The archive.

Property prices in Tirol and Vorarlberg stood far above their assessed tax values—but did the gap indicate eager buyers, or expose limitations in the assessments themselves? In this 1889 statistical article, Karl Theodor von Inama-Sternegg examines 951 transactions recorded for fee assessment in early 1887. His distinctive concern is how taxation and the organisation of landholding shape the meaning of the figures: an additional parcel may be worth more to an established estate than its cadastral return suggests, while different mixes of taxable property can distort district comparisons. Even compulsory auctions yielded unexpectedly high prices relative to assessments. By keeping these findings separate from his tentative explanations, Inama-Sternegg shows readers both what fiscal records disclose about property markets and why assessed value cannot serve as an uncomplicated benchmark.

A birth entered in a parish book does not automatically become a reliable fact in national statistics. In this 1889 introduction to the Austrian Statistical Central Commission’s register survey, Karl Theodor von Inama-Sternegg examines the obstacles between record and count: mismatched ecclesiastical and political boundaries, divided supervision, missing volumes, and uncertain territorial coverage. He connects these administrative problems to a historical question: do apparent demographic regularities endure across centuries, or reflect particular social conditions? Older local registers could help answer it—but only if researchers know what survives and whom it records. His proposals for inventories, jurisdictional directories, and central access show how archival organization could serve both public administration and historical inquiry, without necessarily gathering every original register in one place.

A hundred years after Friedrich List's birth at Reutlingen, this commemorative essay separates his lasting insight from the protectionism later built in his name. Menger traces the phases of a life that did not run in the quiet paths of a German professor — the Württemberg liberal reformer prosecuted as a Demagog and driven into American exile, the railway promoter and Zollverein advocate, the author of the 1841 Nationales System der politischen Oekonomie. His central claim is that List invented a national conception of political economy for a fragmented Germany: free trade within, protective tariffs without, yet tariffs meant as a temporary schooling of productive forces rather than a permanent creed. Later economists, Menger warns, turned that national egoism into a mask for class privilege and particularism.

Die Bedeutung List's als bahnbrechender Reformator der volkswirtschaftlichen Ideen wurde erst nach seinem Tode erkannt.

English translation: “List's significance as a pioneering reformer of economic ideas was recognised only after his death.”

In the aftermath of the Methodenstreit, the quarrel over method that divided Menger's Austrians from the German historical school, this offprint steps back from doctrines of value or price to ask how economic knowledge should be ordered. The threat it names is an encyclopedic political economy that dissolves everything economic into one externally arranged aggregate. Against it Menger distinguishes sciences classed by their object from sciences classed by their cognitive aim, and sorts the field into historical-statistical, morphological, theoretical, and applied branches, each with its own legitimacy. His sharpest defense is reserved for practical economics: against the positivist claim that science may treat only what is and what has been, he argues that applied sciences furnish conditional knowledge of means to chosen ends — not recipes, but reasoned procedures requiring judgment.

Die Lösung der hier berührten methodologischen Probleme ist ein dringendes Bedürfnis unserer Wissenschaft.

English translation: “The solution of the methodological problems touched upon here is an urgent need of our science.”

An economist may anticipate later discoveries without transforming how economic life is understood. This distinction drives Siegmund Feilbogen’s 1889 comparison of James Steuart and Adam Smith. Against attempts to explain Smith’s achievement through borrowed doctrines or historical circumstances, Feilbogen sets a demanding test: Steuart shared many of the same formative influences and offered striking insights of his own. Why, then, did their economics diverge? Feilbogen locates the difference in Smith’s organizing concepts of labour, capital, and distribution, contrasting them with Steuart’s recurring reliance on an exceptionally capable statesman. His defence is not unqualified: Steuart’s methodological caution earns praise, while Smith’s glorification of self-interest draws criticism. The article offers a concrete way to distinguish intellectual priority from explanatory originality—and fidelity to a thinker from repetition of his conclusions.

Interest, this volume of fourteen excursuses maintains, springs from the value superiority of present over future goods — and one root of that superiority is the greater productivity of well-chosen roundabout production, though mere delay is never productive and capital scarcity forbids adopting every longer method already known. Appended to the Positive Theory of Capital to answer a decade of critics, it shows Böhm-Bawerk at his most combative and exact: he defends the average production period against Fisher, Lexis, and Fetter, refines imputation against Wieser, subordinates cost to the value of ends, and wages his central battle over the "third ground" of interest with Fisher and Bortkiewicz, insisting that equations may display mutual determination yet cannot by themselves fix causal direction. It is Austrian capital theory restated as a causal account rooted in scarcity, time, and subjective imputation.

Aber hiemit fängt der Prozeß des Wertvorzugs gegenwärtiger Produktionsmittel über künftige nicht an, sondern damit hört er auf.

English translation: “But it is not with this that the process by which present means of production are preferred in value to future ones begins; rather, it is with this that it ends.”

What can agricultural statistics establish—and where do they cease to justify reform? In this 1889 literature report on Miaskowski, Lexis, and Conrad, Karl Theodor von Inama-Sternegg praises empirical inquiry while challenging policy conclusions drawn without sufficient attention to regional economies and institutional history. Against criticism of grain tariffs, he argues that protection helped redirect eastern German surpluses toward western markets, even at a cost to consumers. Against Conrad’s proposed restrictions on entailed estates, he questions whether measurements of acreage establish that an institution’s historical function has ended. These disagreements make the report more than an appraisal of three publications: readers can examine how a historically minded economist weighs statistical evidence, unequal regional interests, and the uncertain consequences of dismantling inherited arrangements.

Shared foundations do not guarantee agreement: in this two-part newspaper literature report, Carl Menger champions Austrian economics while withholding assent from some of its proposed solutions. He praises Böhm-Bawerk’s achievement without treating his theory of interest as settled, and questions whether graphical methods can establish sound economic explanations. At stake is how a theory grounded in economic actors’ judgments can account for prices, taxation, legal compensation, and forms of organization beyond individual households. Menger’s reviews reveal both the reach and the limits he assigns to this approach: subjective valuation matters, but families and public bodies cannot simply be treated as private individuals. The report offers a concrete view of his standards of evidence—and of theoretical advocacy that leaves room for substantive disagreement.

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.”

Because public law rests on a contested theory of the state, and on a will that both makes law and is bound by it, it is, Landesberger argues in this 1889 Vienna dissertation address delivered under imperial auspices, uniquely unstable and best approached historically. He begins from Kant, for whom the state's sole task is to posit and protect law, then charts how history outgrew that legal-protection state: the French Revolution's separation of powers, the collapse of the Holy Roman Empire, and Fichte's national conception. The modern Rechtsstaat emerges as a Kulturstaat animated by a unified state will and answerable to 'society,' the dynamic stratification of a people; equality before the law figures less as an individual right than as society's freedom against class domination. The speech closes on the Habsburg motto Viribus unitis.

Der Rechtsstaat ist nicht die politische und culturelle allein, er ist auch die ethische Organisation eines Volkes!

English translation: “The Rechtsstaat is not merely the political and cultural, it is also the ethical organisation of a people!”

Why should capital yield interest if it is not an independent source of productive power? In this French journal article, Böhm-Bawerk presents the central ideas of his recently published theory through fishing equipment, loans, and the successive services of a machine. His decisive distinction separates the greater output made possible by indirect production from the premium placed on goods available now rather than later. Interest, he argues, arises from this difference in valuation, not from a productive power inherent in capital. The article offers a compact route into the connection between waiting, saving, and income—and a pointed challenge to the claim that collective ownership would abolish interest rather than redistribute it.

Les détours de production par le capital procurent finalement plus de biens de jouissance, mais il faut les attendre plus longtemps.

English translation: “Roundabout production through capital ultimately provides more consumption goods, but one must wait longer for them.”

Neither a Ricardian exception nor an artifact of private landownership, ground rent in this 1889 study becomes the value that a scarce natural factor draws from its marginal product. Schullern-Schrattenhofen builds the argument on the marginal-utility value theory of Menger and Böhm-Bawerk, treating land not as an eternal surface but as a temporally limited productive service, and carefully separating 'raw' from 'pure' land-use, a distinction that turns decisive in mines, where extraction consumes the resource itself. Fertility, location, population growth, and diminishing returns all move rent by changing either product value or the degree of dependence on the natural factor. Against Henry George, he insists that abolishing private property would redistribute rent, not dissolve it, and presents his whole account as a reform of Ricardo grounded in human need.

Keiner dieser Sätze enthält das Wort „Privateigentum“, oder deutet auch nur im entferntesten darauf hin.

English translation: “None of these propositions contains the word "private property," nor does any of them even remotely allude to it.”