1,549 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Legal concepts, Kaufmann argues, become intelligible only once the pure formal structure of law is stripped of everything empirical, psychological, sociological, and political clinging to it. Extending his earlier Logik und Rechtswissenschaft, this German study grounds jurisprudence in a general logic of science: the dualism of factual and essential knowledge, and a principle of compatibility spheres governing which predicates may belong to which domains. Against theories that define law by force, recognition, or fear of sanctions, Kaufmann insists that law is a totality of sanctioned norms, a double norm binding conduct to consequence, and that the juridical person is no metaphysical substance but a rule-governed unit of imputation. Fusing Husserlian phenomenology with Kelsen's pure theory, he traces legal validity to the Grundnorm and rejects natural law, since value-judgments admit no theoretical proof.
Recht ist ein Inbegriff sanktionierter Normen über menschliches Verhalten.
English translation: “Law is a totality of sanctioned norms concerning human conduct.”
Against J. B. Clark's notion of a "true capital"—a permanent fund of productive wealth standing behind the changing machines and materials that compose it—Böhm-Bawerk mounts the first of his replies to American critics of the Positive Theory. He grants Clark much on abstinence and the trade-off between present and future enjoyment, but attacks the abstraction as a mystical double of real things: capital, he insists, has no causal existence apart from the concrete goods it comprises. He defends his phrase "goods of the same kind and number" as a logical control on time-preference, dismantles Clark's claim that true capital abolishes the production period—the tanner's leather is the true fruit of his labor, not the shoes he trades for—and warns that where words come to rule things, scientific clarity is irretrievably lost.
Nun, ich kenne kein anderes Kapital als die konkreten Güter, die dasselbe zusammensetzen, und ich glaube: auch die Welt der Tatsachen kennt kein anderes.
English translation: “Now, I know of no capital other than the concrete goods that compose it, and I believe that the world of facts likewise knows of no other.”
When General Francis A. Walker charged that the Austrian history of interest theories had been ungenerous and pedantic, Böhm-Bawerk answered with a four-part rejoinder that turned the attack back on productivity doctrine itself. Across questions of historical criticism, capital as a factor of production, the sources of interest, and the relation of production to value, he insists that noticing a surplus - a machine costing fifty dollars that yields fifty-three - is not yet explaining it. The decisive puzzle is why competition fails to bid up the instrument's value or bid down the product's price. Walker's appeal to scarcity and high demand, he argues, names conditions without supplying the mechanism, and interest can be grasped only through the premium present goods command over future ones. Time, not production, proves the more fundamental category.
Und die berühmte und weit verbreitete Abstinenztheorie ist ebenfalls nur eine Erfindung meiner kritischen Phantasie.
English translation: “And the famous and widely disseminated abstinence theory is likewise only an invention of my critical fancy.”
When the Czechoslovak crown came into existence in late February 1919, old Austro-Hungarian notes overstamped and declared sole legal tender, a successor state set out to build a currency from a wartime paper inheritance. Amonn traces that reconstruction to the stabilization debates of 1924 through note circulation, Lombard credit, discount policy, foreign-exchange reserves, and the wealth levy. His governing distinction separates elastic money, born of discounting genuine commercial bills and adjusting automatically to trade, from inelastic money created by Lombard advances and devisen purchases. On that basis he rejects the loose charge of deflation: Czechoslovak policy aimed at exchange-rate stability and real reserve backing, not deliberate contraction, and the crown's 1922 appreciation owed more to intervention and speculative capital flows than to any shrinking of the money stock.
Die neue Währung stellt sich hiernach formell als eine „Staatsnoten“währung, materiell aber als eine Banknotenwährung dar.
English translation: “Formally, the new currency presents itself as a "state-note" currency, but materially as a banknote currency.”
Schumpeter had argued that interest belongs only to dynamic capitalist development, a temporary levy on the profit of the innovating entrepreneur that vanishes once competition routinizes his new combinations. Böhm-Bawerk declares the thesis mistaken from the outset and dismantles it internally, empirically, and conceptually. He exposes an equivocation between the rare creative pioneer and the mass imitator, insists that possession of the means of production is irrelevant to imputation, and turns Schumpeter's own concession about the greater yield of longer production methods into proof that present goods command an agio even in a static economy. Rental housing, ordinary firms, mortgages, and state securities keep paying interest without entrepreneurial breakthroughs; no real economy, past or present, has ever lacked it. In essence, he maintains, there is only one interest.
Der Kapitalzins ist und bleibt das, wofür ihn alle Welt mit gutem Grund seit jeher gehalten hat: ein statischer Einkommenszweig.
English translation: “Interest on capital is and remains that which, with good reason, all the world has ever taken it to be: a static branch of income.”
Ricardo both founded theoretical economics and led it astray, so runs the double verdict of this centenary study. He founded it, Amonn argues, by isolating its true problem: not the justice of class shares but the formal mechanism by which rent, profit, wages, and prices arise in exchange. He misled it by taking the labor-value principle as an unexamined axiom, confusing a mere indicator of value with its cause. Across chapters on heterogeneous labor, capital durability, profit, and rent, Amonn shows the principle breaking down, rent springs from the scarcity of land relative to demand, not from cultivating inferior soil. In its place he rebuilds value on relative scarcity, joining Cassel's equilibrium equations to marginal utility, and reads modern theory as the recovery of an insight Ricardo glimpsed and abandoned.
Der Wert der Güter „hängt“ nicht und niemals „ab“ von der zu ihrer Produktion erforderlichen Arbeitsmenge.
English translation: “The value of goods does not, and never does, "depend" on the quantity of labor required for their production.”
Before an elite Vienna audience of officials, bankers, and industrialists gathered on 29 January 1924 to debate Spitzmüller's lecture, Schumpeter rose to defend Austria's post-inflation Sanierung as a single architecture rather than a bundle of contestable details. What matters, he argues, is grasping the broad lines of the restoration policy and rallying to them. Holding the krone at its given value - resisting the popular temptation to raise it - is the only possible course, since that stability was built into the National Bank's very construction. The Geneva loan he relocates to the margin: a welcome incident that eases sacrifice but does not touch the essence, which lies in the prior domestic acts of stopping the printing press and balancing the budget. His closing appeal is to elites: sustain confidence when austerity turns politically hardest.
Will man diese Mittel nicht – man braucht sie nicht zu wollen – dann verzichte man auf die Sanierung.
English translation: “If one does not want these means—one need not want them—then let one renounce the restoration.”
Renaissance Italy dazzles, yet beneath the dazzle, this study insists, ran the same social and economic anxieties that burden any age: sovereign defaults, collapsing banks, fortunes tied to the unstable Florentine Monte. Rather than construct another causal theory after Weber or Sombart, Engel-Janosi sets out to describe how different circles judged wealth, acquisition, and vocation. He reads the Church's penitential summae and its preachers, Antoninus of Florence, Bernardino of Siena, Aquinas, on just price, usury, and the God-given ordo; the poverty ideals of heretical sects; Savonarola's prophetic politics; the pedagogy of Alberti and the humanists Salutati, Poggio, and Valla; Petrarch's Stoic withdrawal; and finally Machiavelli, in whom the Renaissance worship of human power collapses into a confession of its meaninglessness. Issued as a supplement to the Vierteljahrsschrift für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte.
Die Epoche, die ihr Kennzeichen von der Verehrung für menschliche Kraft erhalten durfte, schließt mit dem Bekenntnis der Sinnlosigkeit eines menschlichen Erfolges.
English translation: “The epoch which took its distinguishing mark from the veneration of human power closes with the confession of the meaninglessness of any human success.”
Freight is no neutral overlay on the map; in this transport theory it dictates where goods are produced, what they cost, and how far they travel. Written by a railway director and professor at Prague, the book follows freight charges outward from a single production point across concentric market areas, deriving sales radii that shrink in inverse proportion to the rate, market areas varying with the square of distance, and Thünen-like rings of agricultural intensity around a consuming city. Part II turns to the rates themselves, contrasting the monopolist's drive for maximum net revenue with a 'public-benefit' tariff aimed at the greatest summation of primary values, and argues through Böhm-Bawerk's subtractive imputation that freight rates must rest on willingness to pay, with marginal cost as their floor.
Nicht weil die Bahn an Kosten erspart, gewährt sie den Nachlaß, sondern damit sie an Kosten erspare.
English translation: “It is not because the railway saves costs that it grants the rebate; rather, it grants the rebate in order to save costs.”
After more than thirty years of trade surpluses, Austria-Hungary's balance turned sharply passive after 1907, sinking to 822.9 million crowns in the red by 1912 — a reversal this newspaper essay sets out to explain. Böhm-Bawerk brushes aside the easy culprits of bad harvests and blocked exports and draws a finer distinction: a passive balance can mark a rich creditor nation paid in goods, or a poor country financing itself through foreign borrowing. The monarchy, he argues, is the latter, and not from productive industrialization but from feeble domestic saving and profligate state, provincial, and municipal spending that drains scarce capital. Reading the trade figures through the wider balance of payments, he insists that goods must ultimately be settled by goods, and that the deficit will dissolve only once lax public budgets are consolidated.
Die Zahlungsbilanz befiehlt, die Handelsbilanz gehorcht, nicht umgekehrt.
English translation: “The balance of payments commands, the trade balance obeys, not the other way around.”
Public anger over abused custody accounts is justified, Schumpeter concedes, but indignation makes bad law. This 1924 banking intervention asks a narrower and harder question: how can Austrian statute protect a depositor's securities without turning ordinary custody, pledge, and clearing into costly formalism? His answer bends civil-law categories toward economic function. Since a depositor of fungible shares needs only the return of an equivalent quantity, not the very numbered certificates, rules demanding separate storage, serial registers, and rigid individualized ownership would burden Vienna's efficient Giro- und Kassenverein and raise banking conditions for everyone. He prefers selective prohibition, naming the dangerous acts such as repledging encumbered customer securities while sparing established practice. The result is a plea for technically exact regulation that secures the claim without fetishizing the paper.
Aber die Frage, wie das geschehen kann, bleibt dessen ungeachtet schwierig.
English translation: “But the question of how this can be done nonetheless remains a difficult one.”
Wartime and postwar monetary chaos, Schumpeter argues, was unavoidable adaptation to real shocks, not proof that old bank policy had failed. What Keynes's reform program really proposes is neither abandoning gold nor stabilizing prices but transforming the central bank into an instrument for consciously steering the whole economy, with discount policy, open-market operations, reserve rules, and selective credit turned from guardians of parity into levers of employment, industry, and distribution. Against Hawtrey and Keynes he grants that credit moves the price cycle yet denies the Konjunkturzyklus is a monetary disease: prosperity is when entrepreneurs force new combinations on the economy, depression the painful reabsorption. Take away price fluctuation and you disable capitalist development. He defends the gold standard not as a fetish but as impersonal constraint against discretionary planning.
Das ist nicht mehr »management« des Geldwesens, das ist »management« der gesamten Volkswirtschaft, ohne daß man irgendwo eine Grenze ziehen könnte.
English translation: “This is no longer 'management' of the monetary system; it is 'management' of the entire national economy, without any point at which one could draw a boundary.”