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.
What must the state do to sustain competition without directing everyday business? Walter Fröhlich’s 1959 review of the tenth volume of Ordo locates this tension at the heart of German neoliberalism. Writing for readers beyond its German setting, he examines how the yearbook’s shared commitment to a competitive order encounters difficult questions of European integration, monetary policy, economic justice, and Catholic teaching. His judgment is favorable but discriminating: the contributions are uneven, and warnings about the Common Market remain untested. The review offers a concise view of an intellectual circle that treats markets as dependent on legal and ethical arrangements, while revealing Fröhlich’s own preference for confronting fundamental questions rather than refining technical answers to potentially less consequential ones.
A social welfare function can make value judgments explicit without resolving what a society should value. Walter Froehlich makes this distinction central to his review of Reimut Jochimsen’s attempt to reorient welfare economics. He locates the book’s originality less in its survey of technical debates than in its search for normative premises concerning personal liberty, social minima, democratic order, and economic adaptability. His response to Jochimsen’s proposed collaboration with philosophers and theologians is cautiously practical: professional biases might counterbalance one another, but cooperation offers no automatic solution. This short review gives readers a sharply defined problem to consider—how economists might move beyond formal consistency toward defensible judgments about public purposes without resorting to improvised philosophy.
Can land reform improve rural welfare while reducing recorded national income? This possibility anchors Walter Froehlich’s preliminary contribution to the 1961 collection Land Tenure, Industrialization and Social Stability: Experience and Prospects in Asia. He questions comparisons that value market transactions more readily than household production, leisure, or security, then brings that criticism to bear on agricultural reform. His preference for viable family farms is conditional: redistribution alone cannot remedy holdings too small to support maintenance and improvement, nor replace opportunities for nonagricultural employment. The chapter’s distinctive interest lies in this connection between measurement and institutional choice. Readers can discover why an apparently technical judgement about economic progress depends on tenancy arrangements, resource pressures, and the social values that reform is intended to sustain.