1,549 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Fear built cathedrals and greed built banking houses: across Brooks Adams's Law of Civilisation and Decay runs a single contest between the imaginative type—warrior, saint, priest—and the economic type of merchant, usurer, and financier. Engel-Janosi rescues this neglected American philosophy of history, written before Spengler and Toynbee, from the oblivion it met in optimistic America, reconstructing Adams's formation through the family inheritance, Harvard, Darwin, Spencer, and Guizot. Adams's narrative runs from Rome and Byzantium through the Crusades, Venice, the Reformation, England, and India to modern finance, everywhere charting centralization and the triumph of money power. Engel-Janosi finds the determinism crude beside Max Weber, yet preserves the severity of Adams's question: what governs civilization once belief in progress has collapsed?
Der Titel des geschichtlichen Hauptwerks von Brooks ist Beweis an sich: The Law of Civilisation and Decay.
English translation: “The title of Brooks's principal historical work is proof in itself: The Law of Civilisation and Decay.”
Historicism reaches its fullest force precisely when it dissolves every human form into a historically conditioned object—and at that same moment exposes its own insufficiency, as life, dogma, myth, and an 'Ur'-history press beyond mere appearance. Engel-Janosi stages the argument as a sequence of confrontations: Burckhardt's contemplative culture of remembering against Nietzsche's demand for an art of forgetting; Acton and Döllinger's historical method defeated by dogmatic reasoning at the First Vatican Council; Spengler's biological determinism against Toynbee's refusal to freeze history at the present. As the scale of comparison widens, factual narration yields to myth as a mode of truth, and the overcoming of historicism becomes a search for a history behind history—an ideal eternal history in Vico's sense, closing on Burckhardt's hope of hearing the valley's dissonances as harmony.
Acton hat den Gegensatz richtig gefühlt, als er notierte: „Le dogme a vaincu l'histoire.“ Für ihn war es ein großes Unglück.
English translation: “Acton sensed the antithesis correctly when he noted: "Le dogme a vaincu l'histoire" [Dogma has vanquished history]. For him it was a great misfortune.”
Written as prison letters to a daughter, Jawaharlal Nehru's Glimpses of World History becomes, in Engel-Janosi's reading, a revealing experiment in universal history composed from outside the conventional Western centre. He grants the book's flaws—no developed system, uneven proportion, a heavy tilt toward the modern age—while arguing that its very subjectivity gives it significance: India, China, Islam, and the Mongol world stand contemporaneous with Europe rather than subordinate to it. Nehru's premises mix anti-imperial nationalism, a Marxian account of the distribution of wealth, secular ethical religion, and faith in science and progress, aligning him at points with Wells and Toynbee even as his interest in Asia is lived inheritance rather than detached comparison. The essay presents Glimpses less as a solution to universal history than as a document of world history turning genuinely global.
Von den ungefähr 1000 Textseiten beschäftigen sich 400 mit der Periode seit dem Ersten Weltkrieg, während die Zeitalter bis zum Ende des Mittelalters mit 240 auskommen müssen.
English translation: “Of the roughly 1,000 pages of text, 400 deal with the period since the First World War, while the epochs down to the end of the Middle Ages have to make do with 240.”
Neither Rome's obedient arm nor a secularizing enemy: the Habsburg monarchy appears in this first volume as a great Catholic power whose dynastic and geopolitical interests repeatedly limited its usefulness to the papacy. Built largely from previously unused diplomatic correspondence out of Vienna and Paris, Engel-Janosi's study runs from the conclave of 1846 through the pontificates of Pius IX and Leo XIII to 1903, tracing the papacy's passage from reformist hope to defensive sovereignty across the revolutions of 1848, the flight to Gaeta, the 1855 Concordat, papal infallibility, and the fall of Rome in 1870. The Italian question sharpens every tension, for temporal power was Rome's own condition of freedom—yet Vienna, defeated and isolated, could not indefinitely subordinate raison d'état to papal restoration. What emerges is a study of mutual dependence in which each side wanted from the other what the other could not give.
When Cardinal Puzyna pronounced the Habsburg emperor's veto against Rampolla in the conclave of 1903, he closed one era of Catholic great-power rivalry and opened another. This second volume follows Austro-Vatican relations from that Exclusiva through the pontificates of Pius X and Benedict XV to the monarchy's collapse in 1918. Engel-Janosi's paradox is that an "unpolitical" pope, hostile to statecraft, drew the Vatican closer to Vienna than his predecessors ever had—until the First World War exposed the limits of papal mediation. Reconstructed from nuncios, cardinals, and crisis files, the narrative turns on the Roman Question, Italy's demand for the Trentino, Benedict XV's peace note of 1917, and above all Belgium, the moral test the Central Powers let become the war's insoluble knot.
Das Konklave von 1903 erscheint in manchem wie der letzte Nachhall des jahrhundertelangen Ringens zwischen Bourbon und Habsburg, zwischen Frankreich und Österreich, um die Vorherrschaft in Italien, im Kirchenstaate und schließlich an der Kurie.
English translation: “The Conclave of 1903 appears in many respects like the last echo of the centuries-long struggle between Bourbon and Habsburg, between France and Austria, for supremacy in Italy, in the Papal States, and ultimately at the Curia.”
No one can narrate the whole of human history exhaustively; every attempt must select, symbolize, and philosophically order. From that premise Engel-Janosi builds a genealogy of the modern effort to write universal history, tracing the underlying Grundeinstellungen that shape it—providence, secular progress, cyclical decline, national mission, cultural morphology, mythic meaning. Polybius first grasps world-historical interconnection, Augustine gives it a providential architecture, and the Enlightenment shifts its center from salvation to civilization. Ranke narrows practice to the Roman-Germanic world, Hegel excludes the peoples not chosen as vehicles of spirit, and Marx secularizes providence through modes of production. Spengler forces historians to stop equating Western development with world history, and Toynbee ends by turning history back toward myth. The essay validates no final system, only the enduring problem of the whole.
Wie immer man die geistige Leistung dieses Zeitalters beurteilen mag, eines ist gewiß: es sah und wollte Geschichtsschreibung im Sinne von Universalgeschichte.
English translation: “However one may judge the intellectual achievement of this age, one thing is certain: it saw and willed historiography in the sense of universal history.”
Had the World War been brought to an end in 1917, Engel-Janosi observes, not only European but world history would have run a different course. This 1965 Academy lecture reconstructs one fragile chance at that ending: the secret 1917–18 Freiburg conversations between Count Nikolaus Revertera and the French intelligence officer Abel Armand, mediated by a Swiss physician. Reading the Austrian and French records against each other rather than harmonizing them, the essay turns on a crucial distinction—Armand's written demands over Belgium and Alsace-Lorraine were a maximum programme he privately conceded was negotiable. The channel failed when Berlin refused and Czernin sent no clear reply; its collapse fed the disastrous speech that provoked Clemenceau's denial and the publication of the Sixtus letters. Whether Armand ever held real authority, the author cautions, remains unproven.
An Czernins Rede ist so ziemlich alles verwunderlich, beginnend mit dem Forum, dem Wiener Gemeinderat, das er sich für sie wählte.
English translation: “About Czernin's speech, virtually everything is astonishing, beginning with the forum he chose for it—the Vienna Municipal Council.”
An oversized house in Döbling's Hofzeile, with its garden statues and imperial loyalties, becomes the whole vanished world of the Viennese bourgeoisie in this memoir-essay. Engel-Janosi reads his family's home as a miniature Austria—grand, eccentric, faithful, and quietly unstable—where the recurring dread of rotting ceiling beams, the Dippelbäume, stands for a class that sensed structural weakness without grasping its political danger. His father, a respected manufacturer whose heart belonged to scholarship and Ibsen, held a loyalty so absolute he would don black-and-yellow trousers if a decree required it, yet foreign affairs never entered the salon of Mahler and Bruno Walter. War arrived as an undefined great experience, the brother died at Koniuchy, the fortune vanished with inflation, and the beams held on until the bombed house was finally razed in 1963.
„Von einem kannst du überzeugt sein: ein Wien wird und muß es immer geben.“
English translation: “Of one thing you may be certain: a Vienna there will always be, and must always be.”
Against the overriding weight of the German alliance, a Viennese salon hostess imagined another Austria. Engel-Janosi reconstructs Berta Szeps-Zuckerkandl's spring 1917 peace feelers as a small but revealing episode in the monarchy's final crisis, tracing her Francophile, anti-Prussian conviction back through a whole Austro-French lineage—Kaunitz's reversal of alliances, Crown Prince Rudolf's circle, her father Moriz Szeps's liberal journalism, and family ties to Georges Clemenceau. Her idea of a separate peace with France, meant to spare Austria from collapse, was no mere salon fantasy, yet the essay records its bitter irony: speaking freely to Harry Kessler, she saw her secret carried straight to the German envoy Romberg and on to Berlin. Czernin's refusal to break with Germany marks the tragic limit of private diplomacy.
August 1914! Der Krieg! Mich ergriff der allgemeine patriotische Taumel nicht. Ich bäumte mich sofort gegen den Haßrausch auf, der selbst die zartesten Gemüter erschütterte.
English translation: “August 1914! The war! The general patriotic frenzy did not seize me. I at once rebelled against the intoxication of hatred that shook even the most delicate spirits.”
Receiving Theodore Roosevelt in 1910, Franz Joseph described himself as the last monarch of the old school—the self-image from which this lecture works outward. Engel-Janosi studies the emperor not as a picturesque survivor but as a political actor governing through counsel, habit, defeat, and constitutional constraint. His early confidence that lost provinces might be won back gave way, over the reign, to renunciation: Lombardy, Venetia, and German leadership were gone, and the alliance with the Prussia that had humiliated Austria in 1866 was embraced as cold state reason rather than affection. Personal in responsibility yet impersonal in manner, scrupulously constitutional despite his distaste for parliaments and bound by the Ausgleich, this Franz Joseph accepted war in 1914 from a pessimistic sense of duty rather than any appetite for it.
„Die Lombardei werden wir ja wieder erobern“, sagte der Monarch, vom Schlachtfeld von Solferino zurückkehrend.
English translation: “We shall reconquer Lombardy after all," said the monarch as he returned from the battlefield of Solferino.”
History is bound to factual correctness, yet it reaches again and again for symbolic and mythic forms when it tries to express a deeper truth. That tension organizes this compact essay, which runs from Jacob Burckhardt—the summit of historicism, for whom historical consciousness separates the cultivated from the barbarian—to Nietzsche's demand that history serve life rather than claim sovereign autonomy. Along the way Engel-Janosi finds myth already at work: Herodotus keeping his distance from the marvels he transmits, Machiavelli stylizing Cesare Borgia and Castruccio Castracani into the political savior-hero who acts as his mission demands. Through Vico, Romanticism, and Bachofen he traces myth's rehabilitation, closing with Arnold Toynbee, the modern historian who no longer merely studies myth but becomes its maker, reaching for an eternal ideal history behind particular ones.
Leopold von Ranke hat einmal Politik und Religion als die beiden Hauptthemen der Geschichte genannt. Sind sie nicht auch die beiden Felder, die der Mythos vorzugsweise besponnen hat?
English translation: “Leopold von Ranke once named politics and religion as the two chief themes of history. Are they not also the two fields around which myth has preferentially spun its web?”
Scholarly prestige, curial trust, and diplomatic office fused in a single man when the impoverished Austrian republic sent Ludwig von Pastor, the famous historian of the popes, as its envoy to the Holy See. Engel-Janosi's study of that 1920–28 mission argues that Pastor's fame gave a weakened state a Roman voice out of all proportion to its power: Cardinal Gasparri spoke to him with a freedom rarely extended to other heads of mission, making his dispatches a privileged source for Vatican thinking. Through them the interwar Curia appears anti-Versailles, conservative, intensely political, and suspicious of the postwar order, tempted by "providential" strongmen yet unwilling to surrender ecclesial independence. The narrative runs through the Roman Question, Fascism, South Tyrol, the Anima dispute, and the still-unsettled question of Anschluss.
Der Österreicher betont die Vorsicht und die Selbständigkeit dieses Papstes, auf den niemand, selbst kaum sein Staatssekretär Einfluß auszuüben scheint.
English translation: “The Austrian emphasizes the caution and the independence of this Pope, upon whom no one, scarcely even his Secretary of State, appears to exert influence.”