2,793 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Falling unemployment can conceal a weakening labour movement. In this 1915 chronicle of Austria-Hungary at war, Emil Lederer brings union accounts, economic statistics, and emergency legislation together to explain that paradox. Military orders revive employment while conscription reduces the workforce; neither development necessarily restores unions’ finances or workers’ bargaining power. His sharpest contrast concerns the unequal reach of wartime compulsion: workers face military discipline and restrictions on leaving employment, without equivalent enforcement of employers’ obligations. Reports of reduced piece rates, withheld overtime payments, and rising food prices expose what employment totals leave out. Written while the war was still unfolding, the report offers a concrete way to distinguish industrial activity from prosperity—and expanded state authority from protection for labour.
Industrial peace need not mean a balance of power. In this 1915 social-policy chronicle, Emil Lederer examines how German employers’ associations benefited from the wartime suspension of open labor conflict. Military procurement encouraged coordination among firms, strike-compensation funds remained available, and workers exempted from military service could face conscription if they struck or changed jobs. Labor shortages therefore did not necessarily bring bargaining freedom. Reading association reports and dispute statistics against claims of national solidarity, Lederer acknowledges practical cooperation and relief while questioning whether either signals a lasting change in employer policy. His account makes visible the institutional resources preserved beneath the wartime truce—and the unresolved question of who would bear the war’s costs when wage bargaining and social reform returned to contention.
There is no such thing as social science, only social sciences whose circles overlap, so opens this lecture-essay, expanded from a 1911 Czernowitz address into a history and prognosis of an unruly field. Schumpeter's boldest rehabilitation is of eighteenth-century natural law, which he presents not as barren rationalism but as the matrix of modern sociology, economics, ethics, and legal theory, likening its role to what the Nile was for Egypt. Its one fatal error was to believe science could prove ideals, confusing explanation with the setting of aims. He reads the nineteenth-century reaction, from Romanticism and Carlyle to Comte and the historical school, as noisy discontinuity concealing cumulative continuity, governed by an impersonal Logik der Dinge that forces recurring problems on unwilling researchers. The future he foresees belongs not to grand synthesis but to specialized, statistically nourished theory.
Das war nichts anderes als Soziologie — in ganz demselben Sinn wie wir sie heute treiben, und von uns nur getrennt durch Fortschritte der Technik der Wissenschaft.
English translation: “That was nothing other than sociology — in exactly the same sense in which we pursue it today, and separated from us only by advances in the technique of science.”
Because restoring a customs wall between Austria and Hungary would revive decades of tariff conflict, Sieghart marshals the finance archives to defend the common market on the eve of the 1917 negotiations. His source-based history follows the Zwischenzoll-Linie, the intermediate customs line dividing Hungary from the hereditary lands, from enlightened absolutism through Joseph II's failed abolition to its removal in 1850 and constitutional confirmation in the 1867 Ausgleich. He shows the line perpetually entangled with unequal taxation, noble tax privilege, and the salt and tobacco monopolies, and charts how Hungarian opinion swung from Smithian free trade to Listian protectionism after the German Zollverein. Refuting Kossuth's prophecies of ruin with trade statistics, he concludes that the common market, not a tariff barrier, raised up both halves of the monarchy.
Der Zwischenzoll ist keine kommerzielle Maßregel, als welche sie niemand in Schutz nehmen würde, sondern nur ein schwaches Surrogat einer regelmäßigen Besteuerung, ein Ausweg, wodurch die Regierung die Schranken umgeht, welche ihr durch die fehlerhafte Verfassung gesetzt sind.
English translation: “The intermediate customs duty is not a commercial measure—as such no one would defend it—but only a weak surrogate for regular taxation, a shift by which the government circumvents the barriers set for it by the defective constitution.”
Citizens gain rights, yet conscription gives the state command over their lives: this paradox drives Emil Lederer’s 1915 essay, presented here in its 2011 republication. Writing while the war’s outcome remained unknown, Lederer asks how industrial productivity, military technology, and mass organization sustain violence whose capacity exceeds any demonstrated collective purpose. He treats wartime unity as a suspension of class antagonisms under shared compulsion, not their resolution. His distinctive move is to separate capitalism’s provision of the means of war from capitalist interests as a sufficient explanation of it. The essay offers a way to examine how social emancipation and economic achievement can strengthen coercive state power—and why neither national solidarity nor socialist ownership necessarily breaks that connection.
Trained nurses left unemployed while wartime hospitals relied on inexperienced volunteers: this paradox anchors Emil Lederer’s 1916 review of Charlotte von Caemmerer’s study of nursing. Endorsing her investigation, Lederer asks what happens when an occupation remains governed by ideals of feminine charity rather than recognition of skilled, paid work. His economic perspective connects exhausting hours and low wages as expressions of the same weak bargaining position, not as an inexplicable mismatch between effort and reward. Particularly revealing is his attention to the limits of sisterhood: professional solidarity may offer belonging without defending the right to organize. The review shows how Lederer turns evidence about nursing into a concrete argument for labour protection and trade-union representation within institutions devoted to care.
What survives of socialist disagreement when clandestine pamphlets circulate in only a few copies? This practical concern sharpens Emil Lederer’s brief 1916 review of the first installment of Carl Grünberg’s documentary collection on the International and the World War. Praising its selection of official and unofficial materials from before the war through August 1914, Lederer stresses the urgency of gathering sources that might soon become unobtainable. His concluding request gives the review its particular interest: future installments should also give voice to divergent currents within socialist parties. The review captures a concrete problem of historical evidence—how collecting documents during wartime can preserve internal dissent alongside institutional declarations.
How can agricultural protection secure food supplies without making essential nourishment unaffordable? In this 1916 review of Siegfried Strakosch’s study of Austrian agriculture, Hermann von Schullern zu Schrattenhofen makes that tension a test of economic policy. He welcomes Strakosch’s challenge to economic liberalism, but insists that tariffs must serve consumption rather than producers’ profits alone. His political commitment does not erase his empirical caution: protection’s effects are difficult to isolate, and grain prices are not bread prices. Tyrol’s special grain surcharge suggests a concrete opportunity for investigation, while farm accounts could establish the costs that policy must address. The review offers a pointed encounter between wartime demands for secure domestic provisioning and the difficulty of measuring whether protection actually advances public welfare.
An inventory of raw materials is not yet an argument for economic self-sufficiency. That distinction gives Emil Lederer’s brief 1916 review of G. Rörig and A. Binz’s survey its point. Against wartime concern over the Central Powers’ supplies, he identifies what the book provides: 1912 production and trade statistics on animal raw materials, with technical remarks on their processing and use, across a region stretching from the North Sea to the Persian Gulf. His judgement is precise and limited: the compilation does not investigate whether this region could achieve autarky. The review offers a compact example of Lederer distinguishing useful economic documentation from the larger question it leaves unanswered.
Tariffs, imperial rivalry, even catastrophic disruptions need not diminish international trade: this is the counterintuitive argument Eugen Peter Schwiedland examines in his 1916 review of Sigmund Schilder’s two-volume study of world-economic development. He traces Schilder’s confidence in expanding exchange through concrete mechanisms, including colonial specialization, loans tied to manufactured exports, and freight-rate adjustments that partly offset protective duties. The resulting picture is not one of frictionless free trade, but of interdependence sustained through political power and commercial defenses. Writing during the war, Schwiedland weighs the continuing usefulness of this account of prewar relations, acknowledging Schilder’s extensive learning while criticizing his prolixity. The review offers a compact way to examine why protection and integration could be understood as partners rather than opposites.
Praise for wartime organization need not imply confidence in national superiority. In this 1916 review of Altmann’s Soziale Mobilmachung, Emil Lederer endorses the view that modern war mobilizes whole peoples, making provision for soldiers’ dependants a condition of the sacrifices demanded by universal military service. Yet he checks praise of Germany against French endurance: organizational advantages do not establish a greater capacity to withstand war. His appreciation of Altmann’s practical welfare experience in Mannheim is equally qualified by elapsed time. The unchanged lecture preserves an early wartime outlook whose judgements Lederer now partly questions. This brief review offers a concrete encounter between approval of social mobilization, comparative caution, and growing distance from the expectations of war’s first year.
When does disagreement with an economic theory become misrepresentation of it? In this 1916 rejoinder to H. J. Davenport’s review of Economic Principles, Frank Albert Fetter makes definitions and the sequence of exposition tests of fair criticism. He argues that Davenport confuses subjective value with commercial price, mistakes reported business usage for theoretical endorsement, and treats preliminary discussions of time-preference as a finished account of loan interest. These objections offer a concrete view of Fetter’s effort to distinguish individual valuation from market transactions. The reply also exposes a tension in scholarly polemic: Fetter demands patient, contextual reading while answering his critic with pointed sarcasm. Readers can examine how conceptual disputes become disputes over what an author has actually said.