1,549 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Where earlier theory chose between technique and valuation, the first part of Engländer's system attempts to weld the two together. The objective-technical structure derives relative prices from labor and production conditions; the subjective-social derives them from valuation and income. Grounding value in the psychic phenomena of desiring goods and avoiding evils, he builds from primary values through economic value, cost, and yield to market price, insisting there is no necessary link between a good's higher marginal utility and a higher price. Rent emerges as scarcity plus the differential advantage of fertility and location; wages and capital interest are handled as factor prices. Yet interest, he concedes, resists convincing derivation here, and its fuller treatment is postponed to the theory of money in Part II.
Nach dem Sprachgebrauch der klassischen Schule erklärt der objektiv-technische Preisaufbau wohl den natürlichen Preis, aber nicht den um den natürlichen Preis oszillierenden Marktpreis.
English translation: “According to the usage of the Classical School, the objective-technical price structure indeed explains the natural price, but not the market price oscillating around the natural price.”
How does the cost of higher-order productive goods relate to the value of the finished products they make? This youthful essay of 1876, printed only decades later in Wieser's collected papers, answers by dismantling the cost theory of value from within. Starting with a single economizing agent, one scarce input, and several consumption goods, Wieser shows that the apparent proportionality between product value and cost is an illusion of good management, not a transfer of value from input to output. Value flows the other way: needs and scarcity impute worth to the productive good through its expected marginal product. His decisive move makes any cost rule normative rather than descriptive—it ought to be, not it is—valid only while its presuppositions hold. This is an early Austrian account of imputation and opportunity cost.
Der Wert der Güter ist nicht bestimmt durch ihren wirklichen, sondern durch ihren, soweit unsere Erkenntnis reicht, wirtschaftlich gebotenen Gebrauch.
English translation: “The value of goods is determined not by their actual use, but by the use which, so far as our knowledge extends, is economically enjoined.”
Delivered as a rectorial address that turns Adolf Exner's plea for political education into a wider sociology of power, this lecture denies that public life can be decoded from legal formulas or liberal slogans. Wieser's target is contract theory: the state, he argues, begins not in voluntary agreement but in domination, command, and the discipline that binds scattered persons into a public body. His organizing concept is 'mass technique' — the selection, leadership, and routine that render unwieldy crowds capable of action, so that even anti-authoritarian movements reproduce hierarchy the moment they become parties. From army and election to custom, class, genius, and the modern press, he charts the layered social powers that govern a people, closing with the moral task of subordinating industrial and military force to culture, rights, and education.
Der Staat ist Herrschaft, und die Herrschaft ist nicht durch Verträge in die Welt gekommen.
English translation: “The State is dominion, and dominion did not come into the world through contracts.”
No single psychological impulse, neither abstinence nor Böhm-Bawerk's alleged underestimation of future needs, can carry the weight of interest. Working at the crossroads of Austrian capital theory, marginal productivity, and monetary economics, Mahr rebuilds the theory around the productivity of roundabout production, distinguishing horizontal expansion, which repeats existing methods, from vertical expansion, which lengthens production through new stages. Whether longer methods pay depends on technology, market size, and above all wages. He then abandons the fiction of one capital market and one rate: money markets, bond markets, and stock markets communicate imperfectly, their rates parting over the cycle. Modifying Wicksell, he locates the trigger of booms not in a single natural rate but in a discount rate held below the normal money-market level. The result fuses Böhm-Bawerkian roundaboutness with institutional and monetary realism.
Die Kenntnis der Gesetze des Produktionsertrages ist eine unentbehrliche Voraussetzung der Zinstheorie wie überhaupt jeder Einkommenstheorie.
English translation: “Knowledge of the laws of the yield of production is an indispensable prerequisite of the theory of interest, as indeed of any theory of income.”
Somary, lecturing at Heidelberg in the war's long aftermath, argues that 1918 recast not merely currencies and trade routes but the very axes of economic politics: state construction, market scale, and world-power position now cut across the old party labels. Liberalism and socialism, once international programs, have both curdled into national interest parties. From this his German survey moves through spaces rather than doctrines, a Britain sunk from ingenious solver to land of unsolved problems, a United States crossing from colonial periphery to world power as the Federal Reserve and New York displace London, a Europe fragmented by tariff walls into a caricature of itself. His boldest proposal is a Franco-German economic union marrying French capital to German labor; his sharpest observation, that the great capitalist organizer and the socialist planner converge in their appetite for monopoly and stabilization.
Das Europa von heute ist eine Karikatur dessen, was es sein sollte.
English translation: “The Europe of today is a caricature of what it ought to be.”
Nineteenth-century England supplies the model: there fiscal reordering, tariff change, and industrial expansion moved as a single process, proof that public finance is never neutral bookkeeping but an invisible tariff running through the economy. From that premise Schumpeter attacks Weimar's stagnation—two years of unemployment and high interest that no ordinary downturn explains—and traces it to a fiscal structure that taxes future productive capacity. His organizing concept is Kapitalbildung: reserves are not hoarding or privilege but the fund from which equipment is renewed and output extended, and progressive income and business taxes fall hardest on the margins where reserves form. A real reform must shift burden toward tobacco and alcohol consumption, as Stolper's plan proposes; even a limited change, well placed, could lower interest rates and unblock recovery. Doing nothing, or replacing private saving with state compulsion, he rejects outright.
Jede Finanzpolitik ist auch Wirtschaftspolitik, bewußte oder unbewußte.
English translation: “Every fiscal policy is also economic policy, whether consciously or unconsciously.”
A bank is not first a lender but an institution whose purpose is to take credit, and from that inversion Somary builds an entire doctrine of banking policy. This revised German edition, expanded from the 1915 original after war and inflation, shifts attention from the asset side of the balance sheet to the liability side, where a bank's size and survival hang on public confidence: banks are servants, not masters, of trust. He rejects theories that make banks autonomous creators of credit and classifies lending by economic liquidity rather than legal form, defining investment credit by whether it exceeds the borrower's liquid assets, at which point it becomes a participation in entrepreneurial risk in the form of credit. Banking crises, he insists, spring less from isolated bad loans than from mismatches among confidence, liquidity, maturity, and institutional form.
Der Industrielle wie der Kaufmann dürfen aus einem Glas trinken, das ihnen nicht gehört; aber es wird ihnen nicht selten gerade in dem Augenblick fortgenommen, in dem sie den stärksten Durst verspüren.
English translation: “The industrialist, like the merchant, may drink from a glass that does not belong to him; but it is not seldom taken from him at the very moment when he feels the strongest thirst.”
Accused by Emil Lederer of reading his crisis writings superficially, Hayek replies by quoting them back at length—and finds in them the same underconsumptionist error he had charged against Foster and Catchings. Lederer explains general crisis as a gap between output and the purchasing power spent as income; accumulation, on this view, proceeds 'too fast' for consumer markets to realize profits. Hayek names this the Grundirrtum. Crises, he insists, come not when consumption is too small but when the structure of production is drawn into roundabout paths no longer justified by the relative demand for capital and consumer goods. Against Lederer's leaning toward credit-financed consumption and public works, he sets a preventive policy of braking the boom, since once malinvestment is done no curative Wunderkuren can undo it.
Eine solche Disproportionalität kann vielmehr meiner Ansicht nur darin bestehen, daß das Verhältnis des Kapitalgüterangebotes zum Konsumgüterangebot größer ist als das Verhältnis von Kapitalgüternachfrage zur Konsumgüternachfrage.
English translation: “Such a disproportionality can, in my view, consist rather only in the fact that the ratio of the supply of capital goods to the supply of consumer goods is greater than the ratio of the demand for capital goods to the demand for consumer goods.”
Empires fall to armies and diplomacy; this study insists that Austria-Hungary fell to exhaustion—'die Tragödie der Erschöpfung,' the cumulative wasting of food, transport, raw materials, manpower, and finance under a long war and blockade. Also written for the Carnegie Endowment's war history, it treats the Habsburg lands as a single economic organism, self-sufficient in bread as a whole yet fatally uneven between its halves, and follows collapse group by group: grain deficits and famine in Vienna, the depletion of copper and iron, the near-elimination of civilian industry, war finance through the Austro-Hungarian Bank, and the inflation that hollowed out the middle class. The apparent vitality of the war economy, the authors argue, only masked the steady consumption of the country's reserves. The wrenching Stürgkh–Tisza correspondence over wartime food closes the volume as its documentary core.
Es war keine echte, sondern eine fiktive Blüte, dem Fieberzustand zu vergleichen, der auf einem der Auszehrung verfallenen Körper die Wangen rötet.
English translation: “It was no genuine but a fictitious flowering, comparable to the feverish state that flushes the cheeks of a body wasting away in consumption.”
Where Sombart sees economics deformed by borrowed natural-scientific method, Schams sees the diagnosis aimed at the wrong target. Prompted by Die drei Nationalökonomien and its carving of the discipline into judging, ordering, and understanding economics, this essay charges that Sombart expels physical "laws" only to smuggle the old wage-fund, rent, monopoly-price, and supply-and-demand laws back in under the stamp of Sinngesetze, without ever showing why the earlier economics was cognitively empty. Exactness, Schams counters, is not measurement or quantity but the fit between a mode of concept-formation and its problem; the true fault lies in importing physical structures — equilibrium, statics and dynamics, material constants — into a domain that has none. Allied with Sombart against scientism, he defends instead a mathematical, relationist theory grounded in meaning and purged of natural-science residue.
Die Mathematik wirkt keine Wunder.
English translation: “Mathematics works no miracles.”
Why should urban land rent appear even at the shabby edge of the city, on the worst sites, and why should rents climb without pause in a free housing market? Pribram takes up Friedrich von Wieser's dominant theory—urban rent as a differential rent of location, capitalized from the surplus that superior sites command—and finds it unable to explain the tenement block at the periphery or the relentless upward drift of rents. His answer trades spatial comparison for temporal: across the business cycle, rising construction costs pull rents up in the boom but leave them stranded high in the depression, and that asymmetric gap is capitalized as an 'absolute' ground rent. Each cycle locks in a higher level, and the riddle yields only when rent theory is joined to the analysis of the Konjunktur.
Nur aus der Einsicht in die Dynamik des Wirtschaftslebens läßt sich das Rätsel der städtischen Grundrente vollständig begreifen.
English translation: “Only through insight into the dynamics of economic life can the puzzle of urban ground rent be fully understood.”
By 1930 many economists spoke as though the fundamentals were settled, the inherited Marshallian and Paretian apparatus needing only defense and application. Against that complacency Schumpeter mounts a brief but pointed disciplinary intervention: keep the theoretical engine, but let it be altered by the problems it cannot yet solve. Monopoly is the exemplary unsolved case. Everything between pure monopoly and perfect competition, monopolistic competition, bilateral monopoly, economic warfare, remains the neglected middle terrain where real markets actually live, and Zeuthen's book earns his praise for entering it. The decisive contrast is between competitive compulsion, where deviation is punished, and strategic discretion, where actors bargain, threaten, and change the data themselves. Yet Schumpeter refuses the verdict that such markets dissolve into Edgeworthian chaos: specified, reasonable assumptions still yield meaningful results.
A large group of cases emerges, for various reasons not without claim to the epitheton ornans »normal«, which undoubtedly yield »determinateness« of equilibrium.