1,549 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
No single formula can explain how prices form: that conviction drives Zuckerkandl's sweeping doctrinal history of value and price. It marches from medieval just-price jurisprudence through Davanzati, Galiani, and Turgot to the English classicals and finally to Menger, whose account of value as conscious dependence on concrete goods, and Wieser's Grenznutzen, he adopts as the decisive advance. He is relentless with the mechanical theories: Locke's quantity-and-vent doctrine, Ricardo's and Marx's labor theories, and the cost-of-production law that collapses, he shows, into the tautology that price equals wages plus profit. On that critical ground he builds his own subjective theory of price, grounded in marginal valuation and the meeting of buyer and seller schedules on organized markets.
So kommt die moderne englische Nationalökonomie zu ihrem Preisgesetz: der normale Preis tendiert nach den Produktionskosten, d. h. er sucht sich dem Arbeitslohn plus Gewinn gleichzusetzen.
English translation: “Thus modern English political economy arrives at its law of price: the normal price tends toward the costs of production, that is, it seeks to equate itself with wages plus profit.”
On 26 June 1893, British India closed its mints to the free coinage of silver, an event Zuckerkandl ranks among the greatest in monetary history since 1871. His essay dissects the reasoning behind severing the rupee from silver: the sharp fluctuation of the silver rupee against gold, the budgetary havoc it wrought on a state owing large annual gold sums in London, and the collapse of the international bimetallism that had been India's preferred remedy. Following Sir David Barbour's plan and the resulting restricted currency, closer to Austria-Hungary's inconvertible system than to a full gold standard, he weighs the early results and finds them mostly adverse: silver fell further, the old exchange stability with the East Asian silver regions broke, and the rupee held up only through artificial restriction of the government's drafts.
Jede Währungsänderung ist ein Experiment; handelt es sich aber um ein solches auf einem so grossen und eigenartigen Wirtschaftsgebiete wie Indien, so ist es nur um so richtiger, erst nach den Ergebnissen eines längeren Wirkens der neuen Maassnahmen zu urtheilen.
English translation: “Every change of currency is an experiment; but where it concerns one on so large and peculiar an economic territory as India, it is all the more correct to judge only after the results of a longer operation of the new measures.”