1,549 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
When the Habsburg monarchy dissolved, its unified currency shattered into a spread of national monies, and every successor state raced to stamp the notes of the Austro-Hungarian Bank as its own. Kerschagl tracks that fragmentation country by country—Czechoslovakia's pioneering stamp and Rašín's forced-loan experiment, Yugoslavia's crown-dinar compromise, Poland's chaos of marks, rubles and crowns, Hungary under Béla Kun—while forged stamps spread panic across the region. At its core stands a scathing critique of Article 206 of the Treaty of Saint-Germain, whose confused provisions for liquidating the Bank he judges both unjust and technically impossible, treating Austria as sole successor and the Bank as a state institution. Left unrevised, he warns, the arrangement risks becoming a Central European economic problem in its own right.
Der Traum der Donaukonföderation war der letzte Traum der Österreichisch-ungarischen Bank.
English translation: “The dream of a Danubian confederation was the last dream of the Austro-Hungarian Bank.”
Two conceptions of money contend across this history of monetary theory: individualism, which treats money as an autarkic commodity carrying intrinsic value, and universalism, which sees it arising from the social division of labour and functioning only within an organic economic whole. Kerschagl reads Ricardo, Adam Müller, Knapp, Wieser, Gesell and Bendixen through this lens—faulting Ricardo's quantity theory for abstracting from income and property, crediting Müller as the first consistent universalist, and praising Wieser's account of the economy as a Zahlungsgemeinschaft, a payment community. Along the way he weighs Gesell's demurrage scheme, under which money would lose roughly five percent a year to discourage hoarding. The decline of absolute value theory, he concludes, leaves the socially embedded, universalist view of money the more plausible.
Das gänzlich unabhängige Geld mit Eigenwert erscheint dem Individualismus als das Ideal.
English translation: “Wholly independent money possessing intrinsic value appears to individualism as the ideal.”
Cashless payment is far older than the banknote: Roman argentarii kept transfer accounts, and Greek Egypt ran giro offices and even a grain giro linking natural, money and credit economies. Commissioned for the fiftieth anniversary of the Wiener Giro- und Cassen-Verein, this historical study traces book-money from antiquity through the medieval exchange fairs of Lyon and Besançon, the Hamburg Girobank and its Mark Banco, English goldsmith notes, the London Clearing House, and Austria-Hungary's own Saldierungsverein. Kerschagl argues throughout that clearing lets an economy function on the smallest possible stock of cash, and closes by criticising Austria's postwar fiscal measures—the Bankenumsatzsteuer among them—for favouring cash over the book transfer just when a credit economy most needed the opposite encouragement.
Von welcher Bedeutung das Clearing für die Geldschöpfung und die Möglichkeit der Erhaltung einer möglichst geringen Geldmenge ist, zeigen am besten wohl die Umsätze des Clearinghouse, die im Jahre 1920 in London allein mehr als 32 Milliarden Pfund betrugen.
English translation: “How significant clearing is for the creation of money and for the possibility of maintaining as small a money supply as possible is perhaps best shown by the turnover of the Clearing House, which in 1920 amounted to more than 32 billion pounds in London alone.”
Not the sheer surfeit of money, but the unequal income shifts it sets loose, does the deepest damage in an inflation—so runs the argument of this diagnosis of the postwar currency crisis. Kerschagl frames three problems: the changing value of money, the expansion and contraction of the money economy, and the practical resistance to inflation. He separates a currency's internal value, its domestic purchasing power, from its external value in exchange rates, tracing depreciation to state debt monetised into banknotes, collapsing confidence and a panic hunger for goods. Rašín's note-stamping, a wealth levy and staged devaluation are weighed as techniques; England's deflation attempts of 1919 to 1921 are followed in statistical detail; and the Brussels Financial Conference under Cassel supplies the closing counsel that production and thrift, not technical measures, cure a currency.
Nur die Kuh, welche wirklich Milch hat, kann welche geben.
English translation: “Only the cow that actually has milk can give any.”
Kerschagl refuses to be filed under either metallism or chartalism, and builds instead a systematic theory of money as a functional concept embedded in an organic, divided-labour economy. Money value is purchasing power: an internal value measured through prices and index numbers, and an external value that is, strictly, not a value but a price. From these foundations he works outward through quantity theory—dissolved, he argues, into many income quantities—money creation tied to commodity bills, cashless payment, inflation as a pathological overissue of monetary tokens, currency stabilisation, centralized foreign-exchange management, and the postwar debates over gold at Genoa. Austria and Hungary after 1918 furnish his central case of inflation joined to a passive balance of payments. Monetary theory, he holds, is the test of any general economic doctrine.
Wir sehen somit, daß der sogenannte Kurswert eigentlich kein Wert ist, sondern ein Preis.
English translation: “We thus see that the so-called exchange-rate value is in fact not a value at all, but a price.”
Stripping the hypertrophy of zeros from a ruined currency, the statute of 20 December 1924 fixed 10,000 depreciated kronen as a single new Schilling. Kerschagl's annotated edition gathers the law, its motives report, his own section-by-section commentary and a sheaf of finance-ministry and National Bank circulars around it. He is at pains to stress what the reform is not: no revaluation, no depreciation—existing notes, deposits and claims keep their worth in a purely arithmetical shift of four decimal places. What it does accomplish is to fix the Schilling's gold value in law, defining the currency's upper limit while the National Bank's exchange policy guards the lower. The volume documents new gold coins, groschen, the long redemption periods protecting old-krone holders, and the daily mechanics of converting a nation's accounts.
Der Vorgang des Ueberganges zur Schillingrechnung ist eine reine Rechenoperation.
English translation: “The process of transition to Schilling accounting is a purely arithmetical operation.”
No single economic doctrine, this textbook insists, can honestly be presented as the last word; the older theories remain indispensable for understanding the present. So Kerschagl leads beginners through the whole succession—mercantilism and physiocracy, Smith and Ricardo, the German historical school and the Methodenstreit, utopian and Marxian socialism, the socialization schemes of interwar Vienna, and the Austrian marginal utility school of Menger, Wieser and Böhm-Bawerk with its problem of imputation. Money theory runs from Bodin's early quantity doctrine through the Currency and Banking controversy to chartalism and metallism, and the closing chapters take up Spann's universalism, Cassel, Liefmann, Pesch's Catholic solidarism and Keynes on the end of laissez-faire. Here in its second unchanged edition, it treats the economy as a means to higher human ends, never an end in itself.
Nur wer die Dogmen der Volkswirtschaftslehre kennt, kennt überhaupt „Volkswirtschaftslehre“.
English translation: “Only he who knows the doctrines of economics knows "economics" at all.”
Out of the wreck of the Habsburg monetary union came a scatter of new currencies, and this survey sets them side by side as they steadied toward the end of the 1920s: Austria's Schilling, Hungary's Pengő, the Czechoslovak crown forged in Rašín's stamping experiment, Poland's twice-stabilised Zloty, the lira, dinar, lei and, after hyperinflation, the German Reichsmark. Kerschagl narrates each path from collapse to reform, then appends the machinery behind them—gold-parity tables computed from fine-gold weights, statutory redemption and reserve rules, and central-bank balance sheets as of March 1929. One principle recurs across the reforms: sound reconstruction meant barring further state credit from the note press. Issued under the Mitteleuropäischer Wirtschaftstag, it serves as much as a reference apparatus as a history.
Die wichtigste Bestimmung war die, daß jede weitere direkte oder indirekte Kreditgewährung an den Staat unzulässig sei.
English translation: “The most important provision was that any further direct or indirect extension of credit to the state was inadmissible.”
As the European gold-exchange order broke apart in the early 1930s, states began seizing, centralizing, and rationing foreign means of payment—and Kerschagl sets out to explain, in strictly economic terms, why. Foreign-exchange control (Devisenbewirtschaftung) is treated here not as a currency system but as an emergency bridge forced by the convergence of trade deficits, capital flight, and reserve losses across the trade balance, the payments balance, and what he calls the Währungsbilanz. Its defining move—allocating scarce exchange—is a form of partial planning that inevitably reaches into imports, production, and consumption. Clearing arrangements, priority lists, and blocked accounts follow the same logic of restriction. Controls can buy time, he argues, but cannot themselves restore the equilibrium whose absence created them.
Der Weg zu dauernd gesunden Währungen führt über wirtschaftliche Vernunft.
English translation: “The road to permanently sound currencies leads through economic reason.”
Austria's spring 1933 gold-clause and foreign-exchange ordinances did not revalue every gold debt at a stroke; they built a classified transition from nominal schilling parity to regulated value payment. Writing as the paper schilling broke openly from gold—127.49 paper schillings for 100 gold schillings on 28 March—Kerschagl turns a vague “gold clause” controversy into a sequence of legal tests: whether an obligation is effective or merely a value clause, whether it sounds in foreign valuta or gold schillings, what kind of debt it is, and whether its Stichtag has arrived. His reading of the Goldschuldenerleichterungsverordnung shows the pattern plainly—revalued mortgage capital paired with longer maturities and reduced interest, temporal redistribution rather than repudiation. Throughout, he insists that technical wording is distributive power.
Also mithin: bei Hypothekentilgung: gleiche Raten, aber mehr Raten, bei Pfandbriefen: aufgewertetes, aber später zu leistendes Kapital.
English translation: “Thus, in short: for the amortization of mortgages, equal installments, but more of them; for mortgage bonds, revalued capital, but payable at a later date.”
Marxism stands or falls with its theory of value—and by that measure, this 1933 polemic sets out to demolish it. Presenting Marx largely in his own words before turning to a factual but uncompromising critique, Kerschagl reverses the Marxian causal order: labor does not create value; labor is undertaken because a purposively valued good is sought. Socially necessary labor time becomes a fiction unable to compare heterogeneous work or accommodate scarcity and demand, while the money chapter convicts Marx of a crude metallism blind to credit and purchasing power. The book's sharpest thrust is the calculation argument—by admitting only one factor of production, Marxism destroys the very measures a planned economy would need to know which processes waste labor and capital. Class struggle, he concludes, dissolves nation, law, and religion into organized antagonism.
Geldschöpfung, Angebot und Nachfrage, Marktprobleme existieren für Marx überhaupt nicht.
English translation: “Money creation, supply and demand, market problems simply do not exist for Marx.”
Read through the political vocabulary of the Fascist “new state,” Pius XI's encyclical Quadragesimo anno becomes, in this 1935 tract, the moral principle that saves a corporative order from mere statism. Kerschagl presents Italian fascism as the force that overcame liberal weakness and socialist disorder—liberalism having atomized society into isolated individuals, socialism having overrun weak parliaments—and reads the Lateran settlement as proof that Church and regime can coexist when neither encroaches on the other's sphere. Fascism is redefined as organization: hierarchy, vocational grouping, and service to the whole, with freedom relocated from liberal autonomy to ordered incorporation. The encyclical's contribution, he argues, is a regulative principle the market cannot supply—social justice and social charity—binding both laissez-faire capitalism and class socialism to moral law.
Es soll gezeigt werden, daß ein faschistisches Programm ganz dem Geiste der großen Enzyklika entsprechen kann.
English translation: “It shall be shown that a Fascist program can fully correspond to the spirit of the great encyclical.”