The archive.

A dividend is not the whole of a shareholder’s gain, and a liquidation date does not tell us when losses occurred. These distinctions drive Felix Somary’s 1910 article on measuring the profitability of joint-stock companies. Bringing commercial reasoning to statistical method, he argues that reserves, retained earnings, and the timing of losses must enter calculations that dividend figures alone cannot support. He also separates company profitability from the yield available to someone buying shares at market prices: a high dividend yield may signal a depressed price rather than a flourishing business. The article offers a concrete way to examine how apparently straightforward financial ratios answer different questions—and how poorly chosen accounting categories can distort the record of a business crisis.

Competing firms can become close allies when they purchase the same commodity: labor. In this 1910 social-policy chronicle, Emil Lederer examines how employers’ associations in Germany and Austria turn that shared interest into organized power. His sharpest test is collective bargaining: does an agreement recognize workers’ organizations as negotiating partners, or merely give contractual form to employers’ commands? Contrasting compromise in woodworking with confrontation in construction, he shows why disputes over hours, piecework, and labor exchanges concern workplace authority as much as wages. Strike-compensation funds make solidarity materially sustainable; political alliances extend it beyond the workplace. Written while the construction conflict remained unresolved, the report lets readers examine Lederer’s distinction between coordination for bargaining and organization aimed at curtailing the other party’s independence.

How can legal obligations be understood where protection, kinship, ritual, and retaliation are inseparable? In this 1910 article, Richard Thurnwald approaches the question through field research in Buin, southern Bougainville, tracing claims and duties through concrete relationships rather than abstract rules. Chiefs depend on followers who can withdraw allegiance; marriage payments redistribute obligations of protection; ownership of planted trees may differ from rights over the soil. These distinctions make familiar legal categories less secure and reveal how authority operates without centralized enforcement. Thurnwald’s attention to local specificity also sits uneasily beside his evolutionary hierarchies and colonial assumptions. The article offers both a detailed account of negotiated obligations and an opportunity to examine the interpretive limits of its ethnographic method.

Twenty years of criticism, yet no change of theoretical position: this is the tension Schumpeter identifies in his 1910 review of the first half-volume of the third edition of Böhm-Bawerk’s Positive Theory of Capital. His brief, admiring notice focuses on how objections—especially those of Lexis and American economists—elicited new arguments about the disproportionately greater productivity of roundabout production. Schumpeter reads the prevalence of opposition as evidence of Böhm-Bawerk’s influence, not his displacement. Rather than independently testing the theory, he shows how its defence has expanded the book’s scope. The review offers a compact instance of Schumpeter’s judgement of theoretical achievement: criticism can deepen an exposition even when it leaves its author’s central convictions intact.

Personal authority can outlast the arguments that earned it. In this brief 1910 review of Eugenie Fabian-Sagal’s study of Albert Schäffle, Joseph A. Schumpeter asks how a critic can separate lasting contributions to knowledge from the force of an economist’s personality. He welcomes the monograph’s judgement and endorses its distinction between Schäffle’s greatness and the more enduring genius of Smith or Ricardo. The review offers a compact glimpse of Schumpeter’s standards of intellectual appraisal: admiration must neither substitute for argument nor prevent discrimination among a thinker’s achievements.

What makes a revised economics treatise worth returning to: newer facts or more fully developed ideas? In this brief 1910 review of the expanded third edition of Part I of Gustav Schmoller’s Grundriß der allgemeinen Volkswirtschaftslehre, Joseph A. Schumpeter gives priority to the latter. He singles out the enlarged treatment of enterprise for particular praise, while observing that Schmoller’s framework remains intact, down to its paragraph numbering. The interest lies in Schumpeter’s criterion of judgment: an edition can offer substantially more without replacing its organizing scheme. His concise assessment identifies where he finds that gain and why, in his view, the volume’s significance cannot be measured by the freshness of its data.

Historical evidence can sharpen a question without settling it. In this brief 1910 review of Hermann Levy’s study of British monopolies, cartels, and trusts, Joseph A. Schumpeter distinguishes the value of collected material from the strength of its explanation. He finds the greatest novelty in Levy’s account of early coal and copper mining combinations; his central analytical interest, however, lies in the obstacles to modern industrial concentration in England. Levy’s discussion, he judges, offers suggestions rather than conclusions. The review shows precisely where Schumpeter locates originality and where he withholds assent, while acknowledging that an imperfect analysis can remain a useful scholarly resource.

What should an economics student learn from statistics without becoming a statistician? In this brief 1910 review of the third, expanded edition of J. Conrad’s textbook, Joseph A. Schumpeter praises a deliberate restriction: demographic findings take precedence over methodological detail and specialist insurance questions. He treats this narrow teaching aim as a strength, not a shortcoming. The review offers a compact statement of his educational priorities: knowledge of population is, in his judgement, indispensable to understanding economic life, while technical instruction must serve rather than overshadow that purpose.

Can abstract economic theory illuminate practical life without dictating a political programme? In this 1910 tribute to Carl Menger, Robert Zuckerkandl connects a portrait of scholarly independence with a defence of theoretical inquiry. His account makes Menger’s reversal of cost-based value explanations concrete: the anticipated value of products explains the value of productive inputs, rather than the reverse. Yet Zuckerkandl’s defence of the Austrian school also acknowledges the achievements of German historical economics. He presents abstraction as a provisional simplification whose exclusions must subsequently be examined, not a licence to ignore institutions, unequal power, or varied motives. The resulting portrait shows how an admirer of Menger could defend theory’s autonomy while refusing to identify its methods with laissez-faire policy.

Cheaper international transit need not entail permanent foreign control over railway policy. That distinction drives Siegmund Feilbogen’s 1910 critique of the proposed Gotthard Convention. Germany and Italy had helped finance the railway; Feilbogen asks whether that contribution entitled them to lasting concessions after its purchase by the Swiss state. He accepts tariff reductions as potentially beneficial through increased traffic, but opposes extending perpetual most-favoured-nation treatment to the entire Swiss network. His objection exposes a paradox: a guarantee of equal treatment could discourage Switzerland from offering concessions to other neighbours, thereby obstructing trade rather than freeing it. This short article offers a concrete examination of where reciprocal commercial advantage ends and an indefinite constraint on national decision-making begins.

Paris was said to offer little to the social sciences; Feilbogen replies by mapping a landscape crowded with rival schools. He tracks liberal individualism across three generations—Passy, Molinari, Levasseur, and then the systematic Leroy-Beaulieu—and the socialism that Guesde and Lafargue imported from German Marxism before it fractured into reformism and revolutionary syndicalism. Georges Sorel draws the sharpest scrutiny as the theorist of violence and the general strike, whose cult of myth the author judges barbarizing and historically naive. Between the extremes stand the mediating currents—academic economics, the Le Play school, Catholic social thought, Durkheim's sociology, and above all Léon Bourgeois's solidarism, which grounds each individual's debt to society in a quasi-contract while preserving liberty and property.

Ein Mythos ist ein Volksmotiv. Er braucht nicht klar, er braucht nicht wahr zu sein, wenn er nur begeistert.

English translation: “A myth is a popular motive force. It need not be clear, it need not be true, so long as it inspires.”

Legal definitions can classify money without explaining its purchasing power; bank balance sheets can record assets without showing how readily depositors can recover their funds. These gaps animate Ludwig von Mises’s 1910 literature report on money and banking. Reviewing monetary histories and institutional studies, he asks what their descriptions explain—and what they leave concealed. His criticism of Knapp’s state theory turns on its neglect of monetary value and the purposes behind currency reform. His attention to small banks and insurers brings a parallel concern into view: apparently reassuring institutions may hold funds in forms ill suited to sudden withdrawals. The report offers a concrete encounter with Mises as a critic, testing scholarship against historical motives, economic explanation, and the practical risks of financial arrangements.