1,549 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Liberal Catholicism was not the work of one man; it arose from the confluence of many springs. Engel-Janosi's essay reconstructs that current as a transnational Catholic response to the collapse of throne-and-altar certainties between the Enlightenment, Napoleon, 1848, and the Syllabus of 1864. He tracks its national forms—Lamennais, Lacordaire, and Montalembert seeking liberty of press and conscience under the banner "Dieu et la liberté"; Gioberti and the neo-Guelphs imagining the pope as leader of a federated Italy; Döllinger and Acton in Germany turning historical scholarship itself into a discipline of conscience, where popes and councils stand under the same moral law as everyone else. The hopes briefly raised by Pius IX's election died with 1848, and Quanta cura and the Syllabus turned condemnation into lasting rupture.
Das Mark aller Kulturgeschichte ist ethisch und nicht metaphysisch.
English translation: “The marrow of all cultural history is ethical and not metaphysical.”
The road from chaos to catastrophe is not one the Vatican itself traveled, but the path of Europe seen from the Holy See. That distinction governs this monograph, which reconstructs the interwar Vatican's political mentality through the Austrian diplomatic reporting of Ludwig von Pastor and Rudolf Kohlruss. Engel-Janosi is frank that he pursues judgments and assumptions rather than a chronicle of events: the Paris peace treaties register as a disorder that multiplied grievances while weakening every transnational restraint. From that diagnosis the book descends through the Lateran reconciliation, the condemnation of Action française, the doomed Reichskonkordat and Mit brennender Sorge, to Pius XI's mounting horror of Nazi Germany and the Anschluss he grieved as Europe's ruin. Throughout, moral authority proves unable, by itself, to arrest the slide toward war.
Diese Einstellung entsprach seiner Natur, aber der unmittelbaren, der zündenden Wirkung seiner Worte war sie abträglich.
English translation: “This disposition corresponded to his nature, but it was detrimental to the immediate, kindling effect of his words.”
Where the archive falls silent, historians have long reconstructed missing origins by other means — analogy, probability, and assumptions about a constant human nature. Engel-Janosi anatomizes this Enlightenment procedure, which Dugald Stewart christened conjectural history, tracing it from Schiller's teleological selection of a usable past through Rousseau's state of nature and Hobbes's social contract, both treated as legitimating fictions rather than documented events. Vico supplies the sharpest counterpoint: against those who project modern motives backward, he makes the strangeness of early consciousness the very principle of understanding. The essay admires conjecture as indispensable while warning that it hardens gaps in knowledge into necessity, purpose, or myth — turning plurality into sequence and, in Ferguson and Kant, ignorance into apparent law.
So und nicht anders ist und mußte die „Universalgeschichte“ verlaufen.
English translation: “Thus and not otherwise "universal history" runs — and had to run.”
On the first day of April 1939, crossing into Switzerland before dawn, Engel-Janosi called himself a beggar and was told he was a proud beggar — he reached Zurich with six and a half francs. His memoir traces the long road there: a childhood in liberal Jewish bourgeois Vienna among Mahler, Bruno Walter, and the Freud circle; artillery service on the Isonzo and Piave; the collapse of the Lombard bank; two decades running a parquet factory while writing diplomatic history in the archives; and the Mises Seminar and Hayek's Geistkreis as intellectual homes. Exile carried him through wartime Cambridge to Johns Hopkins, Catholic University, and visits to the confined Ezra Pound, before the 1949 return to a poorer, younger Vienna. Belonging to the Central European lost generation, it composes a life from what fate and inheritance gave.
Was ich in den folgenden Blättern versuchen wollte: wahrhaftig zu sein über mich und über Menschen, denen ich begegnet bin — in verschiedenen Gegenden, in verschiedenen Situationen, während eines nicht kurzen Lebens.
English translation: “What I sought to attempt in the following pages: to be truthful about myself and about the people I have met—in various regions, in various situations, over the course of a not-short life.”