1,549 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Economic policy, Braun insists, is not a catalogue of desirable social ends nor an administrative handbook, but an analytical science of what state intervention actually does. Grounded in the value and price theory of the Vienna school after Menger, the work makes a sharp methodological cut: economics cannot pronounce on the legitimacy of political aims — those spring from shifting cultural ideals and collective needs — but it can trace how any measure alters the exchange constellations through which production and distribution run. A state cannot simply decree a market result; its measure either changes some datum of price formation or remains economically inert. From this principle Braun builds a taxonomy of interventions — price fixing, price burdens, price relief, influences on demand and supply — judging each by the market relations it disturbs and the reactions it sets loose, without endorsing or condemning intervention as such.
Volkswirtschaftspolitik ist die Lehre von den Wirkungen, die durch Maßnahmen von Staat und Gemeinden auf die Tauschkonstellationen ausgeübt werden.
English translation: “Economic policy is the doctrine of the effects produced by measures of the state and of municipalities upon exchange constellations.”
Vienna's adult-education colleges — the Volksheim, the Volksbildungsverein, and the Urania — grew, Braun argues, out of a nineteenth-century liberal faith in knowledge as emancipation, then bent to modern demands for organized, practical, specialized learning. Confining her study to Vienna, where the evidence allowed, she distinguishes the genuine Volkshochschule from vocational schools and party schools, and defends its integrity against the Marxist claim that objective teaching in the social sciences is impossible: choose lecturers by competence, not worldview, or the college becomes a party school. The essay's sharpest thread follows women into the lecture hall — dominant in foreign languages, advancing in physics, medicine, law, and economics as the university opened to them. That they met so little resistance in this poorly paid, honorary work, she concludes, exposes how often talk of female inferiority merely masks competition for wages.
Daß man dem Vordringen der Frauen in dieser sehr verantwortungsvollen und hochqualifizierten Tätigkeit so wenig Widerstand entgegensetzt, ist wiederum ein Beweis mehr dafür, daß die Schlagworte von weiblicher Inferiorität oft nur durch den Brotneid angeregt werden.
English translation: “That so little resistance is being offered to the advance of women into this highly responsible and highly qualified activity is once again further proof that the slogans about female inferiority are often prompted merely by professional envy.”