1,549 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Delivered as a rectorial address that turns Adolf Exner's plea for political education into a wider sociology of power, this lecture denies that public life can be decoded from legal formulas or liberal slogans. Wieser's target is contract theory: the state, he argues, begins not in voluntary agreement but in domination, command, and the discipline that binds scattered persons into a public body. His organizing concept is 'mass technique' — the selection, leadership, and routine that render unwieldy crowds capable of action, so that even anti-authoritarian movements reproduce hierarchy the moment they become parties. From army and election to custom, class, genius, and the modern press, he charts the layered social powers that govern a people, closing with the moral task of subordinating industrial and military force to culture, rights, and education.
Der Staat ist Herrschaft, und die Herrschaft ist nicht durch Verträge in die Welt gekommen.
English translation: “The State is dominion, and dominion did not come into the world through contracts.”