3,801 works, 471 books, 3,267 articles, 60 other works, 3 awaiting classification, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
A theory can be logically coherent and still fail to explain economic life. In this 1928 article, Oskar Engländer turns that distinction against Böhm-Bawerk’s criticism of Marx. He argues that equalized profit rates need not contradict Marx’s account of surplus value: differences in production time can modify prices without overturning the model’s explanation of how output is divided between workers and capitalists. Yet this defense exposes a different vulnerability. Competition may equalize wages, Engländer contends, but cannot establish that they equal the cost of reproducing labor. His reconstruction offers a precise way to distinguish objections to Marx’s reasoning from objections to his premises—and to see why rejecting one criticism need not mean accepting the theory.
Where earlier theory chose between technique and valuation, the first part of Engländer's system attempts to weld the two together. The objective-technical structure derives relative prices from labor and production conditions; the subjective-social derives them from valuation and income. Grounding value in the psychic phenomena of desiring goods and avoiding evils, he builds from primary values through economic value, cost, and yield to market price, insisting there is no necessary link between a good's higher marginal utility and a higher price. Rent emerges as scarcity plus the differential advantage of fertility and location; wages and capital interest are handled as factor prices. Yet interest, he concedes, resists convincing derivation here, and its fuller treatment is postponed to the theory of money in Part II.
Nach dem Sprachgebrauch der klassischen Schule erklärt der objektiv-technische Preisaufbau wohl den natürlichen Preis, aber nicht den um den natürlichen Preis oszillierenden Marktpreis.
English translation: “According to the usage of the Classical School, the objective-technical price structure indeed explains the natural price, but not the market price oscillating around the natural price.”
Reserved from the first part were money, capital, and interest; the second volume takes them up. Engländer opens with money 'without intrinsic value,' deriving the total sum of prices from quantity, true cash reserves, market frequency, and velocity, and rejecting any appeal to the marginal utility of fiat money. He then argues that a purely cashless economy of book transfers is theoretically possible, and that bank book-credit does not itself create capital but frees idle reserves. The capital theory works upward from a single-stage economy of capitalists and workers to multi-stage and free-stage production, bounding the interest rate between the highest 'provision number' and the lowest 'sacrifice number' while denying that the productivity of roundabout methods explains interest at all. Cycles, he concludes, are not the inevitable fate of capitalism if saving is properly timed.
Nehmen wir nun noch den Fall eines Barerlages bei einer Bank, und zwar zu bloßen Verwahrungszwecken, so ergibt sich die Möglichkeit, daß die Bank diese bei ihr erlegten Gelder weiterverleiht.
English translation: “If we now consider further the case of a cash deposit at a bank, and indeed one made merely for safekeeping purposes, the possibility arises that the bank lends out these funds deposited with it.”
A preference is not a sum of money: this distinction drives Oskar Engländer’s contribution to the edited economics volume Die Wirtschaftstheorie der Gegenwart in Darstellungen. In Wertlehre, he retains marginal-utility reasoning while denying that utility is measurable or that efficient allocation necessarily equalizes weighted marginal utilities. His account of willingness to pay turns on a concrete budget problem: what remains after higher-ranking needs have been provided for? It yields the counterintuitive possibility that a buyer’s maximum total expenditure on a larger quantity may be lower than on a smaller one. Following these comparisons reveals both the reach and the limits Engländer assigns to subjective value theory: individual rankings constrain purchases, but explaining the relationships among market prices also requires production conditions and technical substitution.
Knowing where a tax truly lands, this 1935 treatise argues, must precede any judgment of tax policy. Engländer separates two domains of public finance—general tax theory and the theory of tax shifting—and grounds the obligation to pay not in any equivalence between tax and state service but in the value of the organized community itself. Tracing incidence through his own price theory, he reaches a pointed conclusion: a consumption tax does not merely burden consumers but, by curbing their spending elsewhere, drives down other producers' returns until it merges with the workings of direct taxation. From the Bernoulli-Bentham law of sacrifice he derives progressive rates and exemption of the subsistence minimum, then rejects every single-tax scheme in favor of a system that combines direct and indirect taxes to satisfy competing principles at once.
Nicht die Kaufkraft der Einkommen vermindert sich, sondern indem ein besonderes Staatseinkommen aus Steuern auftritt, vermindern sich die anderen Einkommen.
English translation: “It is not the purchasing power of incomes that diminishes; rather, as a distinct state income from taxes arises, the other incomes diminish.”