1,549 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Japan had won its rank among the great powers by force of arms — but was the far-off empire now an economic world power as well? Prompted by Suke Yoshi Ito's World Year-book and the Russo-Japanese War, Inama-Sternegg answers with careful balance. Reading Meiji trade as a modernization sequence — early import surpluses buying Western machinery, later export surpluses built on silk and disciplined production — he denies that totals alone confer world-economic rank, and dismisses fears of a closed, race-based East Asian bloc as fantasy, with China, not Japan, as the region's true center of gravity. The essay then hardens into theory: Weltwirtschaft is no evolutionary stage beyond the national economy but a field of standardized goods, routes, capital, and central markets whose prices command production — and Britain's rejection of Chamberlain's imperial preference becomes its decisive proof.
Es ist also klar: die Rolle, welche irgendein Staat in der Weltwirtschaft spielen kann, hängt ab von dem Einsatz, den er in die Gemeinschaft der durch die Weltwirtschaft verbundenen und auf einander angewiesenen Staaten einbringen kann.
English translation: “It is therefore clear: the role that any state can play in the world economy depends on the contribution it can bring into the community of states linked together and mutually dependent through the world economy.”
Prometheus, the metal ages, Aristotle's fabled automatic looms, Gutenberg's press, the steam engine — the standard trophies of progress are marshalled here only to be turned against the myth that technology drives history. Inama-Sternegg argues that every technical advance is the accompaniment of a broader cultural movement, not its cause, and that whether an invention creates an epoch or merely lets one become effective must be tested case by case. Slavery, he insists, ended with the spread of Christian civility, not with the mechanical loom; only the nineteenth century earns a genuinely technical stamp. The polemical target is Ulrich Wendt, who made technology the beginning and end of human development. Against him the essay reverses the hierarchy: it is the inquiring human mind that sets technology its problems, never the reverse.
„Es gibt kein höheres geistiges Leben ohne technische Entwicklung, aber auch keine höhere Technik ohne geistige und moralische Fortschritte."
English translation: “There is no higher intellectual life without technical development, but neither is there any higher technology without intellectual and moral progress.”
Two ancient states, Meiji Japan and Porfirian Mexico, threw themselves into modernization within a single generation — an experiment, as the essay puts it, performed on the living body of an entire people. Inama-Sternegg sets the two side by side: railways, post, telegraph, banking, foreign trade, and above all merchant shipping. Mexico's advance under Díaz is real and, emerging from fifty years of civil war, deserving of admiration; but Japan rises faster, denser, and more intensely, building its own fleet where Mexico must ship through foreign carriers. The decisive line is drawn not by infrastructure but by sovereign economic agency — active trade conducted in one's own right rather than mere appearance on the world's markets. The parallel closes over the Pacific ports that might one day bind the two.
Mexiko erscheint wohl mit seinen Produkten auf den Weltmärkten, aber nicht im aktiven Handel.
English translation: “Mexico does appear with its products on the world markets, but not in active trade. Quite different has the economic situation in Japan always been. The country is in the highest degree active and enterprising.”
Reviewing Paul Leroy-Beaulieu's popular guide to placing and managing a fortune, Inama-Sternegg turns a manual for cautious savers into a question about what capital owes a nation. He grants the advice its prudence — shun speculation, distrust financial adventurers, prefer safe state, railway, and municipal bonds — and credits its author as a seasoned man of affairs rather than a system-building theorist. But he warns that the security of even land and houses now depends on the competence of the manager, and that a whole class trained to live off coupons imperils French economic vitality against more enterprising English, American, and German capital. Elevated from private counsel into a national ethic, the rentier's quietism would, he predicts, avenge itself a hundredfold on France's economic strength and its very position among the powers.
Zwar, es ist eine durchaus populäre Schrift, aber sie ist damit noch lange nicht eine seichte Arbeit.
English translation: “To be sure, it is a thoroughly popular writing, but that by no means makes it a shallow work.”
Why should a modern state compel millions of people to answer questionnaires about their sex, occupation, confession, property, and health? Inama-Sternegg answers by drawing a line between the recorded event and the social state: administrative registers of births, deaths, marriages, and trade can follow movements, but only the periodic census discloses the structured composition of the population that such traces leave invisible. He grounds this in a theory of society as differentiated social masses, whose morphology — age, marriage, mortality, occupation — modern statistics first learned to see, against the narrow fiscal and military counts of antiquity. From that theory he derives the rules of a genuine census: complete, exhaustive in content, geographically articulated down to the municipality, periodically repeated, and, against mere sampling, exceptionless in its enumeration of every individual.
Aber das Leben bewegt sich — gottlob — auch ohne behördliche Intervention.
English translation: “But life goes on—thank God—even without official intervention.”
After the guns fell silent at Portsmouth, journalists proclaimed that the center of world commerce had crossed to the Pacific. This essay treats the announcement as exaggeration and then rescues the question by breaking it into parts: the economic opening of China and Korea, the colonization of the Far East and its islands, and the circulation of trade along shipping routes, coaling stations, cables, and ports. Inama-Sternegg praises Japan's transformation of Formosa into an active province of its empire, weighs French, American, British, and German colonial efforts, and warns against every dream of a single Pacific master — the yellow peril, American exclusion laws, British predominance hardening into mastery. His norm is anti-monopolistic rather than anti-imperial: the Pacific is a microcosm of a world made peaceable through commerce.
Japan muß im Stillen Ozean den übrigen interessierten Mächten unbedingt als ebenbürtig anerkannt werden.
English translation: “Japan must unconditionally be acknowledged in the Pacific Ocean as an equal to the other interested powers.”
When an international agricultural congress gathered in Vienna in 1907, Inama-Sternegg seized the occasion to argue that farming could no longer be governed as a merely local or national estate economy. Trade, credit, migrant labor, futures markets, harvest statistics, tariffs, and above all soil fertility had become transnational problems demanding coordinated institutions. He defends grain futures not as speculation but as an apparatus for distributing world supplies and equalizing prices, resists moralizing bans on the Blankotermingeschäft, and dismantles the agrarians' high-protection program as a national rent strategy rather than genuine policy. The essay culminates in the question of Bodenerschöpfung, soil exhaustion, framed through Ricardo and Liebig, insisting that preserving the nation's nutrient capital, not forcing up prices, is agriculture's true international task.
Und darum lassen sich auch die Schäden der Landwirtschaft nicht mehr mit alten Hausmitteln kurieren.
English translation: “And so the ailments of agriculture can no longer be cured with old household remedies.”
Inama-Sternegg's review of A. E. F. Schäffle's posthumous Abriss der Soziologie widens into a reckoning with sociology's claim to be a unified science. His verdict is admiring but severe: Schäffle's Bau und Leben des sozialen Körpers was rejected less for its social observations than for the biological and psychological analogies that framed them, and the later stripping-away of those analogies drained the very vitality that had made the work compelling. The essay separates a fruitful insight, that human life is genuinely social and its phenomena collective facts rather than sums of individuals, from the premature leap to an all-embracing system. Anthropology, ethnology, law, economics, statistics, geography, and psychology all bear on society, and no single mind can master them. Sociology may yet find its laws, but only through specialized research and repeatedly observed regularities, not through grand schemes built too soon.
Man verzeihe das harte Wort, aber die bisherige Entwicklung der „Soziologie“ als einheitlicher Wissenschaft berechtigt einigermaßen dazu.
English translation: “May the harsh word be forgiven, but the development of “sociology” as a unified science up to now to some extent justifies it.”
Inama-Sternegg reviews Gustav Schmoller's general economics in the long shadow of the Methodenstreit, pressing the question of whether a historically grounded economics can still be theoretical. He rejects both extremes, timeless deductive laws detached from history and a descriptive historicism unable to generalize, and defends abstraction, but only when drawn from comparable social-economic formations. Collections of facts, however exact, remain economic history until organized into concepts of recurrent processes. Schmoller's own practice, he argues, proves that historical-realistic research can be theoretically fruitful, nowhere more than in its anatomy of markets, prices, rent, and distribution, where the old problem of the just price returns as a matter of market order rather than scholastic moralism. His reservations are firm: too much borrowed psychology and sociology, and a theory of production left underdeveloped beside organization and exchange.
Zwar der Vorwurf, der von hier aus der klassischen Nationalökonomie gemacht wurde, sie habe sich mit ihren abstrakten Lehren von Wert und Preis, Lohn und Rente vermessen, allgemein gültige Gesetze zu formulieren, ist innerlich nicht begründet.
English translation: “The reproach made from this quarter against classical economics—that with its abstract doctrines of value and price, wages and rent, it presumed to formulate universally valid laws—is not, in its inner substance, well founded.”
Georg von Mayr's renewed defense of a separate moral statistics provokes this sharp rebuttal on the boundaries of a science. Inama-Sternegg does not deny that suicide, divorce, illegitimacy, or prostitution can be studied statistically; he denies that moral categories may organize the discipline itself, forcing heterogeneous facts into a scheme fixed by prior valuation. Notions of the normal and the typical, he argues, obscure the structure of social masses, and the inner motives behind a crime or a suicide cannot be reconstructed as reliable mass data. In place of a moral-statistical chapter he proposes a social statistics of fundamental institutions — marriage and family above all — so that divorce or adultery keeps the legal and confessional context that alone makes its meaning intelligible.
Zunächst sind Symptome nur Hypothesen, nicht Tatsachen.
English translation: “To begin with, symptoms are only hypotheses, not facts.”