The archive.

Support for struggling banks need not mean preserving them all. In this brief 1918 account, Karl Schlesinger describes Hungary’s Geldinstituts-Zentrale, a state-backed cooperative founded in 1916 to provide liquidity while also rehabilitating, merging or liquidating weak institutions. His medical vocabulary—“therapeutic” and “preventive”—frames banking policy as both repair and continuing oversight. Especially revealing is the connection between assistance and scrutiny: smaller institutions borrowing from the Zentrale were subject to detailed audits, which Schlesinger expected to become a regular feature of Hungarian banking. Written in anticipation of urgent capital demand after peace, the piece offers a concise view of the institution’s intended public purposes, rather than evidence of its eventual success.

War can impoverish an economy while enriching its owners. In this 1918/19 article, Emil Lederer examines that tension principally through Germany’s wartime experience, distinguishing depleted productive resources from growing monetary claims on future output. Agricultural receipts can rise as harvests shrink; industrial reserves can conceal equipment consumed without replacement; higher wages need not secure workers a lasting share in recovery. Reading prices, company accounts, and wage statistics against material shortages, Lederer asks who will command reconstruction—not merely how production will resume. His analysis also challenges the equation of extensive state regulation with an end to capitalism: rationing still leaves access dependent on money. The result is a concrete account of how wartime gains can become durable economic power even when the productive basis of wealth has deteriorated.

New money reaches military suppliers before it reaches everyone else: this uneven passage through the economy anchors Mises’s account of wartime inflation in Die Quantitätstheorie (1918). He defends the quantity theory without treating it as a mechanical rule linking money and prices in fixed proportions. What matters is how monetary expansion changes purchasing power—and who gains while wages and prices adjust at different speeds. His distinction between demand for cash and demand for loans also challenges the claim that expanding circulation merely accommodates commerce. These arguments give concrete stakes to the krone’s future: stabilizing its depreciated value and restoring its former gold parity require different policies. The article connects an explanation of inflation’s unequal effects with the monetary constraints on postwar currency repair.

Facing the fiscal wreckage of the coming peace, Ettinger attacks the fashionable remedy of a one-time capital levy: assessed at inflated wartime prices, it would mistake paper valuations for real wealth, drain working capital from firms, and drive weaker producers to the wall while the strong absorb them — accelerating the very concentration it claims to fight. Behind the confusion, he argues, lies the veil of the money economy, which hides the war's true shifts in property. His alternative is more discriminating: skim off the 'virtual' wealth that scarcity, inflation, and abnormal demand have created, and carry the transition on a general compulsory loan at four percent. Fiscal justice, on this account, must be bound to monetary analysis and to the survival of the producers on whom reconstruction depends.

Die Begriffsverwirrung entsteht nur aus dem Grunde, weil der Schleier der Geldwirtschaft den Blick für die wahren Verschiebungen im Besitze und die wirklichen Opfer des Krieges trübt.

English translation: “The conceptual confusion arises solely because the veil of the monetary economy clouds one's view of the true shifts in property and the real sacrifices of the war.”

Not an abstract mechanism of labour, capital, and exchange, but a formation shaped by land, climate, water, mineral deposits, borders, and neighbours — that is the national economy as this 1918 essay conceives it. Schwiedland turns each physical condition into an economic form: coastlines invite navigation, mountains isolate and obstruct, alluvial plains concentrate population and cities, poor soils drive emigration. Water is the most expansive medium — rivers that irrigate, carry, and power, canals and isthmian cuts that rewrite routes, the sea that lifts history from river civilizations to Atlantic and Pacific world traffic. Coal and iron ground industrial modernity in subterranean endowment. The racial and climatic idiom demands critical distance, yet the argument is not fatalism: environment sets possibilities and resistances, while labour, breeding, mining, and organization remake nature, so that man becomes a co-creator of the economic world.

Der große Handel und Verkehr ist Seehandel und Seeverkehr und die große Politik erstrebt die Beherrschung der Meere.

English translation: “Great commerce and traffic are maritime commerce and maritime traffic, and great politics aims at the mastery of the seas.”

Written from a spring 1918 lecture and left unrevised through the November collapse it had almost anticipated, this compressed sociology of revolution begins from a paradox: revolution becomes possible only when an old apparatus of power still functions but has lost its inner recognition. Its defining formula is deliberately idealist — revolution is the breakthrough of an idea into reality — yet every genuine one needs two things at once, a universal idea and a social force it can mobilize. Lederer traces how intellectual strata charge ideas with emotion, why revolutionary violence always risks betrayal by terror and dictatorship, and how modern class organization makes the strike and the factory its central forms. Against historians who reduce upheaval to grievance or misgovernment, he insists the struggle is over social principles, and closes by distinguishing revolution, a spiritual turning point, from war.

Zweierlei ist jeder echten Revolution wesentlich: daß sie Idee ist und daß sie eine soziale Kraft mobilisieren kann.

English translation: “Two things are essential to every genuine revolution: that it is an idea, and that it can mobilize a social force.”

Among the handful of books woven into European social history, Schumpeter ranks Marx's Kapital—and this compact 1918 tribute, published in the Graz Arbeiterwille, sets out to explain why. Marx the economist is read as continuing and surpassing Quesnay and Ricardo, fixing on capitalist profit as the load-bearing beam on which the upper class rests; the theory of surplus value is treated not as denunciation but as an attempt to derive exploitation from capitalism's own necessities. Marx the sociologist supplies the greater achievement: an economic interpretation of history that swells into a total theory of all social being. What set him apart, Schumpeter argues, was the further claim that socialism is not merely desirable but an inescapable necessity—a political goal transformed into historical certainty, research fused with will.

Er lehrt nicht bloß Forschungsresultate, sondern zugleich auch eine neue, kommende Kultur.

English translation: “He teaches not merely the results of research but at the same time a new, coming culture.”

Can a monetary theory justify reform if its central terms keep changing meaning? In this polemical review of Robert Liefmann’s Geld und Gold, Alfred Amonn tests claims of theoretical novelty against the discipline of consistent definition. He traces shifts between money as a tangible medium of exchange and money as an abstract accounting unit, arguing that these changes obscure rather than explain economic relations. The stakes become concrete in Liefmann’s proposal to dispose of the Reichsbank’s gold reserves. Without insisting that sound money must rest on gold, Amonn defends reserves as a resource for international purchases and postwar reconstruction. The review offers a pointed encounter between conceptual criticism and monetary policy: what must an economist establish before recommending that a country surrender such a resource?

Against W. H. R. Rivers, who held that the structure of a society could be reconstructed from its kinship terminology alone, Thurnwald enters a careful demurral. Kinship terms, he grants, offer valuable indications of social organization, but Kroeber's objections—that psychological association, linguistic borrowing, and semantic drift also shape them—must be honored. Drawing parallels between Indo-European words like Ahne and Enkel and Melanesian usage, and tracing how European cousin-terms shift through borrowing, he argues that so-called classificatory systems answer to no single pattern: they encode belonging, marriage prohibition, and protection rather than mere degree of descent. Peaceful eras elaborate such orders while war simplifies them, and similar circumstances may generate similar systems independently. Kinship names, treated as layered historical products, become guides toward earlier forms of human life.

Aber ebenso unzweifelhaft übertrieben erscheint die Exaktheit, mit der Rivers seine Folgerungen zieht.

English translation: “But equally unquestionably exaggerated is the exactness with which Rivers draws his conclusions.”

Not goods and wealth but human qualities and relationships form the true subject of economics: so runs the governing thesis of this first volume of a revised three-volume course, rewritten after 1918 for readers who now demanded critical reflection on inherited institutions. The old sweep remains, the competition of states from Italy to England, the passage from feudal order to industrial capitalism, but the postwar edition weighs capitalism and socialism at length, dissecting Marxism, syndicalism, guild socialism, and Bolshevism, and refusing historical materialism's reduction of culture to the mode of production. Value is grounded in marginal utility, capitalism defined as both purposive organization and a pervading spirit, and the whole framed by a demand for realism about grown conditions joined to idealism of aims.

Mit Freiheit allein ist dem einzelnen nicht gedient, es bedarf auch der Lebenssicherheit und einigen Behagens.

English translation: “Freedom alone does not serve the individual; there is also need of security of life and a measure of comfort.”

Economics begins, for Schwiedland, in reflection on why some peoples prosper while others fall behind, and wealth, he warns, is relative, unstable, and worth having only as a condition of cultural and political power, ruinous to the nation that mismanages it. From that premise a sweeping course unfolds: the rise and fall of Italy, Spain, Holland, France, and England; the passage from medieval estates to liberal industrial capitalism; then a systematic doctrine of environment, population, value, and price. Economic activity he defines as foresighted provision for future wants, value as marginal utility (Grenznutzen) after Menger and Böhm-Bawerk. Against the materialism, speculation, and inequality that economic freedom breeds, these lectures to Vienna's engineering students end in an appeal for conscious idealism and reform.

Der Antrieb zur wirtschaftlichen Entwicklung der Völker ist der Drang der Einzelnen nach Bereicherung.

English translation: “The driving force behind the economic development of peoples is the individual's urge for enrichment.”

Wartime planning can organize an economy without emancipating those who work in it. This distinction drives Emil Lederer’s 1918 review essay on books by Karl Renner, Paul Lensch, and Johann Plenge. Open to revising Marxist theory, Lederer nevertheless challenges the inference that monopoly, state intervention, or national military power amounts to socialism in the making. His criticism is both economic and political: monopoly prices strain inherited value theory, while the portrayal of Germany as a revolutionary force substitutes conflict between states for conflict between classes. The essay exposes a difficult prospect beneath these wartime claims: if organized capitalism can avert economic collapse while preserving domination, socialist transformation requires more than confidence in historical necessity. Readers encounter a precise dispute over what distinguishes collective organization from collective freedom.