1,549 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Not whether the state can decree a price, but what follows when a decreed price is meant to replace the one the market would form: that is the question this theoretical essay on official price fixing pursues within an order still based on private ownership. Mises distinguishes Ordnungstaxen, which hover near the market price and barely disturb it, from genuine controls that push maximum or minimum prices away from the unhampered level. A ceiling breeds shortage, hoarding, rationing, and finally compulsory production; a wage floor breeds unsold labor. Each isolated intervention forces a choice between retreat and further command. Price fixing, he concludes, is no stable third system between capitalism and socialism but cumulative social theory. Reprinted as Theorie der Preistaxen.
Der behördlich festgelegte Preis aber zerstört den Markt, auf dem Waren und Dienste gegen Geld gekauft und verkauft werden.
English translation: “The officially fixed price, however, destroys the market on which goods and services are bought and sold for money.”
Austria's monetary history from 1892 to 1924 becomes, in this English-language report, a case study in how stability depends on more than a loan. Schumpeter traces the late-Habsburg gold-exchange crown, its destruction by wartime finance through discounted treasury bills and bank advances, the monetary dismemberment that followed imperial collapse, and the 1922 Geneva protocols that brought League of Nations control. The achievement, he insists, was not restoring the old crown but stabilizing at the fallen parity, 14,400 paper crowns to one gold crown, once note issue for the treasury had stopped and an independent National Bank could defend the exchange. His verdict stays guarded: inflation had wrecked saving, imports outran exports, and Vienna's financial role remained uncertain. A gold-exchange standard holds only when fiscal discipline, banking, and productive recovery sustain the promise.
The program of reconstruction was essentially a program of economic liberalism.
How can the value of a single productive good be extracted from a utility that several goods together bring about? This is the imputation problem—Zurechnung, a term Wieser had borrowed from law—and Hayek treats it in 1926 not as a footnote to marginal utility but as the decisive next step in grounding distribution on subjective value. He surveys the Austrian solutions of Menger, Böhm-Bawerk, and Wieser, sets marginal productivity in its place as a supplement rather than an independent answer, and exposes a circularity at the heart of the received theory: product values are derived from factor values through cost, yet factor values are supposedly read off product values. His restatement recasts the whole question as one of allocating given quantities of productive goods among competing lines of production according to the scales of needs—soluble only for the entire economic system at once.
Wieser betrachtet den Wert als die Rechenform des Nutzens.
English translation: “Wieser regards value as the computational form of utility.”
When Friedrich von Wieser died in July 1926, Hayek—his student—wrote this memorial for a man he ranks among the greatest teachers of theoretical economics and a formative presence in Austrian public life. He follows Wieser from a youthful passion for history, redirected by Spencer and Tolstoy toward the search for the impersonal regularities of social life, through the decisive encounter with Menger's Grundsätze, to a mature theory of subjective value. Hayek presses Wieser's priority in the cost law that treats costs as indirect utility, praises Der natürliche Wert for analyzing value in a hypothetical simple economy, and calls the Theorie der gesellschaftlichen Wirtschaft the only closed system the modern subjective school has yet produced. He closes by setting Wieser's cultural range and humanity beside Goethe.
Die Volkswirtschaft aber kann man nicht erklären, ohne den Wert erklärt zu haben!
English translation: “But one cannot explain the economy without having explained value!”
To read Wieser's late sociology of power as a betrayal of his economics, Schams argues, is to misunderstand the unity of a single life's work. His memorial, written soon after Wieser's death in July 1926, places him beside Menger and Böhm-Bawerk in a division of labor: Menger fought methodologically for theory, Böhm-Bawerk defended it polemically, and Wieser built its substantive system. It was Wieser who gave marginal utility its lasting name, Grenznutzen, and who in Der natürliche Wert carried value into productive goods through the theory of imputation. The dialectic of leaders and led in Das Gesetz der Macht, Schams insists, completes that economics rather than abandoning it — the sociology supplying the grounding for social action the theory had always presupposed, and making Wieser a monument to a vanished Austrian culture.
Der wirtschaftliche Wert ist Grenzwert.
English translation: “Economic value is marginal value.”
This brief foreword introduces another author's history of advertising, and Mataja uses it to make a case for the subject itself. Advertising, he observes, is rich in history but poor in historians—an institution in constant contact with the economy, public life, technology, and art, yet rarely traced across its own development. He commends the volume for following each advertising medium along its course from the simple and artless toward the composite and mass-produced, for drawing together sources that lie unusually scattered, and above all for its rich pictorial apparatus. The whole, he suggests, reveals how great a sum of thought, ingenuity, and craft has already been placed in advertising's service, and he offers the book as a spur to its technical, artistic, and ethical advancement.
Die Reklame ist reich an Geschichte, weniger reich an Geschichtsschreibern.
English translation: “Advertising is rich in history, but less rich in historians.”
Behind the visible bustle of households, workshops, and markets lies a single circular process no eye observes directly, and making that national economy thinkable is the didactic ambition of this 1926 treatise. Building from need and scarcity toward value, marginal utility, and price, Amonn insists that production and distribution occur uno actu, in one and the same act, and recasts Betrieb against Unternehmung as the units of economic life. He defends land, capital, and labor against every labor-theory reduction, carries the analysis through money, credit, the Konjunkturzyklus, and crisis, and closes with an extended reckoning with the Methodenstreit that set Menger's marginal utility school against Schmoller's historians.
Die „relative Seltenheit“ oder „Knappheit“ ist der letzte Grund der Entstehung und der Höhe der Preise.
English translation: “Relative scarcity" or "scarceness" is the ultimate ground of the emergence and the level of prices.”
The occasion is commemorative but the target is contemporary: Schumpeter reads the empirical, statistical, institutional economics coming out of America, above all Wesley Clair Mitchell, as a latent revival of the old German Methodenstreit that once swirled around Schmoller. Rather than embalm Schmoller as a monument, this 1926 essay treats him as an unresolved problem. Schumpeter accepts the doctrine of Wertfreiheit, that science cannot prove ultimate ends, yet refuses the conclusion that all policy is mere class ideology; emergencies, interdependence, and shared necessities create a concrete field where analysis can distinguish feasible compromise from fantasy. He defends Schmoller against the caricature of the mere fact-collector, arguing for reciprocity between theory and historical research, and closes by pairing him with Marshall as one who pushed economics beyond simplified competitive abstraction.
Gelegentlich hören und lesen wir aus Amerika Symptome von etwas, das man nur als latenten Methodenstreit bezeichnen kann.
English translation: “Occasionally we hear and read from America symptoms of something that can only be described as a latent Methodenstreit.”
After Bolshevik Russia retreated to the New Economic Policy, Mises saw the practical economics of the age settle on a regulated private-property order, neither laissez-faire nor outright expropriation. That third system is his target. Interventionism keeps ownership formal while replacing entrepreneurial calculation with isolated commands, and those commands, he argues, defeat their own ends: a price ceiling below the market breeds shortage, rationing, and finally compulsory production; a legislated or union-enforced wage above productivity turns frictional unemployment into a permanent institution. Corruption and evasion become structural supports rather than accidents. The postwar depression, on this reading, is not the crisis of capitalism but the crisis of interventionism, an order with no economic principle of its own, forced always to retreat or to advance toward socialism.
Entweder Kapitalismus oder Sozialismus; ein Mittelding gibt es nicht.
English translation: “Either capitalism or socialism; there is no middle way.”
Keep two things apart, Schumpeter insists, the businessman's forecasting and the scientist's theory of crises, and the whole field of Konjunkturforschung comes into focus. Prompted by the new German Institute for Business Cycle Research and by American barometer work at Harvard and Babson, this 1926 essay refuses both extremes: abstract crisis theory without data, and curve-reading without a theory of causal sequence. Collecting and charting series, he warns, is not yet prediction; indicators earn forecasting power only when arranged by their place in the wave. From Juglar's discovery that crises are phases of a recurrent cycle to Spiethoff's schema of upswing and depression, Schumpeter puts capital investment, with iron consumption as its best measurable expression, at the causal center, treating prices as mostly derivative. Better forecasting cannot abolish the cycle without harming development.
Wissenschaft dieser Art ist Praxis der Zukunft.
English translation: “Science of this kind is the practice of the future.”
Against the textbook picture of banks as mere intermediaries of prior savings, Schumpeter insists that they create purchasing power outright, and that this single fact reorganizes the theory of prices, cycles, and crises. Delivered as Bonn-period lectures after the war and peace inflations, the 1926 argument defends the return to gold less as doctrine than as an institutional brake on arbitrary monetary expansion, then treats credit-financed innovation as the engine of the boom and its self-liquidating reversal. Deliberate Kreditinflation and deflation become therapeutic tools, precise but perilous. The attached 1928 wage lecture extends the same anti-voluntarist reasoning: durable gains in workers' living standards rest on productivity and capital formation, not nominal wage pressure, which makes Germany's wage question inseparable from taxation.
Mit der Waffe bewußter, planmäßiger Kreditinflation und -deflation kann man offenbar den Pulsschlag des Wirtschaftslebens wirksam beeinflussen.
English translation: “With the weapon of conscious, planned credit inflation and deflation one can evidently influence the pulse of economic life effectively.”
When Oskar Engländer's Theorie des Güterverkehrs und der Frachtsätze promised to overturn transport-price theory—and criticized Sax's own Verkehrslehre in passing—Sax answered with these critical studies. He grants that lower freight costs expand a good's market and equalize prices, but denies that Engländer's mathematical formulas, resting on uniform population density and equal purchasing-power strata, can yield anything but a hypothetical sales figure detached from real markets. The heart of the dispute is Werttarifierung, value tariffing: the practice of charging higher-valued goods higher freight, which Sax defends as a genuine application of monopoly-price theory grounded in subjective value and income stratification. Against Engländer he maintains that cost sets the floor beneath every freight rate and belongs in tariff theory from the outset, and he warns that failed abstract deduction can discredit economic theory itself.
Die Rolle der Kosten im Preisbildungsprozeß ist keine ergänzende, sondern eine wesentliche.
English translation: “The role of costs in the price-formation process is not a supplementary one, but an essential one.”