The three volumes (four books) contain a total of 2,137 pages. The first edition of Volume I was published in 1903 and consists of 549 pages, 4 parts and 28 chapters. All chapters are also broken down into paragraphs. Volume II was published two years later in 1905. It contains parts 5 and 6, a total of 574 pages, going from chapter 29 to chapter 54. Volume III was published in 1908 and is actually two books, but the pagination is continued throughout the two books, the first part having 514 pages and the second continuing from page 515 to page 1,014. The two books of Volume III consist of parts 7 to 10 and the chapters from 55 to 100. The last book also has a postscript, a list of corrections, an alphabetical author index and a detailed subject index.

The subtitle of Socialøkonomik is ‘A Scientific Presentation of the Economic Activity of Human Society’. The first volume mainly presents a historical overview of the economic activity of society, but the first part presents the term, method and system of the economic discipline. The second volume has only two large parts: the first goes through all aspects of value, revenue and wealth; the second part discusses production and acquisition (erhverv).

The first book of the third volume only contains one part, which presents all aspects of turnover and trade in the economy.