The archive.

Does waiting for consumption create a production cost, or does it change what future goods are worth today? In this 1923 encyclopedic article, Franz Xaver Weiss makes that distinction the test of abstinence theory’s explanation of interest. He credits Senior with connecting interest to time and rejects the charge that his theory merely rationalizes capitalist income. Yet, following Böhm-Bawerk, Weiss argues that postponement lowers present valuations rather than adding a separate sacrifice to labor and material outlays. His treatment shows why replacing “abstinence” with “waiting” does not settle the dispute. Readers gain a precise way to distinguish two explanations that acknowledge the same reluctance to defer enjoyment but assign it different economic roles.

Schumpeter recasts supply not as a stock of goods or an independent "cost side" opposed to demand, but as a relational category within the whole exchange economy. The primordial act of exchange, he argues, breaks down for every agent into alienation and acquisition, so that each participant is in principle both supplier and demander; supplying and demanding are reciprocal standpoints, not separate classes. From this he builds definitions of individual and marginal supply, cases of alternative and joint production, and three types of supply law - rising output at rising price, rising output at falling price, and the labor-and-saving case of falling supply at a rising price. Costs are reinterpreted through marginal valuation and opportunity cost, quasi-rent explains the returns of inelastic plant, and monopoly forms the limiting contrast. Supply emerges as a system-wide, time-bound, expectation-laden relation.

Das Anbieten ist eine notwendige Voraussetzung für effektive Nachfrage und das Nachfragen die notwendige Voraussetzung dafür, daß etwas angeboten wird.

English translation: “Supplying is a necessary precondition for effective demand, and demanding is the necessary precondition for anything to be supplied.”

What becomes of economic self-interest when prestige depends on giving valuables away? In this 1923 review of Malinowski’s Argonauts of the Western Pacific, Eugen Peter Schwiedland treats Kula exchange as a challenge to textbook accounts of early economic life. He emphasizes how custom, ceremony, and public recognition organize exchange without eliminating the desire for gain. His distinctive concern is what economists can learn from ethnographic observation: generosity and acquisitiveness need not be opposing explanations, and practical usefulness cannot alone account for value. The review offers a compact encounter between fieldwork and economic theory, while Schwiedland’s bourgeois-versus-Bolshevik comparison exposes the contemporary political categories he brings to Malinowski’s findings.

Artistic freedom can itself be a social product. In this essay, Emil Lederer asks how society shapes artistic possibilities without explaining away creative achievement or aesthetic value. His cultural sociology looks beyond economic interests to the texture of everyday life: workshop traditions, urban experience, inherited tastes, and the audiences able—or unable—to recognize new forms. Social change, he argues, establishes a framework for creation but cannot predict the artist who will give it expression. Capitalism sharpens the tension: it loosens the concrete ties that once supplied artists with shared subjects and directions, enabling stylistic plurality while risking disorientation. The essay offers a way to examine art’s social conditions without treating either its dependence or its autonomy as self-evident.

External supervision can enforce economies, but can it make a depressed economy yield the revenues a balanced budget requires? In this 1923 article, Moriz Dub examines Austria’s financial reconstruction under League of Nations oversight, supporting fiscal discipline while testing its practical limits. Dismissals bring severance costs and the loss of experienced officials; higher tobacco prices and railway tariffs risk reducing consumption and traffic rather than increasing receipts. His commercial scrutiny of state enterprises does not lead to an automatic case for privatization: sales backed by government guarantees would leave public risk intact. The article offers a concrete account of the tension between administrative resolve and economic capacity, showing why a sharply reduced projected deficit is not yet a secure financial recovery.

By 1923 the German banking world was consumed, as Hahn puts it, from morning to night with a single anxiety, the preservation of its capital substance, yet the third edition of Adolf Weber's textbook still fought the prewar battle against the great credit banks. Reviewing it, Hahn dismantles three inherited doctrines: Weber's moralized contrast between English deposit banks and German speculation banks, his loose account of liquidity, and his theory of credit and capital. Genuine risk, he insists, sits with merchants and manufacturers, not with bankers. Liquidity, in a clearing economy, means access to central-bank money rather than idle cash. And the only thing that matters about any credit is whether it enlarges the purchasing power already circulating. Inflation, on this reading, came from state finance, not from weak reserves.

Das Kontokorrentgeschäft aber ist zweifellos das unspekulativste Geschäft, das überhaupt möglich ist, denn seine Gewinnchancen sind in den bedungenen Zinsen und Provisionen von vornherein festgelegt.

English translation: “The current-account business, however, is undoubtedly the least speculative business that is possible at all, for its profit prospects are fixed in advance by the stipulated interest and commissions.”

Protection against inflation appears here not as social relief but as a “curious monopoly” enjoyed by wage-earners and salaried employees. That reversal captures the standpoint of Eugen Peter Schwiedland’s 1923 review of Siegfried Strakosch’s book on Austria’s economic crisis. Strongly endorsing Strakosch’s practical and scientific authority, Schwiedland argues that socialist labour protections weakened production and burdened business. He also acknowledges the destructive effects of the peace settlement, new frontiers, trade barriers and currency instability. The interest of this short review lies in how these explanations are weighted: readers can see an economic indictment of labour policy taking shape around business uncertainty and middle-class losses, even while the reviewer describes pressures extending far beyond domestic legislation.

A reading society founded by Viennese jurists and officials in 1840 becomes, in this early study, a delicate instrument for registering the political pressures of the Austrian Vormärz. Engel-Janosi reconstructs the associational law of pre-1848 Austria, the natural-law background, the police suspicion of reading circles, the concession system, and shows how elite patrons such as Sommaruga shielded the club while Sedlnitzky, Kolowrat, and Metternich eyed it warily. Its history, he argues, is largely the chronicle of its skirmishes with the censorship: the struggle to obtain foreign political newspapers, to hold lectures, and to maintain a library under constant supervision and confiscation. Though the society never acted as a revolutionary body in March 1848, Engel-Janosi reads in its restrained conduct a loyal, sorrowful opposition to the imperial order.

Es liegt viel Schwäche darin, gewiß, aber auch Trauer und Treue.

English translation: “There is much weakness in it, to be sure, but also sorrow and fidelity.”

Once the public stops believing that the inflation will halt, Mises contends, a paper currency financed by the note press is doomed to sudden collapse rather than to endless gradual decline—as the American continentals and the French mandats collapsed before it. The first step of any reform is therefore to shut down the printing press; the second is to bind the mark again to gold, whose quantity answers to mining profitability rather than to state decree. He refutes the balance-of-payments theory of the exchanges, insisting that inflation, not poverty or trade deficits, drives foreign-exchange rates upward, and proposes a monetary constitution forbidding any note issue not covered by gold or foreign exchange. The disorder, he closes, is at root ideological.

An die Stelle des Schlagwortes „Los vom Golde“ muß die Lösung treten: „Los von der staatlichen Beeinflussung des Geldwertes“.

English translation: “In place of the slogan "Away from gold" must be substituted the solution: "Away from state influence on the value of money.”

Contributed to the memorial volume for Max Weber, this essay refuses the abstract rational homo oeconomicus and grounds economy instead in the biological balance of intake and expenditure that humans share with organisms and animals. Economic life, for Thurnwald, emerges from instinct through intelligence, invention, and organization, driven as much by prestige, magic, luxury, and group feeling as by calculation. He distinguishes constant psycho-physiological factors from local geographic ones and from the progressive accumulation of technique, tracing production and exchange values from clan sharing to tribute, primitive money, and finally the coal-and-machine economy that shifts power from land toward finance, industry, and labor. The gathering of prestige objects, he cautions, is not yet capital formation. Economy is treated throughout as a life function shaped by biology, psychology, environment, technique, and politics.

Das Verhältnis der Menschen zum Boden bildet zu allen Zeiten ein Grundproblem der Wirtschaft und der Politik.

English translation: “The relationship of human beings to the soil constitutes at all times a fundamental problem of economy and politics.”

Does a stronger need explain an economic choice, or do we call the need stronger because that choice was made? This tension gives Felix Kaufmann’s 1923 study its critical edge. Drawing on Husserl’s distinction between material and formal concepts, Kaufmann asks what makes conduct economic, rather than what circumstances cause it. He challenges definitions grounded in scarcity or ranked purposes and treats marginal utility as a useful guide to empirical inquiry, not an independent psychological explanation. His alternative centres on behaviour that establishes an order of selection among goods, understood as relations to external things. The discussion of money sharpens the stakes: ranking goods does not yet mean measuring their values. Readers can discover where apparently explanatory economic concepts may merely redescribe the conduct they are meant to explain.

Formally reciprocal rules can distribute burdens very unequally. In this review of Arthur Nussbaum’s study of the Versailles clearing procedure, Helene Lieser foregrounds the costs to Germany of settling cross-border debts as the mark depreciates. Her comparison with Austria makes the issue concrete: should the state absorb exchange-related losses, or should private debtors bear them according to their means? She also endorses Nussbaum’s criticism that the Mixed Arbitral Tribunals favor Allied claimants through selective treaty interpretation. The review’s interest lies in Lieser’s connection of legal machinery to financial incentives—and in her insistence that decisions admitting no appeal nonetheless demand scholarly scrutiny.