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.
How did German economics come to treat industrial poverty and social reform as problems within its own remit? In this 1908 Festschrift contribution, Eugen Philippovich von Philippsberg traces an indirect route: socialist criticism challenged the established order, but legal philosophy and historical and ethical inquiry helped economists reconsider their discipline’s boundaries. His account centres on the tension between property as a condition of personal independence and property as a source of social obligation. Associations, cooperatives and public intervention emerge as competing responses, not components of a single reform doctrine. Readers can discover how economics acquired a broader concern with human development without, in Philippovich’s view, surrendering its insights into scarcity—and why accepting the need for social policy did not settle who should act or how.
Paying rent with a share of the harvest could mean precarious annual dependence—or inheritable rights in vines, trees, and improvements. Hermann von Schullern zu Schrattenhofen makes this disparity central to his report on Kolonat in Görz and Gradisca, Istria, Dalmatia, and Tirol, drawing on a ministry-commissioned journey in spring 1908. Rather than treating share-tenancy as a single institution, he examines how contracts distribute security, costs, and incentives to cultivate. Phylloxera could end agreements tied to the lifetime of vines; landlords’ claims to particular crops could obstruct diversification. His comparisons support locally differentiated reforms rather than uniform abolition. Interviews, contracts, and official responses allow readers to explore the concrete arrangements behind apparently identical tenancy labels—and why ownership alone need not settle questions of agricultural productivity.
A state that had suppressed workers’ associations now proposed to guarantee their representation inside the workplace. Eugen Peter Schwiedland examines this contradiction in his 1908 essay on compulsory workers’ committees in Austria. His account of Emil Steinbach’s proposals shows how institutions intended to foster loyalty to employers could also give workers a recognized voice in disciplinary grievances, welfare administration, and workplace rules. Defending statutory representation against reliance on employers’ goodwill, Schwiedland nevertheless takes seriously the danger of managerial control and workers’ historically grounded distrust. The essay offers a concrete way to distinguish representation from paternalism: compulsory establishment matters only if committees have substantive functions. Its legislative controversies expose why both employers and organized workers could resist the same institution for opposing reasons.
How could equilibrium justify both state intervention and economic freedom? In this 1908 study, Karl Pribram locates a shared mechanical conception beneath the apparent opposition between mercantilism and liberal economics. What changed, he argues, was chiefly the unit of analysis: national stocks of money and goods gave way to individual exchanges, prices, and competing interests. Connecting economic reasoning with natural science, natural law, and commercial rivalry, Pribram asks how balance became an expectation before it was established by observation. His treatment of Adam Smith brings the stakes into focus: spontaneous harmony depends on assumptions about mobility, economic similarity, and bargaining power. Readers can discover how a seemingly neutral analytical idea carries different political prescriptions—and how much those prescriptions leave assumed.
A building project can have many independent contractors yet remain under concentrated financial control. In this 1908 article, Emil Lederer examines that tension in Austrian construction, especially Vienna’s speculative housebuilding, with Germany as a comparison. His revealing example is the landowner who sells to a developer without capital while retaining a senior mortgage: those supplying labour and materials create value but may be last in line for payment. Distinguishing illegal fraud from legally protected advantage, Lederer asks why fragmented production persists and whom it serves. Trade licensing and limited mechanization matter, but so do credit arrangements that separate economic command from liability. The article offers a concrete way to understand how property rights and financing shape not only business organization, but workmanship, payment security, and the costs borne by tenants.
Can a single theory of value explain wages, rent, interest—and entrepreneurial profit? In this 1908 collective review, Joseph A. Schumpeter tests recent economics against that ambition, focusing especially on Seligman, Carver, and Fetter. He welcomes the integration of distribution into exchange theory but refuses to mistake a shared vocabulary for an explanation: individual valuations must be connected to market prices, and discounting future income cannot itself explain interest. Entrepreneurial profit exposes a deeper difficulty. Entrepreneurs sell goods, Schumpeter argues, not a separately priced entrepreneurial service; their residual earnings therefore resist treatment as an ordinary factor payment. The review lets readers see his distinction between static and dynamic explanation taking shape through precise disagreements with economists whose achievements he also recognizes.
A state can raise workers’ incomes with one measure and erode their living standards with another. This tension anchors Carl Menger’s review of the concluding volume of Eugen von Philippovich’s Grundriß der politischen Ökonomie. Menger welcomes Philippovich’s decision to treat income policy as a distinct field, but questions its concentration on wage earners: tariffs and consumption taxes may outweigh the benefits of measures intended to help them. His criticism turns on the combined distribution of advantages and burdens across social groups, rather than the apparent generosity of individual policies. By distinguishing redistribution from workers’ self-financed insurance and aspects of poor relief, this short review offers a precise account of what Menger thinks income policy must explain—and why its boundaries matter.
Can a theory of economic equilibrium explain development, or does change demand different concepts? In this 1908 review of John Bates Clark’s Essentials of Economic Theory, Joseph A. Schumpeter makes that boundary the test of a sympathetic but exacting appraisal. He credits Clark with bringing scattered inquiries into economic dynamics into a coherent framework, yet identifies a missing force: active striving to advance, which might generate development even without changes in Clark’s specified conditions. His reservations extend to interest, which he argues cannot be satisfactorily explained within statics, and to the passage from analysis into policy advocacy against trusts. The review offers a compact encounter with Schumpeter’s developing conception of economic change, while showing precisely where his admiration for Clark gives way to methodological disagreement.
Massachusetts could regulate its own business corporations, but what happened when local enterprises obtained their charters in more permissive states? This tension anchors William E. Rappard’s 1908 dissertation, which joins economic history to comparative law to explain the turn toward liberal incorporation rules in 1903. Rappard distinguishes the industrial forces driving corporate growth from the legal arrangements governing access to capital and the distribution of risk. His comparisons with European regimes sharpen a practical question: how can investors and creditors protect themselves when administrative approval offers no guarantee of reliable information? Supporting corporate enterprise without treating its interests as paramount, he emphasizes truthful, accessible disclosure and penalties for deception. The study shows how competition among charter-granting states could undermine safeguards that any one state sought to maintain.
Maintaining a gold standard need not mean keeping gold in everyday circulation—a distinction that shapes Ludwig von Mises’s judgements in this 1908 collective review of forty-one works on money and banking. He weighs monetary theories against the workings of deposits, bills of exchange and bank assets, separating useful evidence from questionable conclusions. His discussion of Reichsbank reform makes the stakes concrete: competing with commercial banks through longer-term lending could weaken the liquidity on which the money market depended. Elsewhere, he asks whether quantity theory adequately accounts for elastic payment instruments and the role of confidence. The review offers readers a specific encounter with Mises as a critic: receptive to practical reform, sceptical of theoretical shortcuts, and attentive to the economic relationships that institutional histories must explain.
What does a definition of capital leave out when it makes the enterprise its organising unit? In this 1908 review of Walther Jacoby, Robert Zuckerkandl turns a methodological disagreement into concrete tests of classification. Jacoby reserves capital for a category grounded in legal and social relations; Zuckerkandl argues that economic categories independent of legal arrangements can still help explain social life. Theatres, passenger transport, medical establishments, and productive assets outside enterprises expose boundaries that Jacoby’s account has not adequately explained. Praising the book’s clarity without accepting its proposed solution, Zuckerkandl shows why the dispute is more than terminological: the definition adopted determines which productive activities and assets an account of capital can recognise.
No economy is governed by interest alone: conduct is formed by moral sentiment, custom, and law, each carrying its own sanction, conscience, public opinion, state force, and its own historical rhythm. Drawing on Schaeffle, Wundt, Westermarck, and Schmoller, Schwiedland traces how inward feeling hardens into Sitte, the socially expected form of conduct, and how custom in turn sustains, softens, or defeats written law even after its repeal. The deeper ground of both is collective self-protection, which is why acts condemned as selfish between individuals may be praised when done for the state. Applied historically, the argument shows guild rules and price ordinances confining commerce until the eighteenth century, liberal freedom then loosening them, and the modern state re-entering through factory protection, wage regulation, and social insurance to subordinate economic voluntarism to the community's sense of the fair.
„Sitte ist stärker als Recht“.
English translation: “Custom is stronger than law.”