3,801 works, 471 books, 3,267 articles, 60 other works, 3 awaiting classification, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
A system of equations can represent market equilibrium without fully explaining how prices arise. This distinction anchors Alfred Amonn’s two-installment review of the first edition of Gustav Cassel’s Theoretische Sozialökonomik. Appreciative of Cassel’s clarity and theoretical advances, Amonn nevertheless challenges his attempt to dispense with subjective valuation: demand functions still require explanation, and renaming valuation does not remove it. His criticism also exposes a tension between what markets do and what an economically rational allocation ought to accomplish. Purchasing power, he argues, cannot be mistaken for a common measure of the urgency of people’s needs. The review offers a precise encounter between rival explanatory approaches, showing why acknowledging interdependence among prices, incomes and demand is not the same as explaining its foundations.
Mit einem Worte: Cassels Darstellung des Preisbildungsprozesses ist noch keine Erklärung dieses Prozesses, sondern erst der Anfang einer Erklärung.
English translation: “In a word: Cassel’s account of the price-formation process is not yet an explanation of that process, but only the beginning of an explanation.”
A stronger krone need not mean a richer Austria. In this article, Alfred Amonn challenges the demand for currency appreciation by separating money’s numerical value from the goods and services it can command. Against Emanuel Hugo Vogel, he argues that raising the exchange rate cannot create purchasing resources for the country; it can, however, redistribute income toward creditors while disrupting production. His alternative—stable domestic purchasing power—also presents a practical difficulty: Austria’s controlled prices, fiscal deficit, and delayed inflationary effects make existing monetary relationships unsuitable for immediate stabilization. The article connects a precise dispute over the aim of monetary policy with the difficult sequencing of reconstruction, showing why fiscal repair and price adjustment must, in Amonn’s account, precede durable stability.
Does equating a worker’s wage with the value of marginal output explain that wage—or merely restate a relation between values still needing explanation? Alfred Amonn’s methodological article challenges marginal-productivity theory on precisely this ground. He seeks a unified explanation of wages, interest, and rent through consumer demand, production requirements, and the distinct supply conditions of labour, capital, and land. His approach separates questions often run together: why an income category exists, what determines its magnitude, and whether it must take the form of a market payment. Rent on owner-cultivated land and saving without interest sharpen these distinctions. The result is an explanatory programme, not a finished model, that asks readers to distinguish an equilibrium condition from an account of the forces producing it.
Can an editor disclaim responsibility for a translation published under his name? In this brief reply to Kerschagl, Alfred Amonn insists that dividing the labour does not divide accountability. He contrasts Kerschagl’s defence with the editors’ own declaration of joint work on the German translation of Walras’s Theory of Money. His objections to expressions about metallic parity and stabilization sharpen a second distinction: grammatical correctness and intelligibility are not merely matters of stylistic taste. This is not an exposition of Walras’s monetary theory, but a pointed dispute over the standards required to transmit it. Readers can follow how Amonn tests claims of scholarly collaboration against the wording and public presentation of the resulting work.