The archive.

When does labour protection cease to be an experiment and become an accepted basis for further reform? In this brief review of two Swiss studies by Émile Waxweiler, Hermann von Schullern zu Schrattenhofen stresses the value of laws tested in practice—and exposed long enough for opponents to identify harmful effects. His endorsement rests on the experience of Sunday rest and the federal factory law of 1877, whose revisions he treats as evidence of practical learning. Acceptance, however, ranges from enthusiasm to resignation. The review offers a compact view of how protection could reach beyond factories: through widening the legal definition of a factory or through cantonal legislation covering other trades.

Replacing grain fields with pasture may rescue a farm without securing its future. That distinction drives Hermann von Schullern zu Schrattenhofen’s 1897 review of F. Ph. Koenig’s study of English agriculture under international competition. Schullern welcomes Koenig’s county-level evidence and his account of adaptation through lower rents and expanded livestock farming, but questions whether pastoral prosperity offers lasting protection against the pressures already afflicting grain growers. His closing discussion sharpens the issue: agricultural “overproduction” must be measured against consumers’ purchasing power, not their unsatisfied needs. This short review lets readers examine the gap between successful adjustment and durable recovery, while distinguishing an abundance of produce from an ability to buy it.

What makes an economics textbook useful in the classroom—and beyond it? In this brief review of the first two parts of Hermann Bachmann’s Grundlagen der Volkswirtschaft, Hermann von Schullern zu Schrattenhofen judges from roughly six years’ experience teaching at commercial academies. His praise is practical and conditional: a chapter on agricultural production would make the general economics volume independently usable, while stylistic revision and corrected misprints would improve its teaching value. In the agrarian volume, he values concise legislative information and an approach attentive to the circumstances of practical problems. The review offers a compact example of a teacher’s standards for economic instruction, including his expectation that sound exposition might correct prejudiced judgments outside school.

A land tax may fall on the seller through a reduced purchase price rather than simply burden the buyer: this concrete dispute anchors Hermann von Schullern zu Schrattenhofen’s demand that fiscal theory remain answerable to actual markets and institutions. His 1897 review of three Italian works on public finance briefly appreciates Cossa’s textbook before engaging more closely with Graziani and Masè-Dari. Admiration does not preclude disagreement: he questions Graziani’s separation of theory from legislation and values Masè-Dari’s examination of the conditions for progressive taxation in Italy. Readers encounter a reviewer testing abstract claims against property transactions, assessment practices, revenue needs, and taxpayers’ capacity—and distinguishing a tax’s theoretical justification from the evidence needed to introduce it.

Can a collection’s agricultural arguments receive a fair hearing when its contributors write from an explicitly Catholic standpoint? In this brief German review, Hermann von Schullern zu Schrattenhofen gives particular attention to Stanislao Solari’s expectations for a practically tested fertilization system: higher agricultural productivity and wider economic and social benefits, even as markets become more integrated. These are Solari’s expectations, not results independently established by the reviewer. Schullern’s own pointed intervention concerns scholarly fairness: openly declared Catholic commitments, he argues, deserve at least as much consideration as opposing commitments often left implicit in specialist literature. The review brings a concrete proposal for improving Italian agriculture into contact with the question of how religious affiliation shapes its reception.

Venetian shipping gives the opposition between free trade and protectionism a concrete historical test in this brief review of the first part of S. Cognetti de Martiis’s I due sistemi della politica commerciale. Hermann von Schullern zu Schrattenhofen welcomes Cognetti’s account of a state whose commercial policies served practical national interests rather than either abstract principle. Yet he finds the treatment of Friedrich List too compressed, with too little emphasis on its historical and specifically national character. That reservation sharpens the review’s interest: Schullern values the history of actual Venetian policy above the survey of doctrines, while insisting that economic doctrines themselves need historically precise treatment.

Domestic and agricultural servants shared the legal designation Gesinde, but did they belong under a single framework of social policy? This question gives Hermann von Schullern zu Schrattenhofen’s brief 1897 review of Wilhelm Kähler’s study its focus. Schullern welcomes Kähler’s evidence as a resource for reform, bringing an Austrian comparison to his assessment: provincial servant ordinances, he argues, sustain conditions that cannot last. His endorsement is not a legislative programme or a detailed critique. It draws attention instead to the difficulty of reforming laws for workers whose circumstances differ markedly beneath a common name. The review offers a concise statement of why defining the population governed by servant law matters as much as documenting its conditions.

Protecting a debtor does not necessarily protect the weaker party: a wealthy defaulter may be withholding payment from a producer of modest means. This counterexample anchors Robert Meyer’s qualified appreciation of Petrazycki’s second volume of Die Lehre vom Einkommen in his 1897 review. Meyer welcomes an analysis of compensation and interest that asks how legal expectations encourage productive management or reward opportunism. Yet he challenges both the identification of debtors with economic vulnerability and the claim that such inquiry requires a separate discipline of civil policy. His review offers a concrete encounter between jurisprudence and political economy: readers can see how rules governing payment, reimbursement, and contractual remedies alter economic conduct—and why judging their social effects requires attention to who actually gains and loses.

Equal representation does not necessarily mean equal power. In this 1897 introduction to Austria’s law on compulsory mining associations, Hermann von Schullern zu Schrattenhofen welcomes the inclusion of miners alongside mine owners as recognition of a partnership between labour and capital. Yet he tests that promise against the arrangements governing elections, staffing and employment regulations. Owners retain consequential powers, while management’s supervision of workers’ elections threatens the appearance of impartiality. Distinct from the official statute that follows it, this commentary combines confidence in social reform with scrutiny of its institutional safeguards. Readers can discover why Schullern regards public supervision as protection for workers, and why even carefully balanced representative bodies leave practical equality dependent on how employers and employees use them.

Small instalments could conceal obligations large enough to endanger a household or farm. In this 1897 introduction and commentary on Austria’s instalment-sales law of 27 April 1896, Hermann von Schullern zu Schrattenhofen asks when such risks justify overriding freedom of contract. Drawing on lawyers’ experience and reports of distressed peasant holdings in Tyrol, he connects unread printed agreements, reassuring oral promises, and inferior goods to the need for protections buyers cannot sign away. His account makes procedural details concrete: allowing oral evidence matters when a salesman’s assurances contradict the contract. Yet he distinguishes protecting purchasers from preventing harmful purchases. The legislative compromise strengthened remedies while abandoning preventive provisions—a limit that sharpens his assessment of what this law could accomplish.

Marx promised in Capital's third volume to reconcile the labor theory of value with a fact that plainly contradicts it: profit rates tend to equalize across industries regardless of how much labor each employs, so that railways and labor-heavy workshops earn alike. That reconciliation, Komorzynski argues, is self-defeating. Once Marx converts values into 'prices of production'—cost price plus an average profit on total capital—labor value forfeits its real economic force, and with it collapses the exploitation theory that profit is appropriated unpaid labor. Drawing on Böhm-Bawerk's pearl-stringing and wine-cellar examples, he insists that products spring from nature and capital no less than labor, that scarce natural goods carry value without embodied labor, and that Sombart's rescue on grounds of 'social labor' cannot repair the doctrine.

Die Ausbeutungslehre steht und fällt mit der Arbeitswerttheorie.

English translation: “The doctrine of exploitation stands and falls with the labor theory of value.”

More strikes need not mean more strikers—or greater failure. In this commentary on Austria’s official industrial-dispute statistics for 1895, Victor Mataja shows how counting stoppages rather than participants changes the apparent record of success. His concern is what a small, uneven body of evidence can establish without hardening into general laws. He distinguishes the immediate trigger of a strike from the demands it releases: a proposed wage cut could bring accumulated grievances over hours, sanitation, safety, and dismissal into the open. Alongside wages gained and workdays lost, Mataja attends to solidarity with dismissed colleagues and demands for courteous treatment. The article offers a concrete lesson in reading labour statistics while preserving the conflicts over dignity and authority that their categories can obscure.