3,801 works, 471 books, 3,267 articles, 60 other works, 3 awaiting classification, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
An established waterworks can block a far more productive hydropower scheme—but who should decide when its rights must yield? In this 1907 lecture, Ernst Seidler von Feuchtenegg defends Austria’s concession system while challenging both absolute protection of acquired rights and unchecked administrative discretion. His distinctive concern is to make economic development compatible with legal certainty: private enterprises may serve public welfare, yet applicants need protection against speculative rivals and indefinite delays. Concrete proposals give this balance practical force, from requiring improvements to older installations that release water for other users to setting deadlines for competing projects. The lecture shows how technical adaptation and procedural safeguards can reshape conflicts too easily framed as a choice between private property and state power.
When an international agricultural congress gathered in Vienna in 1907, Inama-Sternegg seized the occasion to argue that farming could no longer be governed as a merely local or national estate economy. Trade, credit, migrant labor, futures markets, harvest statistics, tariffs, and above all soil fertility had become transnational problems demanding coordinated institutions. He defends grain futures not as speculation but as an apparatus for distributing world supplies and equalizing prices, resists moralizing bans on the Blankotermingeschäft, and dismantles the agrarians' high-protection program as a national rent strategy rather than genuine policy. The essay culminates in the question of Bodenerschöpfung, soil exhaustion, framed through Ricardo and Liebig, insisting that preserving the nation's nutrient capital, not forcing up prices, is agriculture's true international task.
Und darum lassen sich auch die Schäden der Landwirtschaft nicht mehr mit alten Hausmitteln kurieren.
English translation: “And so the ailments of agriculture can no longer be cured with old household remedies.”
Can sociology become an exact science without first reducing social life to biology? In this short English review of Waxweiler’s Esquisse d’une Sociologie, Schumpeter defends sociology’s independent field of inquiry while endorsing an approach that starts from individual action and reaction. His praise rests on concrete research possibilities: aggression, acquisition, friendship and cooperation offer material for careful description before sweeping laws become credible. Economics provides a revealing comparison, with value serving as an example of the foundational concept sociology still needs. The review shows Schumpeter weighing scientific ambition against premature system-building—and finding more promise in precise accounts of everyday conduct than in claims to a finished theory.
Inama-Sternegg's review of A. E. F. Schäffle's posthumous Abriss der Soziologie widens into a reckoning with sociology's claim to be a unified science. His verdict is admiring but severe: Schäffle's Bau und Leben des sozialen Körpers was rejected less for its social observations than for the biological and psychological analogies that framed them, and the later stripping-away of those analogies drained the very vitality that had made the work compelling. The essay separates a fruitful insight, that human life is genuinely social and its phenomena collective facts rather than sums of individuals, from the premature leap to an all-embracing system. Anthropology, ethnology, law, economics, statistics, geography, and psychology all bear on society, and no single mind can master them. Sociology may yet find its laws, but only through specialized research and repeatedly observed regularities, not through grand schemes built too soon.
Man verzeihe das harte Wort, aber die bisherige Entwicklung der „Soziologie“ als einheitlicher Wissenschaft berechtigt einigermaßen dazu.
English translation: “May the harsh word be forgiven, but the development of “sociology” as a unified science up to now to some extent justifies it.”
Explaining why rent exists does not establish why landlords should receive it. This distinction drives Joseph A. Schumpeter’s 1907 review of J. W. Schiele’s account of the natural origins of rent, interest, and wages. Schumpeter welcomes exact economic theory while insisting that deduction cannot certify the applicability of its own premises. His criticism is concrete: Schiele’s labor-value axiom remains unsupported, and the failure of his proposed formula for distribution leaves interest and wages without a defensible dividing line. The review offers a compact encounter with Schumpeter’s critical method—defending abstraction while demanding empirical verification, and separating the explanation of income categories from the justification of their allocation under existing property arrangements.
Germany’s imperial inheritance tax of 1906 taxed each beneficiary’s share rather than the estate as a whole, making kinship as important as wealth in determining liability. In this short note, Frank Albert Fetter explains how exemptions for close family transfers coexist with progressive rates reaching 25 percent. His attention to a safeguard limiting abrupt tax increases at bracket boundaries shows why the rate table alone cannot describe the burden. Fetter combines precise fiscal exposition with a wry awareness of the statute’s interlocking qualifications. His closing remarks report fears that a popularly elected Reichstag might use the tax against saving and property, while noting the states’ retained taxing powers. The result is a compact account of how family distinctions, progression, and divided authority shape a revenue measure.
Can a distinction between stocks and flows explain capital and income, or does it conceal the role of valuation? In this 1907 review of Irving Fisher’s book, republished in 1977, Frank Albert Fetter praises Fisher’s mathematical treatment of capitalization while arguing that its strongest results have outgrown its original definitions. Durable goods are not stored quantities of their future services; their capital value depends on expected incomes. Fetter makes this conceptual dispute tangible through deferred annuities, capital appreciation, and taxation, asking whether income means earnings available to save or spend, or only consumption actually enjoyed. His qualified endorsement offers a way to examine how apparently simple accounting terms can shift meaning—and how those shifts alter economic arguments.
When John Bates Clark defended a "true capital" — a permanent fund persisting intact while its concrete goods are used up and replaced — he handed his critic a target too tempting to refuse. Across four tightly argued questions, Böhm-Bawerk answers that capital and capital goods are identical at every instant, so no second material entity remains to do the work Clark assigns to his abstraction. He presses the difference between noticing that a net return exists and explaining why, rejects Clark's attempt to confine distribution theory to present production, and denies that capital "synchronizes" labor and its fruits: today's coat was made by past shepherds and weavers, not by workers now beginning another. Throughout, he demands that capital theory keep heterogeneous goods, time-structured production, and honest imputation distinct from mere verbal continuity.
What the labor of the instant secures is not a present provision of completed commodities, but the continuance of provision at some time in the future.
One half of a Tyrolean farm passed through sixteen owners between 1600 and 1738—a striking complication of the image of settled peasant property. In this 1907 article, Hermann von Schullern zu Schrattenhofen explores the Verfachbücher, registers preserving legal documents, through the fortunes of a predominantly peasant lineage. Sales, remarriages, inheritances and long-lived debts reveal how holdings changed hands and wealth accumulated or dispersed. His distinctive concern is what such records permit historians to count—and what they do not. A sale price may conceal assumed debts; a child’s disappearance may indicate migration rather than death. The article offers both concrete evidence of rural mobility and a disciplined account of why family histories, however richly documented, cannot yet stand as population statistics.
Georg von Mayr's renewed defense of a separate moral statistics provokes this sharp rebuttal on the boundaries of a science. Inama-Sternegg does not deny that suicide, divorce, illegitimacy, or prostitution can be studied statistically; he denies that moral categories may organize the discipline itself, forcing heterogeneous facts into a scheme fixed by prior valuation. Notions of the normal and the typical, he argues, obscure the structure of social masses, and the inner motives behind a crime or a suicide cannot be reconstructed as reliable mass data. In place of a moral-statistical chapter he proposes a social statistics of fundamental institutions — marriage and family above all — so that divorce or adultery keeps the legal and confessional context that alone makes its meaning intelligible.
Zunächst sind Symptome nur Hypothesen, nicht Tatsachen.
English translation: “To begin with, symptoms are only hypotheses, not facts.”
A single word—Bedürfnis—had, on Cuhel's diagnosis, thrown the foundations of value theory into confusion, bundling together at least eight distinct concepts under one popular name. Written on the borderland of economics and psychology, this 1907 treatise pries them apart, distinguishing welfare-, use-, and disposal-needs and making the 'use-desire' the first fundamental concept of economic science. Cuhel rejects the hedonism of Bentham and Gossen, argues that the desire-intensity he calls Egenz can be compared but never truly measured—anticipating the later turn to ordinal utility—and reworks Gossen's law of diminishing enjoyment into precise statements about marginal use-egenz. Along the way he criticizes Böhm-Bawerk, Wieser, Menger, and Sax, and treats the discounting of future needs not as a direct effect of time but as a matter of practical probability.
Diesen Vorgang kann man somit nicht Messen nennen; für ihn dürfte die Benennung Skalieren eher passen.
English translation: “This procedure, then, cannot be called measuring; the term scaling would be more appropriate for it.”
Does a gain cease to be income if its owner saves rather than spends it? In this conference discussion, originally published in 1908 and reprinted in 1977, Frank Albert Fetter challenges Irving Fisher’s definition by separating monetary acquisition from the enjoyment wealth eventually affords. His concrete test is ordinary business practice: wages, interest, rent, and increases in capital value need not await consumption to count as income. Fetter accepts the relevance of psychic satisfaction but disputes its use as the exclusive measure of income. The disagreement also bears on taxation of gains from land speculation. This compact intervention shows why accrual, saving, expenditure, and enjoyment must be distinguished before an apparently verbal dispute can be settled.
We are discussing a question of terminology but not a question “merely” of terminology.