The archive.

Society shapes what people desire, but it is not itself a wanting organism—so social value, Schumpeter argues, has no natural meaning in a competitive economy. Only a community that consciously acts as one, as under communism, could possess social utility curves and social marginal utilities. His real target is the optimistic distributive doctrine of Clark, Wieser and Carver, which holds that competition pays each factor what its service is worth to the community. Competitive prices, he counters, rest on individual valuations, ownership, bargaining position, and above all the given distribution of wealth; they cannot be read as the disguised verdict of an organized society. To fix values is not yet to fix prices, he insists, and social value survives only as a scientific fiction outside the communistic case.

For only individuals can feel wants.

Adolescence is neither childhood nor adulthood but a vulnerable passage, bodily growth, sexual maturation, emotional volatility, unfinished judgment, and industrial society, Schwiedland argues, throws working-class youth into adult labour, lodging-house life, drink, and disease before they can withstand them. He reads juvenile mortality, delinquency, and institutionalization as effects of environment rather than innate depravity, and faults courts and prisons for deepening the damage they claim to correct. Against this he sets a coordinated Jugenddienst: vocational guidance matched to health and aptitude rather than mere vacancies, placement offices, youth homes serving as substitute family, medical supervision, thrift schemes, and legal protection. The Jugendhort must feel like a large family, not a school or barracks. Care for the earning young, he closes, matters more than relief for those already broken, because the future lies with them.

Was in erster Linie benötigt wird, ist also ein Nachweis nicht der Stellen, sondern der richtigen Berufe.

English translation: “What is needed first and foremost, then, is a placement not of positions, but of the right occupations.”

Cannons, soldiers, and offices are only instruments; what makes them obeyed is habit, loyalty, prestige, and belief. Across six Salzburg lectures, Wieser corrects both liberal and revolutionary thought by refusing to treat power as the mere enemy of right: social life depends on organized powers—monarchy, army, church, press, capital, labor, public opinion—and the real evil is Übermacht, the point where necessary leadership hardens into oppression. Beginning from Lassalle's claim that constitutions rest on actual force, he deepens it into a sociology of inner power, of leadership and following, of the law of the small number. Law emerges not as power's negation but its ordering, and freedom, against Manchester individualism, becomes a means to the general welfare rather than an absolute principle.

Zur vollen Macht gehört das Recht, zum vollen Recht gehört die Macht.

English translation: “To full power belongs right; to full right belongs power.”

Can a theory of value explain enduring purchasing power rather than merely the outcome of current supply and demand? In this short review, Robert Zuckerkandl examines Bernhard Rost’s attempt to supplement subjective value theory through socially shaped valuations and a concept of lasting exchange value. He separates his appreciation of Rost’s history of economic doctrines from his doubts about the proposed theory. His objection concerns exposition as well as conviction: complicated terminology, compressed reasoning and missing examples leave the reader unsure whether the central claims have even been understood. The review offers a compact encounter with the difficulty of distinguishing lasting value from fluctuating prices—and with a critic who withholds assent without claiming to have supplied a full refutation.

Can the premise that labor alone creates value support a defense of rent and interest against socialism? Robert Zuckerkandl singles out this tension in his review of G. W. Schiele’s account of the “natural” origins of distributive incomes. His concise exposition makes especially clear Schiele’s proposed wage benchmark: what workers could earn in small independent enterprises rather than wage employment. Zuckerkandl appreciates the book’s coherence but distinguishes clarity from proof, observing that its avoidance of controversy leaves disputed claims insufficiently defended. The review offers a compact encounter with an unusual labor-based justification of property income—and records Schiele’s further attempt to use his wage theory to justify reserving employment on German soil for German workers.

Austria-Hungary maintained gold payments without legally obliging its central bank to redeem notes. In this 1909 article, republished here in 2012, Ludwig von Mises asks what that gap between law and practice actually allowed the Bank to do. Its holdings of foreign bills earned interest and economized on bullion, but did they also permit lower interest rates and independence from international money markets? Mises argues that they did not: foreign-exchange management reorganized gold payments rather than escaping their constraints. His concrete account of bill purchases, gold exports, and discount-rate decisions distinguishes an economical reserve technique from monetary autonomy. The case for compulsory redemption consequently turns less on changing banking operations than on making an existing commitment credible to foreign creditors.

High prices can encourage new investment long after enough productive capacity is already under construction: this is the mechanism Emil Lederer examines in his short review of Albert Aftalion’s account of general overproduction. He credits Aftalion with clarifying how lengthy production processes delay the appearance of excess supply, turning apparent scarcity into a stimulus for crisis. Yet Lederer’s approval has a concrete limit: an explanation that assumes free competition leaves the effects of cartel formation unexamined. The review brings into focus the gap between a persuasive account of industrial timing and a theory adequate to the actual organization of markets.

Damaging allegations are not yet a political argument. In this brief 1910 review of Fritz Stephan Neumann’s Die Sozialdemokratie als Arbeitgeberin und Unternehmerin, Emil Lederer objects both to unverifiable citations and to the assumption that reported facts can substitute for a critique of Social Democracy’s principles. His sharper turn concerns persuasion: even an agitation pamphlet, exempt from scholarly expectations, defeats its purpose by underestimating its readers. Against fleeting electoral effects, Lederer sets the sustained influence he attributes to Lassalle and Bebel—writers read by German workers precisely for their intellectual substance, without free distribution by employers. The review offers a compact distinction between circulating hostility and making an argument that lasts.

Can coal output per worker measure a miner’s diligence? In this 1910 review of Ludwig Nieder’s study of the Saar mines, Emil Lederer endorses a concrete challenge to claims that higher wages, shorter shifts, and union activity reduced productivity. Stricter safety work could lower recorded output; reallocating workers between extraction and supporting tasks could change the average without any slackening of effort. Lederer singles out Nieder’s counterexamples, including mines with strong union membership where output rose rather than fell. His interest is not simply in defending workers, but in distinguishing their observed performance from the conditions that make it possible. This brief review shows how an apparently straightforward production statistic can become a misleading judgement about labour conduct.

Can socialism win intellectuals by promising freedom for their intellectual lives rather than appealing to economic interests alone? In this brief 1910 review of Max Adler’s pamphlet, Emil Lederer identifies both the persuasive force and the theoretical cost of that approach. Adler presents socialism as a cultural movement capable of liberating personality; Lederer observes that an appeal to educated readers’ ideals is not strictly historical-materialist. His judgement connects this tension to a concrete political audience: civil servants, whose movement he sees as already more oriented toward class struggle than it recognizes. The review offers a compact assessment of how socialist recruitment might draw strength from arguments that strain its theoretical commitments.

Political sympathy does not suspend economic criticism in Emil Lederer’s short review of Otto Bauer’s Die Teuerung. Praising Bauer’s explanation of rising prices for workers, Lederer singles out its concrete connections between Austrian conditions and the world economy. Yet he challenges the claim that gold-production costs determine gold’s value: gold’s legally secured conversion into money, he argues, distinguishes it from ordinary commodities, while higher mining wages might redistribute proceeds without altering world prices. This precise disagreement gives the review its interest: support for socialist education coexists with scrutiny of its monetary premises. Lederer’s closing observation—that Bauer’s practical proposals converge with Myrbach’s—also suggests why, in his judgement, consumer advocacy can support immediate socialist demands without requiring complete theoretical agreement.

Did Munich’s land-development companies profit by withholding building land, or depend on its rapid development? In this brief 1910 review of Reinhard Dönges’s study, Emil Lederer provisionally accepts the second view for Munich, where companies founded amid a population boom subsequently faced disappointing returns. His interest lies as much in the limits of the evidence as in its findings: dividend figures leave the composition of share capital unclear, while street-building obligations complicate the apparent gains from landownership. Lederer values Dönges’s documentary material without treating eight years of company activity as a final verdict. The review offers a compact example of how demographic change, development costs, and the observation period shape an assessment of the urban land question.