The archive.

This brief foreword introduces another author's history of advertising, and Mataja uses it to make a case for the subject itself. Advertising, he observes, is rich in history but poor in historians—an institution in constant contact with the economy, public life, technology, and art, yet rarely traced across its own development. He commends the volume for following each advertising medium along its course from the simple and artless toward the composite and mass-produced, for drawing together sources that lie unusually scattered, and above all for its rich pictorial apparatus. The whole, he suggests, reveals how great a sum of thought, ingenuity, and craft has already been placed in advertising's service, and he offers the book as a spur to its technical, artistic, and ethical advancement.

Die Reklame ist reich an Geschichte, weniger reich an Geschichtsschreibern.

English translation: “Advertising is rich in history, but less rich in historians.”

Behind the visible bustle of households, workshops, and markets lies a single circular process no eye observes directly, and making that national economy thinkable is the didactic ambition of this 1926 treatise. Building from need and scarcity toward value, marginal utility, and price, Amonn insists that production and distribution occur uno actu, in one and the same act, and recasts Betrieb against Unternehmung as the units of economic life. He defends land, capital, and labor against every labor-theory reduction, carries the analysis through money, credit, the Konjunkturzyklus, and crisis, and closes with an extended reckoning with the Methodenstreit that set Menger's marginal utility school against Schmoller's historians.

Die „relative Seltenheit“ oder „Knappheit“ ist der letzte Grund der Entstehung und der Höhe der Preise.

English translation: “Relative scarcity" or "scarceness" is the ultimate ground of the emergence and the level of prices.”

The occasion is commemorative but the target is contemporary: Schumpeter reads the empirical, statistical, institutional economics coming out of America, above all Wesley Clair Mitchell, as a latent revival of the old German Methodenstreit that once swirled around Schmoller. Rather than embalm Schmoller as a monument, this 1926 essay treats him as an unresolved problem. Schumpeter accepts the doctrine of Wertfreiheit, that science cannot prove ultimate ends, yet refuses the conclusion that all policy is mere class ideology; emergencies, interdependence, and shared necessities create a concrete field where analysis can distinguish feasible compromise from fantasy. He defends Schmoller against the caricature of the mere fact-collector, arguing for reciprocity between theory and historical research, and closes by pairing him with Marshall as one who pushed economics beyond simplified competitive abstraction.

Gelegentlich hören und lesen wir aus Amerika Symptome von etwas, das man nur als latenten Methodenstreit bezeichnen kann.

English translation: “Occasionally we hear and read from America symptoms of something that can only be described as a latent Methodenstreit.”

After Bolshevik Russia retreated to the New Economic Policy, Mises saw the practical economics of the age settle on a regulated private-property order, neither laissez-faire nor outright expropriation. That third system is his target. Interventionism keeps ownership formal while replacing entrepreneurial calculation with isolated commands, and those commands, he argues, defeat their own ends: a price ceiling below the market breeds shortage, rationing, and finally compulsory production; a legislated or union-enforced wage above productivity turns frictional unemployment into a permanent institution. Corruption and evasion become structural supports rather than accidents. The postwar depression, on this reading, is not the crisis of capitalism but the crisis of interventionism, an order with no economic principle of its own, forced always to retreat or to advance toward socialism.

Entweder Kapitalismus oder Sozialismus; ein Mittelding gibt es nicht.

English translation: “Either capitalism or socialism; there is no middle way.”

Keep two things apart, Schumpeter insists, the businessman's forecasting and the scientist's theory of crises, and the whole field of Konjunkturforschung comes into focus. Prompted by the new German Institute for Business Cycle Research and by American barometer work at Harvard and Babson, this 1926 essay refuses both extremes: abstract crisis theory without data, and curve-reading without a theory of causal sequence. Collecting and charting series, he warns, is not yet prediction; indicators earn forecasting power only when arranged by their place in the wave. From Juglar's discovery that crises are phases of a recurrent cycle to Spiethoff's schema of upswing and depression, Schumpeter puts capital investment, with iron consumption as its best measurable expression, at the causal center, treating prices as mostly derivative. Better forecasting cannot abolish the cycle without harming development.

Wissenschaft dieser Art ist Praxis der Zukunft.

English translation: “Science of this kind is the practice of the future.”

Against the textbook picture of banks as mere intermediaries of prior savings, Schumpeter insists that they create purchasing power outright, and that this single fact reorganizes the theory of prices, cycles, and crises. Delivered as Bonn-period lectures after the war and peace inflations, the 1926 argument defends the return to gold less as doctrine than as an institutional brake on arbitrary monetary expansion, then treats credit-financed innovation as the engine of the boom and its self-liquidating reversal. Deliberate Kreditinflation and deflation become therapeutic tools, precise but perilous. The attached 1928 wage lecture extends the same anti-voluntarist reasoning: durable gains in workers' living standards rest on productivity and capital formation, not nominal wage pressure, which makes Germany's wage question inseparable from taxation.

Mit der Waffe bewußter, planmäßiger Kreditinflation und -deflation kann man offenbar den Pulsschlag des Wirtschaftslebens wirksam beeinflussen.

English translation: “With the weapon of conscious, planned credit inflation and deflation one can evidently influence the pulse of economic life effectively.”

The cheapest source of raw materials need not be the nearest—and its price cannot always be explained independently of the markets it serves. This interdependence drives Oskar Engländer’s critique of Alfred Weber and his proposal for a general theory of economic location. In this article, he argues that prices, production sites, and market boundaries must be explained together, rather than locating factories by transport geometry alone. His perspective also brings agriculture and industry into one analytical frame: the choice between selling nearby milk fresh and processing distant supplies into butter exposes a shared spatial problem. Readers can discover why low wages may reflect a location’s disadvantages rather than attract industry, and how distance shapes not only where goods are produced but what consumers buy.

When Oskar Engländer's Theorie des Güterverkehrs und der Frachtsätze promised to overturn transport-price theory—and criticized Sax's own Verkehrslehre in passing—Sax answered with these critical studies. He grants that lower freight costs expand a good's market and equalize prices, but denies that Engländer's mathematical formulas, resting on uniform population density and equal purchasing-power strata, can yield anything but a hypothetical sales figure detached from real markets. The heart of the dispute is Werttarifierung, value tariffing: the practice of charging higher-valued goods higher freight, which Sax defends as a genuine application of monopoly-price theory grounded in subjective value and income stratification. Against Engländer he maintains that cost sets the floor beneath every freight rate and belongs in tariff theory from the outset, and he warns that failed abstract deduction can discredit economic theory itself.

Die Rolle der Kosten im Preisbildungsprozeß ist keine ergänzende, sondern eine wesentliche.

English translation: “The role of costs in the price-formation process is not a supplementary one, but an essential one.”

A tax assessed on one person may ultimately be paid by another through higher prices or lower wages. In this 1926 conference address, preserved as an unrevised stenogram, Hans Mayer asks how abstract agreement about tax shifting can yield dependable guidance for legislation. His distinctive approach joins price theory to taxpayer motivation and the precise design of assessment: a levy on pure monopoly profit, he argues, has different consequences from one on gross receipts, while an inheritance tax may provoke less resistance than a tax on accustomed income. These distinctions underpin his challenge to the presumed fairness of a uniform general income tax. The address shows why identifying the statutory taxpayer is only the beginning of judging a tax’s distributional effects—and why the definition of the tax base matters to fiscal justice.

Useful source material need not make a convincing explanation. In this brief review of the two Valuta volumes edited by Karl Diehl and Paul Mombert, Helene Lieser separates appreciation of the readings and bibliographical guidance from criticism of their theoretical framing. She questions the central place given to balance-of-payments theory, citing objections she regards as still unrefuted. Her sharper concern is with Diehl’s introductory critique of inflation theory: it pays too little attention to how prices form and affect payment transactions. The review offers a compact glimpse of Lieser’s critical priorities in monetary economics, directing attention from the value of a collection to the causal mechanisms its organizing perspective may obscure.

For Felix Kaufmann, legal philosophy can support jurisprudence only if it rests on logic. This brief review of C. A. Emge’s Vorschule der Rechtsphilosophie makes that conviction the measure of its praise: Kaufmann welcomes Emge’s use of epistemological distinctions to approach fundamental legal problems. Yet logical grounding is not his only criterion. Recommending the book as an introduction for students, he also asks for clearer organization in a future edition. Rather than offering a substantive critique of Emge’s arguments, the review gives a compact statement of what Kaufmann expects from an introduction to legal philosophy: sound foundations joined to accessible presentation.

Restoring a currency’s old value does not restore everyone’s purchasing power at once. In this 1926 review of Keynes’s The Economic Consequences of Mr. Churchill, Emil Lederer endorses the critique of Britain’s return to gold, but gives particular weight to the sequence of adjustment: wages fall before prices, making workers pay for monetary stability. Monopoly and unequal social power, he argues, obstruct the smooth adjustment promised by abstract economic models. His distinctive move is to draw a political implication from Keynes’s proposal to make wage cuts conditional on corresponding price reductions: such an agreement would implicitly recognize workers’ claim to preserved real wages and society’s capacity to secure them. The review connects a concrete currency dispute to the possibility of deliberately shaping income distribution.