1,549 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Once the medieval guilds hardened from ladders of advancement into closed, capital-dependent monopolies, the author argues, the modern worker question was born. Rosenberg surveys the full arc of remedies proposed for it in 1890s Central Europe: consumer and productive cooperatives from Rochdale to Schulze-Delitzsch, English trade unions, conciliation chambers, profit-sharing on the model of Leclaire's Paris workshop, factory inspection, and the new German and Austrian schemes of sickness and accident insurance. He rejects Lassalle's iron law of wages as a literal economic law, treating wages instead as prices set by exchange, subjective valuation, and relative bargaining power, and defends the strike as a last-resort instrument rather than a revolutionary weapon. Ranging from Thomas More through Saint-Simon, Fourier, and Marx, he closes by urging liberal social reform over repression.
Dieses „eherne" Gesetz steht auf thonernen Füssen.
English translation: “This "iron" law stands on feet of clay.”
From the Dutch prohibitions on short-selling through England's Barnard's Act to the French campaigns against agiotage, the law has tried and failed for centuries to suppress speculative dealing on the exchanges. Rosenberg traces that comparative history to explain the German and Austrian 'gaming objection' — the doctrine, received into §764 of the new Civil Code, by which pure differential contracts settled only on price movements could be denied enforcement as mere wagers. He shows how the Reichsgericht and, more strictly, the Austrian Supreme Court inferred gambling intent from a speculator's wealth, occupation, and trading pattern, and dissects the 'pathological' commission agent who executes real trades yet hides the true price to skim a concealed cut. The doctrine, he concludes, is judicial self-defense that fails economically, and he ends by proposing to regulate commission houses instead.
Die Geschichte der die Börsengeschäfte betreffenden Gesetzgebung ist zugleich eine Geschichte der Nutzlosigkeit dieser Gesetze, soweit sie den Börsenverkehr beschränken wollten.
English translation: “The history of legislation concerning stock-exchange transactions is at the same time a history of the uselessness of these laws, insofar as they sought to restrict exchange dealings.”
Behind the wartime surge in prices, Rosenberg locates not scarcity, speculation, or blocked imports but the money itself — the mass issue of irredeemable paper with which governments financed the war. Drawing the quantity theory from Bodin, Locke, Hume, Ricardo, Mill, and Fisher, and setting Menger's account of money as a generally accepted medium of exchange against Knapp's state theory, he assembles the cautionary record: Austrian paper money, the French assignats, and Confederate currency, all ending in depreciation. His sharpest pages are distributional. Inflation quietly plunders the holders of fixed money claims — bondholders, savers, pensioners, widows and orphans bound by trust funds — while enriching debtors and owners of real assets, and the law, honoring nominal value, offers the dispossessed creditor no remedy at all.
Die Rechtswissenschaft läßt hier die Gläubiger vollständig im Stiche.
English translation: “Jurisprudence here leaves creditors entirely in the lurch.”