1,549 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Divide economic life into two orders of fact, the repeated equilibrium of statics and the innovation of dynamics, and the central phenomena of capitalism fall into place. Reading Schumpeter's early system, Amonn shows that a purely static economy, where production and exchange merely reproduce themselves, forecloses every specifically capitalist income, interest, capital, and credit alike, since under full competition prices reduce to wages and rent. Everything else requires the entrepreneur, who breaks the routine by introducing a new combination and buys inputs at old prices while the transformed product commands a higher valuation. Profit is that temporary gap; interest is a share split from it; and crisis erupts when too many uncoordinated innovations obstruct one another's readjustment, collapsing the whole value-and-price system.
Gewinne können in der statischen Wirtschaft nicht entstehen.
English translation: “Profits cannot arise in a static economy.”
When the Czechoslovak crown came into existence in late February 1919, old Austro-Hungarian notes overstamped and declared sole legal tender, a successor state set out to build a currency from a wartime paper inheritance. Amonn traces that reconstruction to the stabilization debates of 1924 through note circulation, Lombard credit, discount policy, foreign-exchange reserves, and the wealth levy. His governing distinction separates elastic money, born of discounting genuine commercial bills and adjusting automatically to trade, from inelastic money created by Lombard advances and devisen purchases. On that basis he rejects the loose charge of deflation: Czechoslovak policy aimed at exchange-rate stability and real reserve backing, not deliberate contraction, and the crown's 1922 appreciation owed more to intervention and speculative capital flows than to any shrinking of the money stock.
Die neue Währung stellt sich hiernach formell als eine „Staatsnoten“währung, materiell aber als eine Banknotenwährung dar.
English translation: “Formally, the new currency presents itself as a "state-note" currency, but materially as a banknote currency.”
Ricardo both founded theoretical economics and led it astray, so runs the double verdict of this centenary study. He founded it, Amonn argues, by isolating its true problem: not the justice of class shares but the formal mechanism by which rent, profit, wages, and prices arise in exchange. He misled it by taking the labor-value principle as an unexamined axiom, confusing a mere indicator of value with its cause. Across chapters on heterogeneous labor, capital durability, profit, and rent, Amonn shows the principle breaking down, rent springs from the scarcity of land relative to demand, not from cultivating inferior soil. In its place he rebuilds value on relative scarcity, joining Cassel's equilibrium equations to marginal utility, and reads modern theory as the recovery of an insight Ricardo glimpsed and abandoned.
Der Wert der Güter „hängt“ nicht und niemals „ab“ von der zu ihrer Produktion erforderlichen Arbeitsmenge.
English translation: “The value of goods does not, and never does, "depend" on the quantity of labor required for their production.”
Behind the visible bustle of households, workshops, and markets lies a single circular process no eye observes directly, and making that national economy thinkable is the didactic ambition of this 1926 treatise. Building from need and scarcity toward value, marginal utility, and price, Amonn insists that production and distribution occur uno actu, in one and the same act, and recasts Betrieb against Unternehmung as the units of economic life. He defends land, capital, and labor against every labor-theory reduction, carries the analysis through money, credit, the Konjunkturzyklus, and crisis, and closes with an extended reckoning with the Methodenstreit that set Menger's marginal utility school against Schmoller's historians.
Die „relative Seltenheit“ oder „Knappheit“ ist der letzte Grund der Entstehung und der Höhe der Preise.
English translation: “Relative scarcity" or "scarceness" is the ultimate ground of the emergence and the level of prices.”
Profit, in the strict sense, is no reward for risk, no wage to the manager, and no return on capital—it is a surplus of value with no place among the ordinary income categories. From that austere premise this 1928 essay reconstructs entrepreneurial profit as the fruit of a single non-transferable act: the economic disposition over means of production toward a concrete purpose. Drawing on Schumpeter's new combinations, Amonn separates the static entrepreneur who merely continues an enterprise from the dynamic one who genuinely undertakes something, treats the shareholder rather than the director as the true entrepreneur, and argues that competition never levels such gains but abolishes them once the innovation is imitated. Entrepreneurial profit, he concludes, has no normal rate and no guaranteed duration.
Es besteht keine Ausgleichungstendenz für den Unternehmergewinn.
English translation: “There exists no equalizing tendency for entrepreneurial profit.”
When a peacetime economy converts to war, military demand piles onto civilian demand, usable productive means shrink, and the money circulation is thrown out of joint—three simultaneous shocks that no ordinary peacetime remedy can absorb. Written in Zurich in 1942 alongside Swiss reports by Böhler and Dütscher, this study refuses the comforting idea that policy should preserve the old circular flow; the whole national economy, Amonn argues, becomes structurally a war economy or it is none. He challenges the dogma that taxes never inflate while loans always do, subordinates the prevention of inflation to the overriding goal of maximum production, and defends rationing, differentiated price control, and savings-based war loans, testing each against Swiss figures for the cost of living, wages, and foreign trade.
Aber man geriete dann von der Scylla der Inflation unvermeidlich in die Charybdis der Deflation.
English translation: “But one would then inevitably pass from the Scylla of inflation into the Charybdis of deflation.”
The double meaning of the word Volk, Amonn contends, has quietly corrupted the foundations of economics by fusing the pure theoretical categories of the exchange economy with the practical concepts of Volkswirtschaftslehre. This introduction to economic thinking—second edition of 1944, essentially unchanged from the 1938 original—treats concepts frankly as instruments made by thought and defines each by the problem it is meant to solve. Moving from economic goods, scarcity, and Wohlstand through the production factors, prices, money, credit, and comparative costs, he denies that Volkswirtschaft is any real unit like a household, insisting it is only an ideational association of separate economies. Four appendices turn the method against Max Weber, Sombart, Gottl, and Englis, whose definitions he finds either candidly stipulative or objective merely in appearance.
Begriffe sind Denkwerkzeuge.
English translation: “Concepts are tools of thought.”
Trade unions at the close of the 1920s boom pressed a seductive claim: that higher wages would themselves raise productivity and general welfare—the doctrine this book was written to dismantle. First published in 1930 and reissued in expanded form in 1945, it untangles the many senses buried in the word wage: relative share against absolute goods, nominal against real, the wage rate per unit against total wage income. A higher rate, Amonn warns, need not raise a worker's income at all, since it may cut employment, hours, or output. He works out wage formation under free competition, ties real wages to productivity and capital accumulation, and grants unions a genuine but bounded power to lift wages toward the competitive level while denying they can be pushed permanently above it at capital's expense.
„Lohnsteigerungen“ bilden also eine sehr zweischneidige Waffe im Kampfe der Arbeit mit dem Kapital und den Anteil am Gesamtprodukt. Wenn man sie benutzt, läuft man Gefahr, sich damit ins eigene Fleisch zu schneiden.
English translation: “Wage increases" thus constitute a very double-edged weapon in the struggle of labor with capital over the share in the total product. If one uses them, one runs the risk of cutting into one's own flesh.”
Where should a student of economics begin—thrown at once into the tangle of modern theory, or led through the history of the science's own errors? This guide answers plainly: the aim of study is the capacity to judge practical policy on a theoretically grounded understanding, and the surest path runs through the original works of Turgot, Smith, Ricardo, Menger, and Walras before any textbook. Amonn maps the terrain to be mastered—general value and price theory, the factor incomes of wage, interest, and rent, money and the quantity theory, comparative costs, business cycles, and Malthusian population theory—always separating theoretical questions from the political goal-setting that lies beyond science. A closing mathematical appendix reduces supply, demand, and equilibrium price to linear functions worked out by hand.
Das Primäre in einer Wissenschaft sind ihre Probleme.
English translation: “What is primary in a science are its problems.”
Remembered chiefly as a moralist and forerunner of socialism, Simonde de Sismondi had his strictly theoretical economics undervalued for a century—an imbalance this first volume, offered as a belated centenary tribute, sets out to correct. Amonn reconstructs the 1803 De la richesse commerciale, in which capital governs production understood as a process of turnover, and translates key passages with commentary. He follows Sismondi's distinction of necessary from surplus wages, his national economic balance set against the mercantilist trade balance, his treatment of money as sterile wealth and credit as merely immaterial capital, and his consumer-centered case for free trade against tariffs, guilds, apprenticeship laws, and privileged companies. Throughout, he marks where Sismondi's labor-based reduction of land and capital anticipates the socialist value theories their author himself declined to draw.
«Die Regierung kann also» – so schließt Sismondi – «niemals in die Irre gehen, wenn sie in allen Fällen in Sachen der Handelsgesetzgebung nach dem wohlverstandenen Interesse des Konsumenten verfährt.»
English translation: “The government," Sismondi concludes, "can therefore never go astray if in all matters of commercial legislation it acts in accordance with the well-understood interest of the consumer.”
To fix a price at all, one must already know how prices form—and confusing value with price, this essay warns, wrecks the attempt from the start. Contributed to the 1946 Bern anthology Konkurrenz und Planwirtschaft, Amonn's piece first pries apart two words ordinary usage runs together: price, the money ratio of a good, and value, its regular exchange ratio against other goods. He distinguishes indirect influence such as tariffs from direct price policy, showing how ceilings breed shortages and rationing while floors breed surpluses and quotas, and grounds the whole in modern functional supply-and-demand theory and elasticity. Economics can test whether measures suit a chosen aim, he concludes, but the aims themselves belong to politics—so direct policy should ordinarily aim at durable competitive equilibrium, best secured by curbing monopoly.
Die Wert- und Preistheorie ist eine unumgängliche Voraussetzung einer rationellen Preispolitik, wie einer rationellen Wirtschaftspolitik überhaupt.
English translation: “The theory of value and price is an indispensable prerequisite of a rational price policy, and indeed of a rational economic policy generally.”
What divides this presentation from Stackelberg's popular textbook is method, not subject matter: modern theory, Amonn insists, must be learned as a mode of reasoning rather than gathered as a heap of results. He builds from supply and demand as functional relations through equilibrium and market price to monopoly, duopoly, and the imperfect competition of Joan Robinson and Chamberlin, grounding demand in marginal utility and supply in subjective cost. He rejects the marginal-productivity theory of factor values as circular, substituting his own principle that product prices must be differentiated by the quantities of factors each good requires, and derives wage, interest, and rent from it. The argument runs on through money and the quantity theory, business cycles, and comparative costs to a welfare doctrine that weighs competition's productive power against the inequality it breeds.
Der Preis keines Gutes ist unabhängig von denen der anderen bestimmt, sondern alle sind zugleich, «simultan» bestimmt.
English translation: “The price of no good is determined independently of the others; rather, all are determined at once, "simultaneously.”