1,549 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Modern credit, this Prague lecture of 1881 contends, stands coequal with steam power: it detaches value from its material bearer, so that land becomes mortgage paper, warehoused goods become warrants, reputation becomes bills, and expected profit becomes shares — mobilizing immobilized values to build farms, railways, schools, and municipal works. Yet the same force, ruled by speculation and status, becomes 'a credit of the rich,' excluding artisan, peasant, and worker. Inama-Sternegg defines credit historically as social trust made economically active, tracing it from the interest-free lending of kin and village companion under natural economy to the calculable surplus of the money economy. His remedy is cooperative rather than charitable: Vorschuss- and Kreditgenossenschaften, Volksbanken, and loan funds convert dispersed reliability into public credit, so that the true golden age would be not universal debt but universal creditworthiness.
War die Verlegenheit die Mutter des Kredits in der Naturalwirtschaft, so ist der Überfluß der Vater des Kredits in der Geldwirtschaft geworden.
English translation: “If embarrassment was the mother of credit in the natural economy, abundance has become the father of credit in the money economy.”
A nationality conflict poisoned by mutual suspicion can be clarified, Wieser proposes, by counting who pays the taxes and who receives the spending. His fiscal dossier on Bohemia finds that Germans, barely 37 percent of the population, contribute close to half the crownland's direct tax base — through industry, mining, banks, railways, and urban property that quietly extend German capital into Czech districts even as Czech workers move into German ones. Prague, small in German headcount but strong in house property, banking, and income, becomes the keystone. Economic power, he cautions, does not by itself confer political rule; and since provincial expenditure favors the Czech-feudal majority, a structural transfer of German tax money results. His remedy is not fiscal secession but parity — national financial curiae modeled on the Compromise of 1867 — so that neither nation disposes unilaterally of the other's money.
Nationale Finanzfragen sind nationale Lebensfragen, die in solcher Zeit nicht außer Streit gestellt werden können.
English translation: “National financial questions are national questions of life, which in such times cannot be placed beyond dispute.”
Lorenz von Stein's last essay, written in 1890 for Stengel's dictionary, reads like a testament — and this 1902 Vienna lecture takes up its unfinished program. Surveying the twelve years since Stein's death, Inama-Sternegg argues that German and Austrian administrative law won its autonomy as a discipline through Gerber, Laband, Georg Meyer, Sarwey, and Otto Mayer, yet narrowed itself in the process, explaining prevailing law 'solely from within itself' and setting aside philosophical, political, and historical interpretation. His sharpest charge is that doctrine ignored the emerging social state: while practical administration grappled with worker protection and social capital formation, the textbooks scattered social law into fragments. Verwaltungslehre, he holds, must survive as a political discipline investigating the driving forces behind legal rules — reborn not as a vague science of the state but as a disciplined theory of legal institutions in their living social context.
Das Leben im Rechte wird damit erst vollkommen erkannt und damit auch das Recht des Lebens wissenschaftlich neu gewonnen.
English translation: “Only thus is life within the law fully understood, and only thus is the law of life scientifically won anew.”
Komorzynski defines credit not as a loan of goods, nor of money, nor as mere trust or a time-separated exchange, but as Vermögensleihe—the lending of wealth itself, in which ownership of concrete goods passes to the borrower while the lender's wealth survives as a legally fixed claim yielding income. To ground this, the treatise, dedicated to Böhm-Bawerk, rebuilds the concepts of wealth, capital, and income from the foundation, treating wealth as the power to obtain recurring income and income as a primary concept rather than a circular 'return on wealth.' A second part turns to credit as a national-economic power—productive versus consumptive lending, the economic meaning of usury against the canonical prohibition, and how circulating claims, bills, and banknotes economize money and steady its value.
Credit und Tausch bilden zwei verschiedene eigenartige Gestaltungen dieses Verkehres.
English translation: “Credit and exchange constitute two different, distinctive forms of this intercourse.”
Legal emancipation freed peasants, artisans, and workers from guild, feudal, and administrative restraints, yet Inama-Sternegg argues that this liberation did only half its work. Once the visible fetters fell, the isolated individual still faced markets, credit, factories, and taxation without collective means of resistance; a national and then international grain market fixed wheat prices no farmer could escape. Formal Erwerbsfreiheit, he contends, is not identical with real command over one's economic life. Against both liberal atomism and socialist subordination he advances the Genossenschaft, from Schulze-Delitzsch credit and purchasing unions to Raiffeisen rural societies with their joint liability and local trust, as a post-liberal institution that binds arbitrary individual action in order to strengthen the member's capacity to act. Freedom, on this account, becomes durable only when embedded in disciplined cooperative self-government against organized capital.
Nur die Form änderte sich, in der der Zwang des Lebens auf dem Einzelnen lastete, nicht die Sache selbst.
English translation: “Only the form in which the compulsion of life weighed upon the individual changed, not the thing itself.”
Friedrich Ratzel's Anthropo-Geographie had claimed that where no census reaches, geography must supply the statistical image of humanity. Taking up that challenge, Inama-Sternegg concedes the point without surrendering his discipline: the object of statistics is the human community, grasped through the quantitative determination of mass phenomena, a method that eventually depends on others where it cannot reach. Geography earns its role by reading population from the cultural landscape, from houses, villages, roads, cleared forests, and cultivated land, rather than by replacing enumeration. The essay's governing contrast concerns density: for the statistician a bare ratio of inhabitants to area, for the geographer a territorial condition shaped by relief, climate, water, and settlement history. Neither becomes a complete science of population alone; each gains precision, he insists, only by recognizing the other's method and its limits.
Für den Statistiker ist die Dichtigkeit der Bevölkerung die Beziehung zwischen der Flächenausdehnung eines Gebietes und der Zahl seiner Bewohner.
English translation: “For the statistician, population density is the relation between the areal extent of a territory and the number of its inhabitants.”
Is statistics a science, a method, or mere administrative description? Inama-Sternegg refuses to reopen that old dispute abstractly and turns instead to a sharper thesis: modern official statistics must become historical. A social condition, he argues, is only in small part the product of present circumstances and in far larger part the deposit of earlier social forces, so that population, mortality, prices, crime, schooling, and wages can be understood only through developmental series traced backward in time. Continuous registers, from civil-status records and church books to land books, guild rolls, and price lists, extend statistical vision into earlier centuries, provided estimates and shifting classifications are handled critically. Whoever would make the numbers speak must understand a people's life. Official bureaus, not private scholars alone, must exploit these mass records, since for him legitimate state action is historically informed action.
So ist jede Staatsaktion Verwirklichung einer erkannten historischen Entwicklungstendenz und gerade als solche allein gerechtfertigt.
English translation: “Thus every action of the State is the realization of a recognized historical tendency of development, and only as such is it justified.”
Delivered as a commemorative address before the statistical Central Commission, this appraisal presents Lorenz von Stein not as a statistician, for he conducted no surveys himself, but as the thinker who made statistical inquiry more necessary and more self-conscious. Inama-Sternegg prizes orientation over exactness: Stein opened questions of social masses, causal relations, and institutional form that statistics could later test and correct. He traces the life from Schleswig origins and a Parisian encounter with socialism to the long Vienna professorship of 1855 to 1888, and reads the doctrine as a binding of three movements, the law of goods, the ascent and conflict of classes, and the legal-administrative order of the state, mediated by the concept of soziales Koenigtum. A speculative constructor, yes, but one whose reach disclosed problems narrower methods had not yet learned to formulate.
Er wollte, wie er mir oft mit Stolz erzählte, zeigen, daß er den Adel seiner Familie nicht brauche, sondern ihn sich selbst zu erwerben wisse.
English translation: “He wanted to show, as he often told me with pride, that he did not need the nobility of his family, but knew how to earn it for himself.”
A controversy over smallpox vaccination becomes, in Inama-Sternegg's hands, an occasion to work out a theory of statistical proof. Following J. Koeroesi, he denies that the protective force of vaccination can be settled by physiological experiment alone and defends inference from mass facts. The essay dismantles the objection that vaccination statistics is worthless because the total living vaccinated and unvaccinated populations are unknown: many valid measures relate an event to its nearest causally relevant collective, not to the whole population. Koeroesi's method of relative intensity compares general morbidity and mortality against specifically smallpox morbidity, mortality, and lethality, using Budapest and Hungarian provincial-city material. Underlying all of this is a distinction between two directions of proof, progressive experiment moving from cause to effect and regressive observation moving from effect to cause, which makes statistics indispensable precisely where experiment cannot reach.
Bei der ersten Methode (Zerfällung der Gesamtheiten) scheidet man alle fremden Faktoren aus; bei der letzteren (Intensitätsberechnung) berechnet man den Einfluß eines unausgeschiedenen oder unausscheidbaren Faktors durch die gegebenen übrigen Werte.
English translation: “In the first method (decomposition of totals) one excludes all extraneous factors; in the latter (intensity calculation) one computes the influence of an unexcluded or inextricable factor by means of the other given values.”
When a country reckons its standing in the world, the ledger of exported and imported goods tells only part of the story — and that omission is the subject of this short manuscript essay on travel and the balance of payments. Beginning from the observation that railway passenger traffic on Europe's most developed lines had doubled in twenty years, Inama-Sternegg treats modern travel not as a cultural curiosity but as a measurable economic force. Tourists circulate needs as well as bodies: exposure to foreign hotels, food, and comforts differentiates demand and makes national markets porous. He then converts visitors into lodging-days and expenditures, and folds tourism receipts, transport services, emigrant funds, and workers' remittances — with figures from Switzerland, the Tyrol, and Italian labourers — into a fuller Zahlungsbilanz that mere merchandise trade conceals.
Der Reisezauber hat es den Kulturmenschen angetan.
English translation: “The spell of travel has taken hold of the civilized man.”
Statistics, on the metaphor that governs this public lecture, is the ground plan of social life: abstract and dry, yet fundamental to the whole structure. Refusing any narrow technical brief, Inama-Sternegg presents it as an old, almost instinctive human need, visible in ancient censuses and biblical enumerations. His central move carries statistics from a state function to a social one: because the state sees only what passes through its organs, the whole of society must be called upon to record and reckon. The housewife's account book, the worker's budget, and business bookkeeping all become elementary statistical acts. He marks the limits too, for some things cannot be measured and they are not the least significant, and defends objectivity against its one true enemy, one-sidedness. A servant, then, whose guidance modern life cannot dispense with.
Die Statistik, meine Herren, liegt dem Menschen im Blute.
English translation: “Statistics, gentlemen, is in man's blood.”
From antiquity's equation of wealth with conquest, through mercantilist trade balances to physiocratic faith in the soil, Inama-Sternegg reads the whole history of doctrine as partial answers to one problem — national wealth — in this Vienna lecture of 1883. He first severs national wealth from private fortune: an individual may pursue, renounce, or squander riches, but a people has duties — culture, self-preservation, public power — for which wealth is only adequate means, dead or destructive beyond rational purpose, as the fates of Spain and Rome suggest. Mercantilism, he argues, grasps artificial rents from privileged trade, physiocracy natural rents in land; both narrow surplus to a favored sector. Adam Smith restores industry, trade, and agriculture to one field through labor and division of labor, yet leaves the theory incomplete. Wealth, finally, is a moral and economic deed — productive superiority earned within the community of nations.
Für ein Volk gibt es keine Launen und keine Genüsse; das Leben eines Volkes ist eine Summe großer Aufgaben, eine Kette von Pflichten.
English translation: “For a people there are no whims and no indulgences; the life of a people is a sum of great tasks, a chain of duties.”