The archive.

Does money’s development depend chiefly on theories of value or on the institutions that organize payments? In this brief 1922 review of Richard Kerschagl’s book, Eugen Peter Schwiedland cautiously identifies an institutional thesis: clearing centres and government administration as a centre of payments help shape monetary development. His concise assessment distinguishes Kerschagl’s historical treatment of monetary theory from what remains to be explained—how a medium of exchange becomes legal tender. The review offers a compact glimpse of this shift in explanatory emphasis, while preserving the provisional character of Kerschagl’s account.

A balanced state budget can conceal an economy still out of balance. In this 1922 newspaper article, Emil Lederer tests the fiscal slogans circulating in Germany’s reparations crisis against the ways households, producers and banks actually respond. Taxes passed on through prices may merely turn public borrowing into private debt; reduced consumption may undermine the domestic production needed for recovery. His distinctive concern is the connection between financial adjustment and the survival of productive and social relationships. Rather than promise a painless cure, he argues for sacrifices by owners of tangible assets and cooperation across economically entangled nations. The article offers a compact account of why an apparently sound fiscal measure can defeat its own purpose—and why distributing losses is inseparable from deciding what must be preserved.

A stable currency need not be a stronger currency: this distinction drives Emil Lederer’s 1922 newspaper article on Austria’s krone and its implications for Germany. Foreign loans, he argues, must finance not only current imports but also the sale of banknotes accumulated abroad—a pressure that successful stabilization could itself unleash by ending hopes of speculative gains. The choice of exchange rate is equally consequential. Appreciation could cut exports and force wages down before prices fell, harming workers and producers while benefiting recipients of fixed monetary incomes. Lederer connects these monetary mechanics to Austria’s political conflict and Germany’s public debt, showing why restoring a currency’s former value might obstruct rather than secure economic recovery.

In the Vienna of 1922, ordinary households followed the share listings as a matter of survival, and Moriz Dub set out to explain why. Written as a sequel to his earlier study for the Finanz- und Volkswirtschaftliche Zeitfragen series, this pamphlet insists that the spectacular boom on the Austrian and German exchanges—the Katastrophenhausse—is no prosperity but the market's mirror of currency collapse. Through tables converting Vienna and Berlin quotations into dollar parities, Dub shows that gains reckoned in crowns and marks conceal real impoverishment; investors flee money for Substanzwerte, claims on inventories, land, and machinery. Only monetary stabilization can end the spell, he argues, and its price will be a fall in securities whose rise depended on endless depreciation.

Österreich ist für jenen, der mit fremder Valuta rechnet, das billigste Land Europas, während seine eigenen Bewohner unter unerträglicher Teuerung stöhnen.

English translation: “For anyone reckoning in foreign currency, Austria is the cheapest country in Europe, while its own inhabitants groan under unbearable inflation.”

A remainder in the accounts is not yet an explanation of interest. In this critical article, Franz Xaver Weiss tests Richard Strigl’s claim that capital interest arises from what remains after wages and land rent have been paid. His sharpest objection is that Strigl’s reasoning would permit such a surplus even in production without capital: why, then, attribute it to capital? Weiss defends marginal-productivity reasoning without accepting the explanatory primacy claimed for it by Clark and his followers. He also restores entrepreneurial choice and competitive adjustment to an apparently motionless equilibrium. The article offers a precise way to distinguish the calculation of a distributive share from an account of its cause—and to see why market prices cannot simply be translated into subjective valuations.

Would a stronger krone make Austria richer, or merely change the monetary terms in which wealth and obligations were counted? In this 1922 rejoinder to Emanuel Hugo Vogel, Alfred Amonn challenges the claim that recovery requires currency appreciation rather than stabilization. His central distinction is between a currency’s permanent exchange-rate level and the disruptive process of moving to another level. Applied to wages and taxes, it yields pointed consequences: cheaper goods do not necessarily mean greater purchasing power for workers, while unchanged nominal taxes become heavier when money appreciates. Amonn’s insistence on defined terms and causal explanations gives this polemical exchange its substance. Readers encounter both a concrete dispute over monetary recovery and the friction between analytical criticism and personal disparagement.

Where does quotation end and distortion begin? In this brief 1922 reply to Robert Liefmann, Alfred Amonn defends his criticism against a charge of falsification. His distinction is pointed: quoting necessarily removes words from their context, but that alone does not demonstrate a material alteration of meaning. He demands a side-by-side comparison of Liefmann’s text and his own allegedly falsified presentation, maintaining that no adequate example has been supplied. The statement offers a compact encounter with Amonn’s combative standard of proof—not a resolution of the dispute, but a precise account of what he insists his accuser must establish.

Credits and debt cancellations alone cannot buy peace - that is the burden of Schumpeter's March 1922 address to the Austrian League of Nations association. Fiscal and monetary disorder are not autonomous technical problems but the outward manifestations of deeper dislocation, the war having been an excess of consumption and a great consumption of capital that left general impoverishment. He contrasts Britain's harsh deflationary return to the pound with the inflationary adjustments of Germany and Austria, and shows how divergent currency policies breed new international antagonisms: weak-currency states appear aggressive, strong-currency states turn protectionist. Emergency loans would only intensify these tensions. The League's proper work, he concludes, lies in unglamorous legal-economic infrastructure - lowering tariff walls, securing international payments, rebuilding credit law - since free trade is the surest cement of the idea of peace.

Nicht von außen und nicht durch Kredite können diese Probleme gelöst werden.

English translation: “These problems cannot be solved from outside, nor by means of credits.”

At a moment when economics could not agree on its own object, this 1922 introduction sets out not to found a new system but to ask what abstraction the science actually requires. Its answer: theory is indispensable, yet its concepts are never timeless natural laws — they are constructions fitted to a historically specific order, the capitalist exchange economy, where access to goods runs through money-mediated exchange and homo oeconomicus is a working fiction. Lederer reconstructs the labor-value tradition — Ricardo's rent, Marx's distinction between labor and labor-power, surplus value, the equalized profit rate — as a powerful account of reproducible commodities, then delimits it: it cannot price scarce or monopoly goods. Marginal utility, resolving needs into ranked partial satisfactions, supplies the rest, and he reads classical, Marxian, and Austrian economics as partial theories of one and the same exchange order.

Für die Ware ist die Tauschfähigkeit das Wesentliche, so wie für das Gut: die Brauchbarkeit.

English translation: “For a commodity, exchangeability is essential, just as usefulness is essential for a good.”

Just as a chemical equilibrium shifts to absorb an external shock, an exchange rate moves to keep a nation's balance of accounts in balance—the analogy to Le Châtelier, Van't Hoff, and Lenz from which Rueff builds a theory of currencies as natural phenomena rather than political accidents. Working from wholesale price indices, he defines the 'disparity' between a currency's purchasing power at home and abroad, then demonstrates, mathematically and against 1912–1922 data for France, Britain, and the United States, that disparity moves to equilibrate the balance of accounts. He reads Britain's postwar unemployment as the cost of negative sterling disparity and dismisses the reparations quarrel: to compel Germany to pay while barring her exports is simply contradictory.

La vie économique, dans son ensemble, et pour un groupe important d'individus, paraît bien ainsi régie par la loi la plus générale de la nature.

English translation: “Economic life as a whole, and for an important group of individuals, thus appears indeed to be governed by the most general law of nature.”

International financial control could become an obstacle to the development it was meant to oversee: this tension draws Schwiedland’s attention in his short review of E. J. Tsouderos’s account of Greece’s economy. He highlights Tsouderos’s case for adapting supervision to the demands of territorial expansion, while offering his own qualified optimism about Greek agriculture, shipping and trade. Unfinished railways give that qualification a concrete basis. Particularly revealing is Schwiedland’s endorsement of Tsouderos’s proposed Balkan economic arrangement: reduced tariffs and restored banking relations might prepare the ground for political understanding. The review offers a compact view of how this sympathetic reviewer connected Greece’s prospects with both domestic improvements and cooperation across borders.

A jurisprudence resting solely on the ground of logic — that is the ambition of Kaufmann's outline of a "pure theory of law," which takes Kelsen's reine Rechtslehre and grounds it in Husserl's phenomenology of essence, against every empiricism that dissolves validity into fact. Jurisprudence becomes exact, he insists, only when it stops deriving its concepts from psychology, power, purpose, or moral value. A norm is not an imperative bound to a commander's will but an objectivation of a stance; the legal proposition is a double norm — a subject ought to act, and if it does not, a consequence ought to follow toward that subject — whose juristic core is formal imputation, not causality. From four ground concepts — person, behavior, fact, and ought — he generates the pure legal concepts, recasting the subjective right as nothing but the correlate of another's duty.

Jede theoretische Wissenschaft ist ein Inbegriff synthetischer Urteile a priori.

English translation: “Every theoretical science is a totality of synthetic a priori judgments.”