis theory depends on an account of how the economy’s processes interact. His appraisal of Eugen von Bergmann’s history of crisis theories thus offers a compact statement of his own standards of explanation. He praises Bergmann’s ordering of rival doctrines while asking what makes an explanation more than conjecture—comparing theories unsupported by economic understanding to accounts of disease without anatomy or physiology. Readers encounter a revealing distinction between admiration for historical scholarship and endorsement of theoretical conclusions: Bergmann has reserved his own crisis theory for another work, and Böhm-Bawerk’s favorable expectations remain explicitly provisional.
How can an economics textbook encompass rival schools without sacrificing independent judgement? In this brief 1898 review of the second edition of Eugen von Philippovich’s Allgemeine Volkswirthschaftslehre, Carl Menger praises precisely that balance: concise synthesis joined to critical assessment. His approval also turns on practical choices—what to include, and which subjects deserve fuller treatment. He singles out the revision of the money and credit chapters entrusted to I. Landesberger as enhancing the book’s teaching value. Rather than a doctrinal critique, the review offers a compact statement of what Menger valued in economic exposition: breadth, discrimination, and usefulness to students.
Can an employer demand lasting loyalty while offering only the protections of an ordinary wage contract? This tension gives Rudolf Sieghart’s 1898 review of Emil Steinbach’s Rechtsgeschäfte der wirthschaftlichen Organisation its critical focus. Steinbach distinguishes competitive exchange from relationships of economic organization, in which fidelity entails reciprocal protection. Sieghart welcomes the distinction as a test of legislation on employment duties, business secrecy, and related restrictions, but questions the conditions under which solidarity can flourish. His reservation is material rather than merely doctrinal: people exposed to economic insecurity cannot reasonably be asked to renounce self-interest on the same terms as those assured a livelihood. The review shows how a sympathetic critic turns a theory of contracts into a precise challenge to one-sided obligations—and separates its legislative usefulness from confidence in its wider social realization.
Origin is not concept: house or putting-out industry may grow from domestic work, wage labour, rural or urban craft, or even factory production, yet none of these births determines its essence. Across four forms, the dependent Kleinmeister who keeps his license but loses control of materials and market, the Zwischenmeister or sweater who profits from the wage difference, the isolated Heimarbeiter, and the Sitzgesellengruppe, Schwiedland tracks a single constant: production commanded by a Verleger rather than served for a customer. Against German and Austrian law, which sorted dependent home workers from supposedly independent Hausgewerbetreibende, he insists both are subordinate once the intermediary controls the outlet. Dependence, not poverty and not place, marks the boundary; independence survives as legal form after commercial capital has seized the market.
Da gibt es keine Krankenkasse und gar nichts.
English translation: “There is no sickness fund and nothing whatever.”
Five numbers drawn from ninety, with payouts pitched far below fair odds and a risk limit that let the operator refuse any wager grown too large: such was the Austrian Zahlenlotto, whose history Sieghart reconstructs from the finance archives that Minister Kaizl opened to him. From its introduction under Maria Theresa in 1751, justified partly to keep Austrian money from foreign lotteries and to dower poor girls, through four lease periods, the state takeover under Joseph II, and the abolition debates that stretched across the nineteenth century, he traces both the institution and its steadily mounting revenues. The statistical chapters, running to 1895, show Lower Austria and Vienna bearing the heaviest per-capita burden and argue that it was want, not savings, that drove the poor into the lottery's arms.
Sehr treffend sagte ein Lotteriesekretär in einem Berichte aus dem Jahre 1769, dass beim Lotto „aller Vorteil immer auf Seite des Unternehmers und alle Gefahr auf Seite des Spielers ruhe“.
English translation: “Very aptly a lottery secretary said in a report from the year 1769 that in the lotto "all advantage rests always on the side of the operator and all risk on the side of the player.”