1,549 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
A reading society founded by Viennese jurists and officials in 1840 becomes, in this early study, a delicate instrument for registering the political pressures of the Austrian Vormärz. Engel-Janosi reconstructs the associational law of pre-1848 Austria, the natural-law background, the police suspicion of reading circles, the concession system, and shows how elite patrons such as Sommaruga shielded the club while Sedlnitzky, Kolowrat, and Metternich eyed it warily. Its history, he argues, is largely the chronicle of its skirmishes with the censorship: the struggle to obtain foreign political newspapers, to hold lectures, and to maintain a library under constant supervision and confiscation. Though the society never acted as a revolutionary body in March 1848, Engel-Janosi reads in its restrained conduct a loyal, sorrowful opposition to the imperial order.
Es liegt viel Schwäche darin, gewiß, aber auch Trauer und Treue.
English translation: “There is much weakness in it, to be sure, but also sorrow and fidelity.”
Renaissance Italy dazzles, yet beneath the dazzle, this study insists, ran the same social and economic anxieties that burden any age: sovereign defaults, collapsing banks, fortunes tied to the unstable Florentine Monte. Rather than construct another causal theory after Weber or Sombart, Engel-Janosi sets out to describe how different circles judged wealth, acquisition, and vocation. He reads the Church's penitential summae and its preachers, Antoninus of Florence, Bernardino of Siena, Aquinas, on just price, usury, and the God-given ordo; the poverty ideals of heretical sects; Savonarola's prophetic politics; the pedagogy of Alberti and the humanists Salutati, Poggio, and Valla; Petrarch's Stoic withdrawal; and finally Machiavelli, in whom the Renaissance worship of human power collapses into a confession of its meaninglessness. Issued as a supplement to the Vierteljahrsschrift für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte.
Die Epoche, die ihr Kennzeichen von der Verehrung für menschliche Kraft erhalten durfte, schließt mit dem Bekenntnis der Sinnlosigkeit eines menschlichen Erfolges.
English translation: “The epoch which took its distinguishing mark from the veneration of human power closes with the confession of the meaninglessness of any human success.”
Engel-Janosi builds this study from the private papers of Bernhard von Rechberg to rehabilitate a long-misjudged Austrian foreign minister, Metternich's disciple in an age that had outgrown him. Across four chapters it follows Rechberg from diplomatic apprenticeship in Rio and Frankfurt to the foreign ministry he assumed in 1859, too late to realize his German program. His statecraft emerges as one of delay and defensive legal protest: preserving the Vienna settlement after the disaster of Solferino and Villafranca, threading the Polish crisis of 1863 without dragging the monarchy into war, and resisting exclusive dependence on either Prussia or France until the customs dispute of 1864 forced his resignation. Blamed afterward for the catastrophe of 1866, Rechberg is defended here as narrow and rigid, yet unswervingly loyal to the Austrian state.
Eine Starrheit, ja selbst eine Enge seiner Ansichten wollen wir ihm nicht absprechen, aber er blieb in ihnen sich selbst und seinem Staate treu.
English translation: “A rigidity, indeed even a narrowness of his views we do not wish to deny him, but in them he remained true to himself and to his state.”
How does one write the life of a statesman without dissolving it into general history or shrinking it to private psychology? Engel-Janosi answers with a political biography of Alexander von Hübner, the illegitimate Viennese boy, rumor made Metternich his father, who rose through the State Chancellery to become one of Franz Joseph's sharpest diplomatic observers. The book follows him through the 1848 collapse in Milan and his near-lynching at Brescia, the Paris embassy under the Second Republic and Napoleon III, his advocacy of the Crimean alliance against Russia, a brief tenure as police minister, and finally Rome, where he watched the temporal power of the papacy fade. Formed by late-Romantic Catholic legitimism, Hübner distrusted mass politics and industrial modernity, holding to a unifying imperial idea over any written formula.
Die Konstitutionen lassen sich nicht erfinden.
English translation: “Constitutions cannot be invented.”
In the years before Sedan, three courts negotiated in secret over an alliance that never came, and over Rome, the one prize Italy would risk everything to seize. This tightly documented study reconstructs the Franco-Austro-Italian talks of 1869-70, in which Beust maneuvered to restore Austria's German standing, Napoleon III bargained from illness and decline, and Victor Emmanuel's envoys tied every commitment to the evacuation of the Papal States. Engel-Janosi shows Italy willing to stake Trentino, Nizza, and the Isonzo frontier on that single question, while French troops still guarded Pius IX and Antonelli's Vatican refused all compromise. When war and the fall of the Empire dissolved the last ambiguous promises, Italian troops entered Rome in September 1870, and Europe, he notes, remained strikingly unmoved by so momentous a rupture.
Die römische Frage aufzuwerfen hatten weder Paris noch Wien ein Interesse.
English translation: “Neither Paris nor Vienna had any interest in raising the Roman question.”
Austria's long transformation from the Ottomans' frontier antagonist into their guarantor, the price of holding Russia back from Constantinople, frames this account of how Vienna met the birth of the Greek kingdom. Engel-Janosi weighs Metternich's reluctance, who saw in the war of independence only a rebellion, against King Ludwig of Bavaria's dynastic investment in his son Otto, and gives Prokesch-Osten, Austria's envoy in Athens, the central role: a conservative trying to shore up an independent Greek monarchy amid the rivalry of Britain, France, Russia, and Bavaria. Through the Armansperg and Rudhart ministries, the constitutional revolution of 1843, and the duel of Maurokordatos and Kolettis, the project decays. Austrian passivity, great-power intrigue, Greek factionalism, and Otto's weakness, he concludes, made an independent conservative Greece untenable.
Staaten hat noch niemand geschaffen; sie schaffen sich selbst.
English translation: “No one has ever created states; they create themselves.”
Anton von Prokesch-Osten carried Vienna's cause first to Berlin and then to the Frankfurt Bundestag, where he faced the young Bismarck across a table neither man respected. Through these missions between 1849 and the Crimean War, Engel-Janosi reconstructs the struggle over whether Germany would become an enlarged Prussia or Prussia be sacrificed to a unified German nation. Schwarzenberg's design—that Vienna become the centre of a Habsburg-led Mitteleuropa—runs up against a Prussian Borussianism strong enough to thwart every Austrian plan while still too weak to build its own. In quarrels over the federal fleet, fortresses, and procedural privilege, a decade emerges when unification was not yet inevitable and Austria's federal alternative was still a living idea—one strategically defeated long before 1866.
Dank der überlegenen Taktik Bismarcks und der Furcht der kleineren Staaten triumphierte Preußen im Bundestag.
English translation: “Thanks to Bismarck's superior tactics and the fear of the smaller states, Prussia triumphed in the Federal Diet.”
Three problems—development, individuality, and success—organize this genealogy of how history became the medium in which German thought grasped culture, politics, and human meaning. Tracing a line from Herder's Volksgeist through Humboldt, Goethe, Niebuhr, and the Romantic school to Hegel, Ranke, Marx, and Schopenhauer, Engel-Janosi shows historicism forming by refusing the Enlightenment's universal progress: each epoch, people, and life-form becomes an individual with its own inward justification. The culmination is Jacob Burckhardt, who abandons Hegelian purpose and moral progress for constants, types, and recurring forms, and who holds that political power is in itself evil even as culture depends upon it. Historicism thereby reaches its height as a disciplined art of memory—already shadowed by Nietzsche's counter-demand for an art of forgetting.
Ich aber behaupte, jede Epoche ist unmittelbar zu Gott.
English translation: “But I maintain: every epoch is immediate to God.”
Anti-Prussian sentiment ran high in the monarchy of 1870, yet at the Crown Council of 18 July—Franz Joseph, Andrássy, Beust, Kuhn, and Potocki around the table—Austria-Hungary chose neutrality with only preparatory armament. Engel-Janosi reads that choice not as simple weakness but as the sum of converging constraints. Potocki's federalist ministry, which would have granted the crownlands almost the status of American federal states, had deepened rather than resolved the monarchy's internal paralysis, while the Eastern Question tied any western war to Russia's designs on Constantinople and to unrest in Serbia, Romania, and Egypt. Drawing on ministerial protocols and American diplomatic reports, the essay presents neutrality not as grand design but as the only policy the Dual Monarchy's divided structure could sustain.
Prokesch hatte recht: es war, als seien die Segel eines Schiffes so gesetzt, daß sie gegeneinander wirkten.
English translation: “Prokesch was right: it was as though the sails of a ship had been set so as to work against one another.”
The 'execution' of the 1856 Paris treaty, Engel-Janosi argues, was precisely the process by which the post-Crimean order came apart. Following the Eastern Question from that settlement to the Franco-Sardinian war of 1859, the essay makes Cavour's schemes over Moldavia and Wallachia inseparable from his Italian designs, with Napoleon III—hostile to a merely preserved Ottoman Empire, drawn to Balkan nationality, never wholly clear in plan—as its hinge. The Constantinople chapters read as a prosopography of policy: Stratford de Redcliffe's anti-Russian reformism, Prokesch-Osten's defence of Ottoman individuality, Thouvenel executing a French line he privately distrusted. The manipulated Romanian elections of 1857 and Cuza's double election bind Ottoman decline, Romanian unification, and Italian nationalism into a single crisis of legitimacy—inherited legality hammered by a ruthless new politics.
Wenn dies, wie wir allen Grund haben zu hoffen, das Ende der Welt sein soll, wird alles irgendwie geregelt werden. Wenn dies jedoch nicht das Ende der Welt ist, wird alles noch viel schlechter werden.
English translation: “If this, as we have every reason to hope, is to be the end of the world, then somehow everything will be settled. But if this is not the end of the world, then everything will become much worse.”
In May 1895 Kálnoky could describe Austria-Hungary's foreign relations as orderly while an American envoy judged the monarchy's future exceptionally bleak—and Engel-Janosi shows the two verdicts need not contradict each other. Reconstructing the foreign minister's resignation as a constitutional rather than merely personal crisis, he traces its trigger to the Agliardi affair, in which the papal nuncio's politically charged Hungarian visitation let Premier Bánffy turn a conditional diplomatic protest into a public fait accompli. Behind the rupture lay a structural defect of the 1867 Ausgleich: a common foreign ministry obliged to act for the Dual Monarchy without any command able to restrain Vienna and Budapest at once. Agliardi's later recall partly vindicated Kálnoky, but his fall came as European politics dissolved into a wider world crisis, Russia's gaze turning eastward after Japan's defeat of China.
Zwei Leistungen bestimmen die geschichtliche Rolle des Grafen Kálnoky: seine Politik des Abschlusses und der zweimaligen Erneuerung des Dreibundvertrages und seine Politik gegenüber Rußland, in der die Balkanfrage das Zentralproblem darstellte.
English translation: “Two achievements determine the historical role of Count Kálnoky: his policy of concluding and twice renewing the Triple Alliance treaty, and his policy toward Russia, in which the Balkan question was the central problem.”
Sharing language, history, and culture with the Reich did not make Austrian resistance a mere province of German opposition to Hitler—so runs the thesis of this deliberately provisional survey. Prompted by the Moscow Declaration's call for Austria to earn its own liberation, Engel-Janosi roots the movement less in fresh ideology than in the will 'to remain what one had been,' a determination uniting monarchists, Catholics, socialists, communists, and anti-Prussian conservatives against absorption. Against the charge that resistance came only once defeat was obvious, he documents cells forming immediately after March 1938, from Tyrol to Vienna, and redefines resistance as cumulative and practical: aid to prisoners' families, intelligence networks, Wehrmacht cells, ingenious economic sabotage, the '05' organization, and finally the battle for Vienna and the rescue of bridges and art treasures from last-ditch destruction.
Auch in Österreich wurde die Saat der politischen und geistigen Erneuerung mit Blut getränkt; wir hoffen, daß sie in diesem Boden umso kräftiger gedeihen werde.
English translation: “In Austria too the seed of political and spiritual renewal was watered with blood; we hope that in this soil it will flourish all the more vigorously.”