1,549 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
The consumer faces a problem no equilibrium diagram quite states: how to bring an unrechenbarer Nutzen, a utility that cannot be counted, into the arithmetic of money. Schönfeld-Illy's answer reconstructs Wieser's marginal law, stripping away its accretions until the value it names turns out to be not an inner quantum of feeling but the consumer's demand price. Marginal utility becomes a rule of economical simplification: a disposition found admissible at the margin can be carried over to a whole stock without appraising each unit. From there the book turns on static equilibrium theory, rejecting the Walrasian Universalrechner that would solve prices and demand from outside the economy — whoever manages an economy calculates for himself — and substitutes a dynamic account built on expected data and forward-looking plans.
Die Preise werden durch die Nachfrage determiniert, die Nachfrage wird durch die Preise determiniert!
English translation: “Prices are determined by demand; demand is determined by prices!”
Schönfeld-Illy asks what marginal utility is once it is placed inside the real procedure of economic choice, and answers that it is not a measurable quantum of pleasure but a functional shortcut. Economic agents, he observes, do not measure utility; for one use to be greater than another means only that it holds economic precedence. Grounding subjective welfare in the Gesamtwirtschaftsnutzen — the total utility of an actor's whole stock of goods — he treats calculation as a maximum problem solved not by summing utilities but by weighing performance against counter-performance through successive partial decisions. Marginal utility, he concludes, belongs to the abbreviated procedure agents actually use, distinct from the theoretical utility-orderings behind it. Kurt Leube's preface to this 1924 treatise places its neglected author, a pupil of Böhm-Bawerk and Wieser, between Mises and the generation of Hayek and Machlup.
Die beim Wirtschaften über die Güter zu treffenden Verfügungen werden von dem subjektiven konkreten Nutzen dieser Güter regiert.
English translation: “The dispositions to be made in economic action over goods are governed by the subjective concrete utility of these goods.”