1,549 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
The book that Hulsmann's introduction calls the great untranslated work of interwar Austrian economics appears here in its first English edition, rendering the 1934 Kapital und Produktion for readers of capital-based macroeconomics. Strigl builds an entire theory of production on the higher yield of roundabout methods and the wage-fund idea: capital is not an independent force but a way of using labor and land across time, sustained by a fund of subsistence goods. He distinguishes free capital, intermediate products, and fixed capital, and traces how credit expansion — money capital created beyond real saving — lowers interest below equilibrium, lengthens production past what the subsistence fund can support, and immobilizes investment. Two appendices carry the argument into the business cycle, joining Bohm-Bawerk's production theory to Mises's theory of the crisis.
Owning capital equipment can never in itself represent wealth; it only becomes wealth if it can be integrated into the structure of production.
Over the twentieth century the economics profession loaded competition with a static meaning — the perfectly competitive equilibrium — and then, unevenly, began to unload it. Kirzner tracks that arc as a sequence of doctrinal milestones, from the pre-1930 rise of the model through revisionist histories by Machovec and Loasby to its late-century retreat. Hayek's 1946 'Meaning of Competition' is the pivot, exposing an equilibrium model incapable of explaining how equilibrium is ever approached — an insight Mises grasped at once and most of the profession ignored for decades. The recovery, when it came, was plural rather than sectarian: Demsetz on natural monopoly, Brozen and Sylos-Labini on entry, the contestable-markets theory of Baumol, Panzar and Willig, the industrial-organization 'new learning.' What returns, on Kirzner's telling, is competition understood as rivalry, entry, and entrepreneurial discovery rather than a structure real markets merely approximate.
Paradoxically, therefore, it was the very effort to dislodge the PC model (in favor of the equally static, but less unrealistic model of monopolistic competition) which thrust that PC model into the analytical limelight.
After aggregate wealth, interpersonal utility sums, and the fiction of a single social maximizer had lost their authority, could economics still say anything objective about good and bad policy? Kirzner's answer is coordination — a value-free property of social interaction that independent moral reasoning may then judge desirable. Borrowing Whately's analogy between studying wealth and studying disease, he defines a fully coordinated state as one in which each person's action correctly accounts for what others do and might do. The criterion is bounded by property rights and turned against Pigouvian and Paretian welfare economics; it recasts Mises's socialist-calculation argument as a coordination comparison and defends entrepreneurial creative destruction as coordinative rather than destructive, since the earlier calm merely masked discoordination no one had yet discovered.
That calm was a facade expressing the presence of as yet undiscovered (but very real) discoordinatedness; dynamic competition shattered that calm, replacing the earlier uncoordinated sets of activities by a better-coordinated set.
Two portraits of the entrepreneur — Schumpeter's creative destroyer, who breaks routine and drives capitalist development, and Kirzner's alert discoverer, who notices overlooked price discrepancies and nudges markets toward equilibrium — have competed for a generation. Rather than collapse them, this reconsideration clarifies the level at which each holds. Schumpeter, Kirzner concedes, captures the psychology and historical force of real entrepreneurship; his own alertness theory captures the analytical market-process function, which remains at bottom Misesian arbitrage between present input prices and future output prices. Boldness, imagination, and leadership are how alertness expresses itself under multi-period uncertainty, not a substitute for discovery. The automobile displacing the horse-drawn carriage, he argues, only exposed a misallocation already present — coordination, not mere disruption.
This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism.
Few economic subjects breed more confusion than money, and here — in the German translation of Rothbard's 1963 What Has Government Done to Our Money? — that confusion is dismantled by returning to the market. Money is no creature of decree but a commodity risen from barter, the most saleable good gradually accepted by all; gold and silver won the role by being durable, divisible, and independently desired. Paper circulates only by inheriting purchasing power already established in metal. From this Rothbard argues that the size of the money stock is irrelevant to real wealth, that inflation is a hidden tax enriching its first receivers, and that fractional-reserve banking issues many claims to the same specie — fraud dressed as credit. State mints, legal-tender laws, and central banks complete money's long descent into fiat disorder.
Weil Gold ein allgemeines Tauschmittel ist, ist es am marktgängigsten, kann es aufbewahrt werden, um morgen genau wie heute verwendet zu werden, und werden alle Preise in seinen Einheiten ausgedrückt.
English translation: “Because gold is a universal medium of exchange, it is the most marketable of goods; it can be stored so as to be used tomorrow just as today, and all prices are expressed in its units.”
Globalization, its critics charged, destroys jobs, exploits the poor, degrades the environment, and hands the world to big business. Against that indictment this polemic defends global commerce as peaceful, voluntary cooperation—made possible by falling trade barriers, post-Soviet liberalization, and capital mobility—while locating the real threat in protectionism and international management. Sennholz champions multinational corporations for raising wages and productivity abroad, denies that human rights and property rights are enemies, and rebuts Marxian exploitation theory by insisting that market alternatives, not political controls, are what shield workers from domination. His targets cut both ways: anti-globalists who would throttle trade, and the IMF, WTO, NAFTA, and EU insofar as they preserve subsidies and privilege behind liberal rhetoric. The closing warning invokes Hawley-Smoot and the Depression, when moralized attacks on trade hardened into ruinous economic nationalism.
Three market features negate any such power: competition among employers, the mobility of labor itself, and the freedom of self-employment.
The hedgehog knows one big thing, the fox many; Kirzner borrows Shackle's version of that contrast to test which Hayek was. Hayek's range — cycles, capital, socialist calculation, knowledge, competition, law, liberty — invites the foxlike verdict, yet Kirzner weighs Gerald O'Driscoll's claim that a single theme, plan-coordination, unifies the whole economics. The thread is real, he decides, but sewn too seamlessly. Its heart is the 'coordination tetrad' of essays from 1937 to 1949, where Hayek recasts equilibrium as the state in which independently formed plans prove mutually compatible, and prices as signals that carry fragments of dispersed knowledge. Patiently separating order from spontaneous order, and coordination toward an outcome from the dovetailing of plans, Kirzner shows these ideas overlapping without merging. His verdict resists the hedgehog reading: Hayek is not one totalizing doctrine but a scholar forever circling a constellation of kindred insights.
Continuity does not itself constitute unity.
Mainstream economics can describe equilibrium; it cannot explain how uncoordinated agents ever reach it, leaving Adam Smith's invisible hand an analytical black box. Written for a general and policy-minded readership as a Hobart Paper, this study builds the missing account: a positive theory of entrepreneurial discovery drawn from Mises and Hayek, in which pure profit signals prior error and competition means freedom of entry rather than a crowd of price-takers. Textbook price theory, Kirzner charges, merely assumes the perfect knowledge it should explain. He then turns the theory loose on advertising, antitrust, welfare economics, and the socialist-calculation debate, reinterpreting the entrepreneur's profit as created gain brought into social existence by discovery, not a slice carved from a fixed pie.
The systematic character of the market process stems from the human propensity to sense (without deliberate search) where to find pure gain.
How could the dollar stand so strong while America ran its largest trade deficits on record? That apparent contradiction opens a July 2000 diagnosis that credits neither American productivity nor Federal Reserve mastery, but capital inflows that can reverse. Reaching for Böhm-Bawerk's analysis of the passive trade balance, Sennholz shows how an incoming capital account can sustain imports, asset markets, and a firm exchange rate at once—until it doesn't. He reads Southeast Asia's 1997 collapse as the template: pegged currencies, central-bank credit, real-estate speculation, and sudden foreign withdrawal. Rapid M3 growth, record current-account deficits, borrowed share buybacks, unprecedented margin debt, and derivatives concentrate leverage until the Fed is trapped between defending the currency and cushioning recession. The maladjustments of years of monetary manipulation, he concludes, must be liquidated, not gently unwound.
Political intervention is ill-designed for soft landings.
By the 1980s, foreign observers held up Japanese manufacturing, management, and export prowess as proof of superior institutions—until land and share values collapsed and a decade of stagnation set in. This Austrian-style reckoning refuses the flattering reading in both directions: if ministries and industrial policy are credited for the boom, they must be blamed for the bust. Japan's real gains, Sennholz insists, came from saving, enterprise, and capital formation; the late-1980s asset mania was a creature of cheap money and guided lending, malinvestment already built into the boom. The response after 1990—public works, bank rescues, deposit guarantees, near-zero rates—treated a structural and monetary disease as a demand-management problem, keeping insolvent banks alive and postponing the reckoning. Falsified interest rates, he warns, misprice saving, investment, and public finance alike, converting correction into malaise.
A financial bubble is a manifestation of inflation and credit creation, insubstantial, groundless, and ephemeral, that comes to nothing.
Borrowing Thomas Kuhn's account of scientific revolutions while refusing its relativism, this essay diagnoses modern economics as a discipline capable of forgetting its own discoveries. Lacking laboratory tests and saturated with ideology, it entrenched a false paradigm through mathematics, positivist testing, and professional prestige — burying the Austrian School in the process. Rothbard reads the eclipse of Menger, Böhm-Bawerk, and Mises not as refutation but as collective amnesia, sharpened by late translations and Mises's denial of a prestigious American post. Yet criticism alone topples no paradigm; it must be replaced. Mises supplies the replacement through praxeology, the deductive science of human action, from which follow the critique of cumulative interventionism, commodity money as a check on inflationary credit, and the calculation argument that an economy without private ownership has no real prices to reason with.
But the work of Ludwig von Mises furnishes that “something”; it furnishes an economics grounded not on the aping of physical science, but on the very nature of man and of individual choice.
Mises insisted that unhampered market prices clear supply and demand, then turned around and called those same prices "false," the residue of entrepreneurial error under uncertainty. To a reader schooled only in mainstream economics this looks like contradiction. The resolution, Kirzner argues, lies in Mises's plain state of rest — distinct from the final state of rest and the evenly rotating economy — which means only that all currently perceived exchange opportunities have been exhausted, not that anyone commands perfect knowledge. Actual prices can thus be optimal relative to present information yet false relative to what competition will reveal. From here the essay reaches Menger's vision of higher-order goods, the doctrine of consumer sovereignty, and monopoly price as the lone case where private ownership can defy the consumer.
The tension in Mises is quite imaginary; it is perceived—quite understandably and reasonably perceived—only as a result of reading Mises through the spectacles acquired in studying mainstream economics.