1,549 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Delivered as a commemorative address before the statistical Central Commission, this appraisal presents Lorenz von Stein not as a statistician, for he conducted no surveys himself, but as the thinker who made statistical inquiry more necessary and more self-conscious. Inama-Sternegg prizes orientation over exactness: Stein opened questions of social masses, causal relations, and institutional form that statistics could later test and correct. He traces the life from Schleswig origins and a Parisian encounter with socialism to the long Vienna professorship of 1855 to 1888, and reads the doctrine as a binding of three movements, the law of goods, the ascent and conflict of classes, and the legal-administrative order of the state, mediated by the concept of soziales Koenigtum. A speculative constructor, yes, but one whose reach disclosed problems narrower methods had not yet learned to formulate.
Er wollte, wie er mir oft mit Stolz erzählte, zeigen, daß er den Adel seiner Familie nicht brauche, sondern ihn sich selbst zu erwerben wisse.
English translation: “He wanted to show, as he often told me with pride, that he did not need the nobility of his family, but knew how to earn it for himself.”
A controversy over smallpox vaccination becomes, in Inama-Sternegg's hands, an occasion to work out a theory of statistical proof. Following J. Koeroesi, he denies that the protective force of vaccination can be settled by physiological experiment alone and defends inference from mass facts. The essay dismantles the objection that vaccination statistics is worthless because the total living vaccinated and unvaccinated populations are unknown: many valid measures relate an event to its nearest causally relevant collective, not to the whole population. Koeroesi's method of relative intensity compares general morbidity and mortality against specifically smallpox morbidity, mortality, and lethality, using Budapest and Hungarian provincial-city material. Underlying all of this is a distinction between two directions of proof, progressive experiment moving from cause to effect and regressive observation moving from effect to cause, which makes statistics indispensable precisely where experiment cannot reach.
Bei der ersten Methode (Zerfällung der Gesamtheiten) scheidet man alle fremden Faktoren aus; bei der letzteren (Intensitätsberechnung) berechnet man den Einfluß eines unausgeschiedenen oder unausscheidbaren Faktors durch die gegebenen übrigen Werte.
English translation: “In the first method (decomposition of totals) one excludes all extraneous factors; in the latter (intensity calculation) one computes the influence of an unexcluded or inextricable factor by means of the other given values.”
When a country reckons its standing in the world, the ledger of exported and imported goods tells only part of the story — and that omission is the subject of this short manuscript essay on travel and the balance of payments. Beginning from the observation that railway passenger traffic on Europe's most developed lines had doubled in twenty years, Inama-Sternegg treats modern travel not as a cultural curiosity but as a measurable economic force. Tourists circulate needs as well as bodies: exposure to foreign hotels, food, and comforts differentiates demand and makes national markets porous. He then converts visitors into lodging-days and expenditures, and folds tourism receipts, transport services, emigrant funds, and workers' remittances — with figures from Switzerland, the Tyrol, and Italian labourers — into a fuller Zahlungsbilanz that mere merchandise trade conceals.
Der Reisezauber hat es den Kulturmenschen angetan.
English translation: “The spell of travel has taken hold of the civilized man.”
Statistics, on the metaphor that governs this public lecture, is the ground plan of social life: abstract and dry, yet fundamental to the whole structure. Refusing any narrow technical brief, Inama-Sternegg presents it as an old, almost instinctive human need, visible in ancient censuses and biblical enumerations. His central move carries statistics from a state function to a social one: because the state sees only what passes through its organs, the whole of society must be called upon to record and reckon. The housewife's account book, the worker's budget, and business bookkeeping all become elementary statistical acts. He marks the limits too, for some things cannot be measured and they are not the least significant, and defends objectivity against its one true enemy, one-sidedness. A servant, then, whose guidance modern life cannot dispense with.
Die Statistik, meine Herren, liegt dem Menschen im Blute.
English translation: “Statistics, gentlemen, is in man's blood.”
From antiquity's equation of wealth with conquest, through mercantilist trade balances to physiocratic faith in the soil, Inama-Sternegg reads the whole history of doctrine as partial answers to one problem — national wealth — in this Vienna lecture of 1883. He first severs national wealth from private fortune: an individual may pursue, renounce, or squander riches, but a people has duties — culture, self-preservation, public power — for which wealth is only adequate means, dead or destructive beyond rational purpose, as the fates of Spain and Rome suggest. Mercantilism, he argues, grasps artificial rents from privileged trade, physiocracy natural rents in land; both narrow surplus to a favored sector. Adam Smith restores industry, trade, and agriculture to one field through labor and division of labor, yet leaves the theory incomplete. Wealth, finally, is a moral and economic deed — productive superiority earned within the community of nations.
Für ein Volk gibt es keine Launen und keine Genüsse; das Leben eines Volkes ist eine Summe großer Aufgaben, eine Kette von Pflichten.
English translation: “For a people there are no whims and no indulgences; the life of a people is a sum of great tasks, a chain of duties.”
Does social science possess a unified object, or must it splinter into a natural science of mass regularities and an ethical history of institutions? Delivered as an inaugural lecture at the University of Vienna in 1881, this essay stages that apparent dualism — unplanned phenomena like price formation, custom, and population change set against consciously organized associations, firms, and positive law — only to dissolve it. Inama-Sternegg argues that even the 'natural' phenomena are socially conditioned: child mortality, illegitimacy rates, and market order depend on law, habit, and collective ideas of welfare. The unity of the science lies in studying all that is socially conditioned and reconstructing the causal system behind it. Method follows object: observation and statistics wherever facts can be counted, but history as statistics' necessary twin, since a present state must be understood through its development.
Die Sozialwissenschaft ist die Wissenschaft von den Handlungen der Menschheit, durch welche sie die Idee der Wohlfahrt zu verwirklichen strebt.
English translation: “Social science is the science of the actions of mankind by which it strives to realize the idea of welfare.”
When Guerry coined the phrase moral statistics in 1833, he attached a single name to investigations of crime, marriage, and social conduct, and, Inama-Sternegg warns, opened the door to metaphysical system-building on half-tested data. His sustained target here is A. von Oettingen, whose Christian social ethics dressed speculative social-ethical laws as inductive results. Worldview may orient inquiry, the essay concedes, but must never be smuggled into the proof. The sharpest methodological blows fall on international comparison, where tables juxtapose crimes, marriages, and illegitimacy governed by incompatible legal and administrative regimes, and where the law of large numbers only manufactures pseudo-truths. His alternative is historical and contextual: moral statistics is no autonomous discipline but a viewpoint within general statistics, answerable always to carefully analyzed social reality rather than to a doctrine fixed before the facts.
Der ehrliche Forscher verzichtet von vornherein darauf, aus der bloß äußeren Erfahrung die sittlichen Prinzipien, die die Welt erhalten, abzuleiten.
English translation: “The honest investigator renounces from the outset any attempt to derive from mere external experience the moral principles that sustain the world.”
When a farm passes undivided to a single heir while the others take compensating claims, the law is doing something ordinary private law cannot — and defending that exception is the work of this 1882 essay. Inama-Sternegg's premise is that land is no ordinary item of private wealth: fixed, productive, socially indispensable, bound to settlement, credit, and family continuity. Against the demand that private law be uniform, he argues that agrarian law, like commercial law, is not caste privilege but a legal response to a distinct sphere of economic relations. Anerbenrecht is no romantic restoration: its aim is to keep money economy, credit, and world-market competition from destroying viable holdings through irrational fragmentation and inheritance debt. His solution preserves ownership and testamentary freedom while converting coheirs' claims from parcels of land into secured, yield-based rents measured by the holding's net return.
Die nationalökonomische Eigenart von Grund und Boden hat sich zu allen Zeiten auch im Rechtssystem ausgeprägt.
English translation: “The economic peculiarity of land and soil has at all times also expressed itself in the legal system.”
Two economic logics pull against each other in the world politics of 1904, and Inama-Sternegg's aphorisms turn on the contradiction between them. Within their own borders, the cultural states hem in the peasant's holding and inheritance, wrap the artisan in corporative controls, and cultivate what he mockingly calls a policy 'for the little man' — a defensive localism born of distrust in ordinary economic initiative. Outward, imperial and commercial competition demands coordination on a far larger scale. He refuses to read British imperialism or American expansion as mere lust for domination, seeing instead a contest for secure shares in an expanding world economy, and rejects both doctrinaire free trade and isolated protection. His preferred path is institutional reciprocity — the 1892 Central European treaties, the Brussels Sugar Convention, American reciprocity — over fragmented, item-by-item tariff bargaining.
Der Bauer wird neuerdings unter eine strenge Vormundschaft gestellt; er soll sein Gut nicht zerteilen und beliebig vererben, über eine gewisse Grenze nicht verschulden.
English translation: “The peasant has of late been placed under a strict guardianship; he is not to divide his holding or bequeath it as he pleases, nor is he to encumber it with debt beyond a certain limit.”
A generation earlier, Europe's cities had buried more of their inhabitants than were born in them, surviving only by immigration; now, Inama-Sternegg observes, they grow from their own surplus of births. This essay from the Österreichische Rundschau warns against reading that reversal as simple urban flourishing. The vanished 'Lebensdefizit' rests less on sanitation, water, and food inspection than on the altered age-structure of a population fed by vigorous young rural migrants — so the city's vitality is borrowed, and the deeper reproductive strength of the people still rests on the land. The second half turns the lens around: rural factories, commuter suburbs and annexations, and spa and resort towns carry urban economy and habits outward, weaving town and country into a single circulatory system in which each feeds the other.
So bewirken schließlich alle Kräfte, welche das städtische Leben entwickelt, eine Nivellierung des Gegensatzes von Stadt und Land, indem sie dem Lande höhere Lebensformen zuführen, sich selbst aber von den überschüssigen Säften des flachen Landes nähren.
English translation: “Thus, in the end, all the forces which urban life develops bring about a leveling of the opposition between town and country, in that they bring higher forms of life to the countryside, while nourishing themselves from the surplus vital sap of the flat land.”
Every street, sewer, and tramline a city lays out of public funds quietly enriches the private owners of the land beside it — and that unearned increment, Inama-Sternegg argues, is why the growing city must claim a public competence over its soil analogous to the state's own. Dedicated to Adolf Wagner, the study presents urban land policy as at once the central municipal social question and an old problem in new form. He works through its instruments in turn: annexation of urbanized suburbs, expropriation and 'Zonenenteignung' reaching into the adjacent hinterland, deliberate municipal purchase of land and housing, and private-law devices — repurchase rights, the revived Erbbaurecht, tenancy reform. Rejecting the land-reformers' call for outright communalization, and drawing medieval parallels from Burgrecht to the taxing of the 'tote Hand,' he keeps municipal power firmly under the rule of law.
Ein so erweitertes Expropriationsrecht ist also eine notwendige Voraussetzung für die Durchführung eines jeden weiter ausgreifenden Planes einer Straßenregulierung und Bebauung unter den Gesichtspunkten moderner Hygiene, Verkehrs- und Sozialpolitik.
English translation: “Such an expanded right of expropriation is therefore a necessary precondition for carrying out any more far-reaching plan of street regulation and development under the aspects of modern hygiene, transport, and social policy.”
Rows of official figures cast a peculiar spell over the layman, and Inama-Sternegg's essay — occasioned by the 1905 London session of the International Statistical Institute — sets out to break it. Trade statistics have improved, he grants, thanks to reformers like Sir Alfred Bateman, yet they turn dangerous the moment parliaments and newspapers read them as self-evident truth. He catalogues the obstacles to comparison: state territory diverges from customs territory; countries value goods officially or by trader declaration; freight, transit, and processing traffic are counted inconsistently, inflating the figures for entrepôts like Belgium and Holland. Values aggregate unlike goods but rest on estimates; physical quantities are firmer facts yet cannot themselves yield an overall balance. A nation's true weight in world trade, he concludes, lies in its own production, which merchandise figures must be supplemented to reveal.
Die 1000 Stück Mastochsen (oder ihr Lebendgewicht) sind unanfechtbar; ob aber die Million Mark, mit der sie etwa in den Handelsausweisen figurieren, auch nur ungefähr richtig ist, kann täglich bezweifelt werden.
English translation: “The 1,000 head of fatstock oxen (or their live weight) are unassailable; but whether the million marks with which they may figure in the trade returns is even approximately correct can be doubted every day.”