The archive.

A decade after the Methodenstreit, Feilbogen registers a shift: abstract theory, so often declared dead by the historical school, is undergoing a renaissance in the value and price work of Gossen, Jevons, Menger, Walras, and Clark. This sketch situates the historical school itself historically, as a necessary phase whose anti-theoretical reflexes are now spent, and argues for the mutual control of induction and deduction rather than the victory of either. It weighs the growing use of mathematics while warning against false precision in measuring pleasure and value, defends marginal utility against Lexis, and faults Jevons for neglecting entrepreneurial profit—an omission, Feilbogen suggests, that left theoretical openings for socialist doctrines of surplus value and crisis.

Auf die Thatsache der Werthschätzung allein kann nur eine Statik, nie eine Dynamik der Volkswirthschaft gegründet werden.

English translation: “Upon the fact of valuation alone only a statics, never a dynamics, of the national economy can be founded.”

Capital may help produce more goods—but why should those goods be worth more than the inputs used to make them? This distinction drives Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk’s 1894 encyclopedia article, Zins. Testing rival explanations of interest against the problem of a persistent surplus of value, he argues that productivity alone cannot account for it. His own explanation turns on the premium placed on present goods over future goods, connecting loan interest with returns from production and durable property. The article offers a compact way to examine what competing theories must explain, while keeping depreciation, risk payments, and entrepreneurial profit distinct from pure interest. Its closing treatment of monetary abundance sharpens a further distinction: plentiful money is not necessarily plentiful real capital.

A skilled artisan earns four florins for relatively agreeable work; an ordinary laborer earns two for twice the hardship. In this 1894 reply to Auspitz, Böhm-Bawerk uses that contrast to separate two explanations too easily treated as one: prices tending toward monetary production costs, and wages compensating workers for subjective sacrifice. He accepts that labor’s disutility can influence prices, but disputes its universal operation when workers cannot freely adjust their hours. His distinctive emphasis falls on the value of money to the worker: utility enters the supply side as well as demand. The exchange offers a precise way to distinguish an observable cost-price relationship from the subjective mechanism proposed to explain it.

Agreement on marginal utility does not settle what capital is or why interest arises. In this 1895 review of Georg Sulzer, Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk examines a fellow marginalist’s attempt to organize economics around equilibrium. He admires Sulzer’s disciplined construction but questions whether its elaborate vocabulary identifies new economic quantities or merely renames familiar ones. The decisive disagreement concerns time: does the premium on present goods reflect psychological discounting alone, or must technical conditions of production also enter the explanation? Writing as a theorist whose own concepts Sulzer adopts and alters, Böhm-Bawerk makes these differences concrete through the treatment of savings, intermediate goods, and longer production periods. The review shows how shared foundations can sustain sharply different accounts of capital and interest.

An intended opponent can arrive independently at the theory he seeks to displace. That is Böhm-Bawerk’s verdict on Moriz Naumann’s account of value in this short 1895 review. He credits Naumann with genuine originality of reasoning even where his conclusions reproduce marginal-value theory—a distinction that makes the praise more than a reward for agreement. The limit comes at the relationship between costs and value: Böhm-Bawerk finds Naumann’s concept of “cost value” ambiguous and his criticism insufficiently grounded in his opponents’ actual arguments. The review offers a compact example of theoretical judgement that separates independent thought, novel results and accurate polemic, without allowing a serious objection to erase a work’s merits.

How much may someone consume from an asset without consuming the asset itself? In this 1895 review of the first volume of Leo von Petrażycki’s theory of income, Robert Meyer shows why that economic question matters to civil-law disputes over usufruct, possession, and the fruits of property. He welcomes Petrażycki’s treatment of income as a rule of conduct rather than merely a category of receipts, while claiming that his own earlier work had advanced substantially the same conception. His praise also stops short of endorsing a separate science of legislative policy. This compact review offers a pointed encounter between legal doctrine and economic reasoning: rules must be judged not only by the cases they resolve, but by the conduct they encourage.

Preparing a currency for gold redemption could strengthen a bank while weakening its lending business—and leave the state paying for shareholders’ gains. In this 1895 encyclopedia article, Robert Zuckerkandl examines that tension as the Austro-Hungarian Bank seeks renewal of its note-issuing privilege. His distinctive concern is to connect reserve policy with the financial bargain between bank and government: repayment of state debt may be necessary for monetary reform, but its necessity does not establish shareholders’ entitlement to the resulting profits. Reading the still-unsettled proposals against balance-sheet evidence, he shows how gold purchases, the withdrawal of state notes and profit-sharing rules redistribute costs and opportunities. The article offers a concrete test of when public support for monetary stability becomes an unwarranted private benefit.

Do more recorded baptisms of boys mean more boys were born—or that girls went unrecorded? This uncertainty sharpens Karl Theodor von Inama-Sternegg’s short study of Pirano’s baptismal register, which he identifies as Austria’s oldest surviving example. Correcting its reported starting date to 1457, he examines how retrospective entries, changes of priest and damaged leaves affect its statistical value. His selected series of 2,032 baptisms offers evidence for late-medieval population history without resolving every apparent pattern. The article’s particular interest lies in watching manuscript criticism constrain numerical inference: a low annual total need not signal population decline, and the month of baptism need not be the month of birth.

Interest is not the wage of the capitalist's pain. Replying to J. B. Clark - here in the German translation of the 1895 English essay "The Origin of Interest" - Böhm-Bawerk rejects the reading of his theory as a disguised abstinence doctrine and grounds interest instead in the objective superiority of present goods, given that fruitful methods of production are time-consuming. He defends the claim that interest can persist in a stationary economy, untied to fresh capital formation, and answers Clark's regress objection by distinguishing capital's absolute historical lineage from the average interval between original inputs and finished consumption goods. Turning Clark's water-mill and steam-mill example around, he shows that an equal financial return over a longer investment period implies greater technical productivity, confirming rather than refuting his analysis.

Professor Clark scheint ferner meine Zinstheorie für eine Art Abstinenztheorie zu halten.

English translation: “Professor Clark further seems to regard my theory of interest as a kind of abstinence theory.”

Exceptionally low grain prices need not prove an uninterrupted agricultural decline. In this 1895 article, Hermann von Schullern zu Schrattenhofen tests that distinction against Austrian market reports, Vienna exchange quotations, and foreign price series. He acknowledges the sharp fall in wheat and rye prices while showing how earlier reversals and the different behaviour of oats complicate contemporary crisis diagnoses. His distinctive concern is what comparisons can legitimately establish: monthly averages cannot settle accusations against speculation, and neighbouring markets may register different prices because one has cheap railway access and another does not. The article offers a concrete encounter with the making of economic evidence—how grain quality, reporting practices, harvest timing, and transport connections shape the apparent meaning of a falling price.

Evidence that peasant farms are disappearing is not proof that restrictions on their division will save them. In this 1895 article, Hermann von Schullern zu Schrattenhofen tests the official inquiry behind proposed farm-preservation legislation in Lower Austria. Committed to the social and political value of family ownership, he nevertheless exposes undefined units, missing baseline figures, and classifications that obscure where land actually went. His scrutiny makes the distance between documenting rural change and justifying a legal remedy unusually concrete. Municipal reports of indebtedness, villa development, and purchases for private hunting grounds offer explanations that aggregate transfer totals cannot supply. The article shows how a defender of peasant proprietorship can question the evidence advanced in its defence without dismissing either the problem or imperfect statistics.

How did economists once attacked as dangerous innovators come to be dismissed as bourgeois reactionaries? This unsigned 1895 review, attributed to Carl Menger, finds the reversal revealing of the classics’ critics rather than the classics themselves. Praising Richard Schüller’s book of the same title, the reviewer defends Smith, Malthus, Say, and Ricardo in his practical essays as evidence-minded reformers who challenged privilege while counselling prudence. Against German historical and social-policy schools, he argues that their writings anticipated contemporary demands for social reform despite the limits of their historical experience. This brief polemic offers a pointed distinction between acknowledging those limits and accepting inherited caricatures of classical economics.