1,549 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Traditional police science no longer matched its object: the modern Rechtsstaat had narrowed the police to tighter limits even as administration expanded into every corner of public life. Inama-Sternegg answers by carving out Verwaltungslehre as a discipline in its own right, bounded against justice, finance, and politics, and governed by three principles — law, morality, and purpose. Refusing both bureaucratic tutelage and abstract laissez-faire, he holds that the measure of direct state activity cannot be fixed by doctrine but must be found case by case from a people's economic development. His sprawling survey — population, health, poor relief, education, property, credit, transport, church, and municipality — treats administration as the art of assigning each public task to its proper organ, with the self-governing Gemeinde as the model of public power that is not centralist.
Das Prinzip der wirthschaftlichen Freiheit verträgt sich nicht mit Massregeln, welche den Einzelnen zu einer nach den Ansichten der Staatsverwaltung ökonomisch besten Güterverwendung zwingen sollen.
English translation: “The principle of economic freedom is incompatible with measures intended to compel the individual to an economically best use of goods according to the views of the state administration.”
In the high valleys of Tyrol, Salzburg, and South Bavaria, medieval peasants often lived not in villages but on isolated farmsteads ringed by their own consolidated fields. Inama-Sternegg argues that this Einzelhof was no anomaly but an economically rational answer to broken terrain, pasture, and woodland — a form in which field community, intermixed strips, and Flurzwang simply lose their object. Reading the Weisthümer, Dorfrechte, and Öffnungen as records of actual rural practice, and pressing back through the Volksrechte to Tacitus's Germania, he makes arrondierung — compact holding — the analytic hinge that separates the Hofsystem from the village. His deeper claim is that communal belonging and field intermixture are distinct: a farm could stand outside the Feldgemeinschaft while remaining a member of the Markgenossenschaft.
Dagegen sind Anordnungen über die Fruchtfolge, über die Brachäcker etc., kurz alles, was der Flurzwang der im Gemenge liegenden Felder betrifft, hier entweder nicht möglich oder nicht nothwendig und daher gänzlich gegenstandslos.
English translation: “By contrast, arrangements concerning crop rotation, fallow fields, and so on—in short, everything that pertains to the compulsory tillage regime of intermixed fields—are here either not possible or not necessary, and therefore altogether without object.”
Delivered as a lecture sketch to the Imperial-Royal Geographical Society in March 1884, this compact study ranges from Savoy and Wallis to the Salzkammergut, asking why some Alpine communities cluster into villages while others scatter into single farmsteads. Inama-Sternegg refuses every one-cause answer. Settlement form, he insists, must be read together with Flurverteilung, the distribution of fields; its causes are plural — relief and the contrast of sunny and shaded slopes, the layering of German, Romance, and Slavic peoples, place-names, property law, colonizing lordship, and shifting Alpine cultivation. Terrain matters, but only through economy; ethnicity supplies patterns, not laws. The morphology of dwelling and field thus becomes historical evidence — sediment left by centuries of interacting natural, social, and economic forces.
Das wissenschaftliche Interesse an den Ansiedelungsformen ist keineswegs nur ein spezielles einer einzelnen Disciplin.
English translation: “The scientific interest in forms of settlement is by no means merely a specialized concern of a single discipline.”
Inama-Sternegg treats the medieval Salland — the demesne land the great lord worked on his own account — as the hinge between estate administration, farming technique, and social power. Across four studies he tracks the Carolingian villa system into its long decline: royal, secular, and ecclesiastical estates lose active command of production, the Cistercian granges reclaim wilderness as model self-cultivating enterprises, and the demesne hufen operate as advance posts of a more intensive agriculture. The decisive agent of dissolution is the Meier, the estate steward who fixes deliveries, appropriates dues, and makes his office hereditary until he emerges as a ministerial lord. Once corvée labour is commuted into money, the lord's own husbandry becomes impossible, and productive leadership passes from the old great lordship to a rising rural nobility — a victory, in modern terms, of labour over capital.
Die Wirthschaftsgeschichte eines Volkes ist immer zugleich die Geschichte seiner sozialen Ordnung.
English translation: “The economic history of a people is always at the same time the history of its social order.”
The state, in this 1902 lecture to the Gewerbeverein, is no fixed machine standing above society but the highest form of human association, itself in constant movement because it springs from human nature. Social policy, Inama-Sternegg argues, must therefore begin from concrete observation — population, institutions, associations, parties, public moods — yet cannot be made scientific by measurement alone: where exact mass observation fails, the statesman's intuitive, historically trained judgment must take its place. Society is not passive material but a field of organized forces with their own pressure and inertia. Modern life, he insists, has outgrown individualist assumptions; transport, cartels, unions, and class consciousness demand a collectivist orientation. Politics becomes applied social ethics — cultivating associations, decentralization, and self-government while subordinating parties themselves to the state as the highest cultural and moral value.
So bilden diese sozialen Massen immer auch Schranken der Politik, über die kein Staatsmann sich ungestraft hinwegsehen kann.
English translation: “Thus these social masses always constitute limits upon politics as well, which no statesman can disregard with impunity.”
No departmental bureau can grasp the interdependence of population, occupation, production, household, welfare, and mobility, which is why Inama-Sternegg insists that labor statistics be built into the whole apparatus of central state statistics rather than hived off as a specialty. Because class cuts across every demographic and occupational group, it cannot serve as the highest principle of classification; social position within occupation must instead be registered consistently throughout. The object, he stresses, is not labor as a productive force to be ranked beside the machine, but the life-condition of the working man as an ethical being and full member of society. The census is foundational; population-movement data and the Betriebszählung, tied to the occupational census, supply the dynamic and institutional complements. Against inflated hopes for a special labor office wielding executive power, he offers a disciplined middle position.
Mit Enqueten kann man eben nicht Statistik machen.
English translation: “One simply cannot produce statistics by means of inquiries.”
The crash of 1873 and the Austrian parliamentary debates it provoked supply the raw material for this legal-economic essay, reprinted in 1903 from an 1874 original, which turns scattered political claims about crisis relief into a theory of public law. The question is not whether state aid is expedient but when it is legally justified, required, and bounded — for even legislative power, Inama-Sternegg insists, is no absolute will. Against both laissez-faire self-responsibility and socialist demand, he grounds intervention in the 'modern state' as a cultural and legal organism: aid is lawful when crisis disables the real exercise of economic freedom, and its purpose is to restore private agency, not replace it. His distinctive move makes organized self-help the state's first task — regaining freedom, not merely protecting it — with direct monetary aid permitted but secondary and situational.
Der Staat ist nicht nur der Lückenbüßer der Gesellschaft.
English translation: “The State is not merely society's stopgap.”
Modern credit, this Prague lecture of 1881 contends, stands coequal with steam power: it detaches value from its material bearer, so that land becomes mortgage paper, warehoused goods become warrants, reputation becomes bills, and expected profit becomes shares — mobilizing immobilized values to build farms, railways, schools, and municipal works. Yet the same force, ruled by speculation and status, becomes 'a credit of the rich,' excluding artisan, peasant, and worker. Inama-Sternegg defines credit historically as social trust made economically active, tracing it from the interest-free lending of kin and village companion under natural economy to the calculable surplus of the money economy. His remedy is cooperative rather than charitable: Vorschuss- and Kreditgenossenschaften, Volksbanken, and loan funds convert dispersed reliability into public credit, so that the true golden age would be not universal debt but universal creditworthiness.
War die Verlegenheit die Mutter des Kredits in der Naturalwirtschaft, so ist der Überfluß der Vater des Kredits in der Geldwirtschaft geworden.
English translation: “If embarrassment was the mother of credit in the natural economy, abundance has become the father of credit in the money economy.”
Lorenz von Stein's last essay, written in 1890 for Stengel's dictionary, reads like a testament — and this 1902 Vienna lecture takes up its unfinished program. Surveying the twelve years since Stein's death, Inama-Sternegg argues that German and Austrian administrative law won its autonomy as a discipline through Gerber, Laband, Georg Meyer, Sarwey, and Otto Mayer, yet narrowed itself in the process, explaining prevailing law 'solely from within itself' and setting aside philosophical, political, and historical interpretation. His sharpest charge is that doctrine ignored the emerging social state: while practical administration grappled with worker protection and social capital formation, the textbooks scattered social law into fragments. Verwaltungslehre, he holds, must survive as a political discipline investigating the driving forces behind legal rules — reborn not as a vague science of the state but as a disciplined theory of legal institutions in their living social context.
Das Leben im Rechte wird damit erst vollkommen erkannt und damit auch das Recht des Lebens wissenschaftlich neu gewonnen.
English translation: “Only thus is life within the law fully understood, and only thus is the law of life scientifically won anew.”
Legal emancipation freed peasants, artisans, and workers from guild, feudal, and administrative restraints, yet Inama-Sternegg argues that this liberation did only half its work. Once the visible fetters fell, the isolated individual still faced markets, credit, factories, and taxation without collective means of resistance; a national and then international grain market fixed wheat prices no farmer could escape. Formal Erwerbsfreiheit, he contends, is not identical with real command over one's economic life. Against both liberal atomism and socialist subordination he advances the Genossenschaft, from Schulze-Delitzsch credit and purchasing unions to Raiffeisen rural societies with their joint liability and local trust, as a post-liberal institution that binds arbitrary individual action in order to strengthen the member's capacity to act. Freedom, on this account, becomes durable only when embedded in disciplined cooperative self-government against organized capital.
Nur die Form änderte sich, in der der Zwang des Lebens auf dem Einzelnen lastete, nicht die Sache selbst.
English translation: “Only the form in which the compulsion of life weighed upon the individual changed, not the thing itself.”
Friedrich Ratzel's Anthropo-Geographie had claimed that where no census reaches, geography must supply the statistical image of humanity. Taking up that challenge, Inama-Sternegg concedes the point without surrendering his discipline: the object of statistics is the human community, grasped through the quantitative determination of mass phenomena, a method that eventually depends on others where it cannot reach. Geography earns its role by reading population from the cultural landscape, from houses, villages, roads, cleared forests, and cultivated land, rather than by replacing enumeration. The essay's governing contrast concerns density: for the statistician a bare ratio of inhabitants to area, for the geographer a territorial condition shaped by relief, climate, water, and settlement history. Neither becomes a complete science of population alone; each gains precision, he insists, only by recognizing the other's method and its limits.
Für den Statistiker ist die Dichtigkeit der Bevölkerung die Beziehung zwischen der Flächenausdehnung eines Gebietes und der Zahl seiner Bewohner.
English translation: “For the statistician, population density is the relation between the areal extent of a territory and the number of its inhabitants.”
Is statistics a science, a method, or mere administrative description? Inama-Sternegg refuses to reopen that old dispute abstractly and turns instead to a sharper thesis: modern official statistics must become historical. A social condition, he argues, is only in small part the product of present circumstances and in far larger part the deposit of earlier social forces, so that population, mortality, prices, crime, schooling, and wages can be understood only through developmental series traced backward in time. Continuous registers, from civil-status records and church books to land books, guild rolls, and price lists, extend statistical vision into earlier centuries, provided estimates and shifting classifications are handled critically. Whoever would make the numbers speak must understand a people's life. Official bureaus, not private scholars alone, must exploit these mass records, since for him legitimate state action is historically informed action.
So ist jede Staatsaktion Verwirklichung einer erkannten historischen Entwicklungstendenz und gerade als solche allein gerechtfertigt.
English translation: “Thus every action of the State is the realization of a recognized historical tendency of development, and only as such is it justified.”