The archive.

Swiss industry existed long before the factory: urban merchants coordinated work performed in rural households. William E. Rappard takes this dispersed economy as the starting point for explaining how mechanization changed both labour and the case for its legal protection. His 1914 study connects industrial techniques, household poverty and political institutions without reducing reform to humanitarian conviction alone. Child labour brings these relationships into focus: larger, more complex spinning machines could make young children less useful to employers, while declining destitution made their earnings less necessary to families. Following the emergence of factory workers as a distinct social group, readers can examine how industrial growth created new vulnerabilities—and helped establish the conditions under which unrestricted economic freedom could be challenged.

A tax assessed on yesterday’s prosperity may fall due in a year of hardship. Such practical difficulties give substance to Siegmund Feilbogen’s portrait of Robert Meyer, the Austrian finance administrator and scholar commemorated in this July 1914 obituary, introduced by Yves Guyot. Feilbogen connects Meyer’s conceptual precision with his concern for fair treatment of taxpayers, while acknowledging his inability to overcome privileges enjoyed by great landowners. Particularly striking is Meyer’s argument, as presented here, that progressive taxation rests primarily on fiscal productivity rather than justice. The tribute offers a compact encounter with the uncertain boundaries of taxable income—and with Feilbogen’s understanding of conscientious public service, where sound definitions matter but political constraints remain.

A survey can capture a movement’s main tendencies yet leave its social meaning unexplained. In this brief 1914 review of Leo Müffelmann’s Die moderne Mittelstandsbewegung, Emil Lederer credits the book’s descriptive account but questions its separation of the Mittelstand movement from economic development and class structure. His objection is directed especially at writing for a broad public: accessibility, he argues, requires explaining connections rather than treating a subject in isolation. The review offers a compact statement of that critical standard, identifying—but not itself explaining—the movement’s changing significance within state social policy.

A defense can reach the right conclusion for the wrong reason. In this brief 1914 reply to Mezey, Böhm-Bawerk corrects a sympathetic account of why sellers’ subjective valuations may cease to determine the momentary market price. A price ceiling near zero cannot simply be ignored: if binding, it would force prices down. His explanation instead turns on who remains outside the exchange. When every seller finds a buyer, no excluded seller exists to supply that upper limit; buyers’ valuations can then become decisive under the conditions he specifies. The afterword offers a compact lesson in applying a general price theory: a constraint that does not exist is different from one that exists but does not bind.

What might China lose by acquiring a supposedly modern currency? In this 1914 article, Hermann Schwarzwald argues that silver valued by weight and fineness offers protections that a national coinage and central issuing bank could undermine. His defence of metallic money, informed by Eugen Dühring, turns apparent monetary disorder into a question of who controls value: those who weigh and verify silver, or governments and banks that enforce nominal denominations. British India supplies his warning about exchange stability purchased at the cost of financial dependence. Yet he advocates standardization, not the preservation of every local custom. The article exposes the political choices within technical proposals for currency reform, while making clear how Schwarzwald’s opposition to foreign financial control rests on his distrust of credit-based money.

Gathering the results of a lifetime spent extending Austrian value theory, this treatise—here in A. Ford Hinrichs's English translation of the 1914 Theorie der gesellschaftlichen Wirtschaft—carries marginal utility outward from the isolated act of choice into the institutions through which valuation becomes socially effective: property, enterprise, capital, class, the state, and world trade. Wieser accepts subjective valuation but refuses to confine economics to it, insisting that the whole social economy is built with a view to management and value while power distorts how that value is realized. Enterprise becomes the organ of modern stratification, where formal freedom coexists with unequal command over capital; private property is defended functionally, as the condition of responsible economizing. Even world exchange is no neutral arena, confining less developed economies to less remunerative roles.

The rationale of private property is the rationale of all economy.

Could rural settlement cure large estates’ labor shortages if successful settlers no longer needed estate wages? This contradiction gives particular bite to Emil Lederer’s 1914 chronicle of agrarian social policy, chiefly concerned with Germany during 1913. Reading organizational reports and policy disputes through conflicts among owners, workers, and consumers, Lederer asks whose interests measures advertised as helping “agriculture” actually serve. Dairy cooperatives may strengthen small farmers without making food cheaper; settlement schemes may create independent holdings rather than the dependent workforce estate owners want. His distinctive concern is how economic organization changes relations of power, even when its declared purpose is stability. The chronicle offers a concrete way to distinguish agricultural improvement from the preservation of existing property and labor arrangements.

Rising industrial output and substantial union reserves did not necessarily give German workers greater bargaining power in 1913. In this annual chronicle, Emil Lederer sets economic statistics beside union debates and strike reports to explain that discrepancy. Unemployment benefits consumed funds available for industrial action; employers’ growing concentration exposed the limits of unions divided by occupation and religious allegiance. His accounts of the Krefeld textile and shipyard disputes make these tensions concrete: solidarity could break down between rival organizations or between militant members and cautious officials. Yet Lederer does not simply oppose democracy to bureaucracy. He asks how technically necessary administration might coexist with effective membership control. The result offers a precise way to distinguish an organization’s apparent resources from its capacity to act.

A wage increase can conceal a loss of bargaining power. In this chronicle of Austrian labour in 1913/14, Emil Lederer makes that tension concrete through the printers’ dispute: workers secured higher pay while conceding higher output requirements and union control over job placement. The outcome was troubling precisely because the printers possessed an unusually strong, well-financed organization. Lederer places their struggle against a depression that drained union funds through unemployment relief, while national and confessional divisions impeded collective action. His attention to the limits of employment statistics and the practical reach of legislation gives the report a perspective beyond strike results alone. Readers can discover how control over hiring, organizational resources, and administrative arrangements shaped workers’ capacity to defend gains that wages alone could not measure.

Strike insurance could keep firms from settling with workers; employment exchanges could control access to jobs. In this 1914 social-policy chronicle, Emil Lederer examines such mechanisms to ask how employers turn economic resources into collective power—and why law treats their combinations differently from trade unions. His account of Germany and Austria combines scrutiny of membership and financial statistics with a critique of ostensibly neutral protections for individual freedom. Restrictions on picketing, he argues, sit uneasily beside tolerance of exclusionary cartel practices. Yet employer solidarity is no automatic consequence of wealth: industrial divisions and the weakness of Austrian craft associations reveal its limits. The chronicle offers a concrete way to distinguish an organization’s reported size from its capacity to sustain collective action, and formal legal equality from unequal room to act.

Refusing to argue for or against the vote, this 1914 newspaper article reframes women's suffrage as the political symptom of a deep economic change. Institutions, Schumpeter contends, adapt belatedly to material conditions: marriage keeps its name while its content is transformed, and the family, far from being the primordial cell of society, emerged only when settlement made the household an economic unit. His sharpest move is to explain the women's movement as a kind of structural unemployment within domestic life, since modern industry and trade have stripped middle-class women of the productive household functions that once gave their labor economic substance. Suffrage, on this reading, is neither whim nor benevolent gift but an unavoidable step, arriving because the order that excluded women from political citizenship has already been undone by economic reorganization.

But all these women who have not to go out to work now offer the most tragic case of unemployment ever witnessed, with all its effects on happiness and character.

Unemployment, on the eve of the First World War, was still widely read as pauperism or personal failing; this 1914 lecture — the first pamphlet of the Austrian Association for Combating Unemployment — insists instead that it is a socially produced market risk, unverschuldet, obliging the community to both prevention and relief. Schwiedland weighs three existing models: the Belgian or Ghent system of subsidised union funds, which he judges a mere surrogate reaching only the better-situated skilled worker; the Scandinavian public funds open to the unorganised; and the English compulsory insurance of 1911. For Austria he proposes a fourth, municipal path outside poor relief, aiding organised and unorganised alike. His deepest claim is institutional: reliable relief is impossible without a public labour-market infrastructure to test willingness to work and measure involuntary idleness.

Arbeitsnachweis ist die erste Form der Arbeitslosenfürsorge.

English translation: “Labor exchanges are the first form of unemployment relief.”