The archive.

Trade, defined here as 'the acquisition of goods for the purpose of their resale,' is distinguished from the social type of the merchant and reconceived as an economic function: spatial and temporal distribution between producers and consumers. In this fourth edition of 1918, Schwiedland tracks that function from armed caravans and colonial companies — long-distance exchange long dependent on protection and force — to the modern apparatus of railways, banks, exchanges, brokers, and standardized samples that detach commercial dealing from the physical presence of goods and make markets comparable across distance. His fullest analysis is of retail's revolution: the branch system, mail-order house, consumer cooperative, and above all the department store, emblem of rationalized distribution running on mass purchasing, rapid turnover, and narrow margins. Every commercial layer, he warns, imposes its own cost on the consumer.

Der Handel und der Frachtverkehr haben nun das Bestreben, die Welt zu einem einzigen weiten Markte zu gestalten.

English translation: “Trade and freight transport now strive to fashion the world into a single wide market.”

With the German Reich facing ruin at the war's end, Somary sets aside whether a capital levy of a fifth or a quarter of national wealth can be justified and asks only how it could actually be carried out. His answer treats emergency taxation as financial engineering: a managed conversion of wealth that avoids forced liquidation, drains inflationary money, and transfers capital to the Reich through verifiable, self-declared valuations. Agricultural land could be taken in kind and resettled on war invalids; a National Ground-Charge Bank would issue Pfandbriefe against priority land charges, a National Securities and Industrial Bank four classes of obligations, and these privately backed instruments, exchanged against war loans, would quietly convert public debt into private claims. He rejects fiscal co-ownership of enterprise, insisting the spheres of state monopoly and private business stay separate lest each corrupt the other.

Soll nicht die Wirtschaft den Staat und der Staat die Wirtschaft korrompieren, so muß das Gebiet des Staatsmonopols und das der Privatunternehmung vorerst getrennt bleiben.

English translation: “If the economy is not to corrupt the state and the state the economy, then the sphere of state monopoly and that of private enterprise must for the time being remain separate.”

War, Pribram argues, did not abolish capitalism but destroyed the self-evidence of liberal economic policy. Written in 1918, the essay follows three movements—prewar liberalism, wartime compulsion, and an uncertain transition—to show how a scale of urgency displaced selection by purchasing power: copper could no longer go to the highest bidder when the army needed it, nor bread be allocated by wealth. Property, profit, and enterprise survive, suspended only as the exigency of the day requires. Yet the deeper thesis is ideological: nationalism, strengthened by war, threatens to replace individualist liberalism with a collective will that binds economic life to the nation imagined as a purposive personality. Austria, a Nationalitätenstaat pulled apart by rival peoples, becomes the limiting case where no unified economic policy can hold.

Der Geist des Nationalbewusstseins fordert von neuem die Unterordnung des Wirtschaftslebens unter einen deutlich vorschwebenden, einheitlichen, höheren Zweck: den Machtzweck der Nation.

English translation: “The spirit of national consciousness demands anew the subordination of economic life to a clearly envisaged, unified, higher purpose: the power-purpose of the nation.”

Does the World War's fiscal wreckage force society beyond the capitalist "tax state"? Schumpeter refuses the easy answer. Against slogans proclaiming capitalism or the state bankrupt, he gives "crisis" a strict sociological sense—not a ruined budget but the immanent collapse of a whole social form—and grounds his reply in what he calls Finanzsoziologie, the reading of budgets as the state stripped of ideology. He reconstructs the modern tax state from the late-medieval crisis of domain finance, where princely appeals to the estates in the name of common necessity first carved out a public sphere, then defines it as the fiscal parasite of bourgeois society, bounded by the need not to destroy the motives it feeds on. His answer to 1918 is a one-time wealth levy that burns inflated paper claims rather than nationalizing production.

Wer ihre Botschaft zu hören versteht, der hört da deutlicher als irgendwo den Donner der Weltgeschichte.

English translation: “Whoever knows how to hear its message hears there, more clearly than anywhere else, the thunder of world history.”

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.”

Italy mediating between Europe and the East, Spain squandering American conquest, Holland rising on shipping and colonial cultivation: this third edition of 1918 reads world history as a relay of commercial supremacy, in which wealth is the medium that turns collective capacity into cultural and political rank. France succeeds through centralized manufacture, England through the durable synthesis of sea power, colonies, industry, and finance, and then Germany, the United States, Russia, and Japan press against the British system. Reading the World War as proof that great powers' spheres now collide everywhere, Schwiedland argues for large, contiguous, autarkic Weltstaaten. A second part traces the dissolution of medieval corporate bonds into an individualism whose enormous energy also breeds crisis, class polarization, and the acquisitive Americanismus he indicts.

Erwarb früher der Mensch, um zu leben, so lebt er jetzt um zu erwerben

English translation: “Whereas man formerly acquired in order to live, he now lives in order to acquire; Americanism, the view that sees in acquisition the purpose of life, has seized broad strata who sacrifice their life in order to die rich (Müller-Lyer).”

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.”

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.”

Technique is never self-legitimating: it is a means, and its social form depends on the purposes that command it. That claim organizes this expanded 1918 essay, which runs from prehistoric tool use to modern industry and the cultural crisis of efficiency. Schwiedland distinguishes older empirical craft from scientific technique — mastery of nature attained through knowledge — and, borrowing Sombart's stages, shows how inherited recipes are reorganized by experiment and systematic control of forces. Within the firm the technician is the oarsman, the economist the helmsman: the best process counts for nothing unless it can be financed, sold, and scaled. The century's real engine, he argues, was not sudden genius but cheaper transport and wider markets, which made every technical advantage urgent. Efficiency thus develops its own technique and comes to dominate — a rule before which culture must assert itself.

Kultur ist Selbstentfaltung und Beherrschung der Umwelt.

English translation: “Culture is self-unfolding and mastery of the environment.”

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.”