The archive.

Can a historian of capitalism and a theorist of interest use the same concept of capital? In this 1915 rejoinder to Werner Sombart, Alfred Amonn argues that studying the same phenomena does not mean asking the same questions—or requiring identical concepts. Defending his book on the foundations of theoretical economics, he concedes the omission of Marx and Rodbertus while resisting Sombart’s broader indictment of Austrian scholarship. The reply becomes especially concrete when Amonn separates the unit in which prices are reckoned from the money used for payment: their customary association does not establish logical necessity. This compact controversy shows how Amonn distinguishes concepts needed to formulate economic problems from assumptions that may help solve them, giving methodological disagreement a sharper focus than allegiance to rival schools.

Admiration does not require doctrinal agreement in Carl Menger’s obituary of Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk. Menger praises the economist’s intellectual integrity while challenging his exclusion of patents, businesses, and customer relationships from economic goods—assets that can command prices independently of physical inventories. He likewise distinguishes the achievement of Böhm-Bawerk’s history of interest theories from the disputed explanation of interest through the preference for present over future goods. Alongside these disagreements stands a concrete account of fiscal responsibility: tax reform, debt conversion, and the demands of maintaining budget equilibrium. The result is a tribute that measures achievement neither by theoretical unanimity nor by scholarship alone, allowing readers to see how Menger weighed explanatory rigor, productive controversy, and practical public service.

A book’s documents can be more useful than its exposition: this distinction guides Emil Lederer’s brief review of Nestriepke’s account of trade-union origins and agitation methods. Lederer favours Bringmann’s practical guidance for union workers, while suggesting that scholars may gain more from Nestriepke’s historical facsimiles than from his discussion. Yet he expressly reserves judgement on their selection. The review offers a compact example of critical discrimination between practical usefulness and documentary value, ending with a qualified endorsement for readers interested in unions’ internal structure and the life within them.

Can a general strike secure universal suffrage if the state can replace strikers with technically trained troops? This tension gives Emil Lederer’s brief review of Cyr. van Overbergh’s La Grève générale its focus. Lederer locates the book’s chief value in its documentary reconstruction of Belgium’s 1913 strike, compared with that of 1902. He reports, without developing an independent verdict, Overbergh’s prediction that growing military power would increasingly thwart general strikes, and his hope that social legislation and a modern franchise would ease social tensions. The review offers a compact encounter with the distinction between a strike’s political purpose and the practical limits of its leverage.

Little more than a signature survives here: an oblong-octavo album leaf inscribed by Eugen von Philippovich at Vienna on 6 April 1915, its value wholly bibliographical rather than textual. The catalogue record moves from author identification to physical description to provenance — a red round stamp of the J. K. Riess manuscript collection, an inventory number, and the punch-marks of an old binding. No argument, no doctrine: only attribution and the material history of collection and handling. As a wartime trace of one of Austria's leading national economists, the leaf documents how a fragment of hand becomes a collectible object, authenticated by stamps and stitching-holes rather than by anything its author chose to say.

Nur die Unterschrift.

English translation: “The signature only.—With the red round stamp of the "J. K. Riess Manuscript Collection", inventory no. "1086", and traces of holes from old binding.”

Wartime hostility confronted an economy bound together by international trade, payments and property rights. In this brief 1915 review, Emil Lederer values the Vienna Chamber of Commerce and Industry’s compilation of economic warfare measures precisely because it makes that tension available for comparison. Its coverage of all belligerents, including the Central Powers, allows restrictions on payments and the liquidation of enemy assets to be viewed alongside one another rather than in national isolation. Lederer’s concise judgement identifies the collection’s interest beyond legal reference: its systematically arranged documents show how states responded to close global economic interdependence when economic ties became targets of war.

How could readers find their way through the accumulating wartime decrees of the German Reich and Prussia? In this brief 1915 review of H. Jünger’s Die Kriegsgesetze, Emil Lederer judges the compilation by its usefulness as a reference tool. He notes the uneven breadth of its subject categories, but finds that subdivisions, chronological listings and separate alphabetical indexes make the legislation accessible. The review offers a precise glimpse of Lederer’s practical standards for documentary scholarship: his recommendation rests on careful compilation and ease of retrieval, rather than an assessment of the laws’ political consequences.

Political restraint is itself evidence in Emil Lederer’s brief review of Robert Schmidt’s account of worker protection in Germany. Lederer praises the survey’s reliability and grounding in official sources, yet notices how little its author’s position as a Social Democratic parliamentarian registers in the prose. Even shortcomings in strike jurisprudence and sickness-fund self-government receive only muted criticism. Reading tone alongside policy, Lederer identifies a tendency in influential trade-union circles to concentrate their efforts on reforms that might make workers’ lives tolerable within capitalism. The review offers a compact example of his attention to the political commitments implicit in an apparently factual presentation.

Admiration for monetary theory does not entail agreement with its policy conclusions. In this 1915 review of Karl Schlesinger’s Theory of Money and Credit, Joseph A. Schumpeter praises an original extension of Walrasian analysis while testing its assumptions against banking practice. He especially values the move from general claims about money and prices to the mechanisms of cash reserves, uncertain payments, and deposit creation. Yet he questions Schlesinger’s conclusions about banking crises and lasting changes in purchasing power, and resists abandoning interest-rate increases as a check on anticipated postwar inflation. The review offers a compact encounter with Schumpeter as a critical reader: receptive to theoretical innovation, but unwilling to let analytical elegance settle questions of monetary stabilization.

Falling unemployment need not mean greater security. In this 1915 social-policy chronicle, Emil Lederer examines why German salaried employees remained economically vulnerable even as conscription reduced competition for jobs. Association reports and employment statistics reveal salary cuts that outlasted the initial emergency, rising prices, and restrictions on employees’ freedom to change employers. Lederer distinguishes the survival of their organizations from those organizations’ capacity to defend members’ interests. The distinction becomes especially sharp when a technical employees’ association suspends benefits to protect its finances, provoking a revolt among the members it exists to serve. Women’s entry into posts vacated by soldiers presents another test of solidarity. The chronicle offers a concrete account of how wartime labor scarcity could coexist with weak bargaining power and divided collective loyalties.

Wartime recognition offered German trade unions new standing—but did it give workers greater power? In this 1915 chronicle, Emil Lederer tests hopes of lasting accommodation against union accounts, employment figures, and disputes over recruitment and wages. Falling unemployment could reflect military call-ups rather than recovery; mobilization could drain dues income while benefit obligations persisted. His distinctive concern is how these material pressures shaped political expectations: organizations committed to social transformation increasingly concentrated on protecting benefits and securing recognition within capitalism. By placing union leaders’ confidence beside employer-controlled labour exchanges and military restrictions on changing jobs, Lederer distinguishes cooperation in war production from durable gains in workers’ rights. The chronicle captures that distinction before demobilization could put reformist expectations to the test.

Falling unemployment can conceal a weakening labour movement. In this 1915 chronicle of Austria-Hungary at war, Emil Lederer brings union accounts, economic statistics, and emergency legislation together to explain that paradox. Military orders revive employment while conscription reduces the workforce; neither development necessarily restores unions’ finances or workers’ bargaining power. His sharpest contrast concerns the unequal reach of wartime compulsion: workers face military discipline and restrictions on leaving employment, without equivalent enforcement of employers’ obligations. Reports of reduced piece rates, withheld overtime payments, and rising food prices expose what employment totals leave out. Written while the war was still unfolding, the report offers a concrete way to distinguish industrial activity from prosperity—and expanded state authority from protection for labour.