1,549 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Written as Keynesian ascendancy pushed Austrian cycle theory to the margins, this reconstruction insists that its critics had mistaken its character: the theory is not a static contrast between saving and credit but a dynamic account of how investment reshapes the interdependence of industries over time. Its hinge is irreversibility—investment transforms fluid resources into specific, complementary capital that mistaken expectations can no longer unwind. Lachmann gives the theory a sectoral anatomy of consumers' goods, equipment, raw-material, and 'dynamic key' industries, and joins the Lundberg effect to the Ricardo effect to show how falling real wages during a boom divert entrepreneurs from long-period deepening toward speculation. Candid about limits, he finds the nineteenth-century railway booms fit the model but concedes that the 1929 crisis, with its stable prices and rising raw-material stocks, does not.
Once "free Capital" has been converted into buildings and machinery, any failure of events to conform to expectations will upset everything.
What began as a 4,000-word review for Economica, commissioned by Hayek, had swollen into a 20,000-word analysis—"a monster," Schütz calls it—of Talcott Parsons's The Structure of Social Action. This 1940 letter opens the celebrated transatlantic exchange between the émigré phenomenologist and the Harvard theorist of social action. Schütz reports reading Parsons's unpublished second manuscript three times, reserves his sharpest comments for an oral meeting he proposes in New York or Cambridge, and presses gently on their differences over the foundations of a theory of action. He encloses his essay "Phenomenology and the Social Sciences" from Farber's Husserl memorial volume and mentions his forthcoming paper on William James, folding a personal letter into a document at the crossroads of phenomenology and American sociology.
Ich verdanke Ihren Theorien auch dort unendlich viel Gewinn und Anregung, wo ich von ihnen abweiche.
English translation: “I owe your theories an infinite amount of profit and stimulation, even where I depart from them.”
One God in heaven, one lord on earth: the Mongol letters and edicts of 1245–1255 turned that cosmic analogy into a working juridical doctrine of world conquest. Voegelin collects and classifies the documents carried between the papal and French courts and the khans—two khan letters, two edicts, two commanders' letters—reconstructing their preambles after Pelliot and reading them as formal legal instruments rather than mere barbarian arrogance. The empire they proclaim is an imperium mundi in statu nascendi, a world-empire-in-the-making in which every ruler, upon contact, must submit and enter as vassal or be destroyed as rebel. What lifts the study above orientalist antiquarianism is Voegelin's closing move, comparing the Mongols' sacral literalism—killing and conquest proclaimed as divine judgment—to the peace rhetoric of modern communist regimes.
Das Opfer der Aggression ist der Aggressor.
English translation: “The victim of aggression is the aggressor.”
Do the so-called primitive peoples truly lack logical and causal thought? Thurnwald, drawing on first-contact encounters in New Guinea, the Solomons, and Africa and citing Jung on the limits of the psyche, answers no. Hunting, planting, house-building, and trapping all proceed by sound causal reasoning; magic enters only where causal relations turn opaque, as when a Buin man's festering arm is traced to coconuts stolen from a tabooed palm and healed through payment, rite, and appeal to the demon Orómrui. He reads headhunting, name magic, tjurunga stones, omens, and totemism as internally coherent theories of where life-force resides, and holds that all knowing is interpretation, modern minds included. Primitive thought, diffuse and unexact, survives in the fatigued and the neurotic today.
Doch beurteilen wir die Gedanken und Riten nur zu oft von unserem Standpunkt am Schreibtisch und im geheizten Zimmer mit hochgezogenen Augenbrauen und überlegenem Lächeln.
English translation: “Yet all too often we judge these ideas and rites from our vantage point at the desk in a heated room, with raised eyebrows and a superior smile.”
In the years before Sedan, three courts negotiated in secret over an alliance that never came, and over Rome, the one prize Italy would risk everything to seize. This tightly documented study reconstructs the Franco-Austro-Italian talks of 1869-70, in which Beust maneuvered to restore Austria's German standing, Napoleon III bargained from illness and decline, and Victor Emmanuel's envoys tied every commitment to the evacuation of the Papal States. Engel-Janosi shows Italy willing to stake Trentino, Nizza, and the Isonzo frontier on that single question, while French troops still guarded Pius IX and Antonelli's Vatican refused all compromise. When war and the fall of the Empire dissolved the last ambiguous promises, Italian troops entered Rome in September 1870, and Europe, he notes, remained strikingly unmoved by so momentous a rupture.
Die römische Frage aufzuwerfen hatten weder Paris noch Wien ein Interesse.
English translation: “Neither Paris nor Vienna had any interest in raising the Roman question.”
What can Husserl's phenomenology actually offer the social sciences? Schütz's programmatic essay answers by first indicting mathematical natural science for forgetting the lifeworld and the constituting subjectivity on which it silently rests. Organized around four guiding problems—the epoché's retention of the world, the constitution of the alter ego against solipsism, the critique of naturalism, and the grounding of social inquiry—it separates transcendental constitution from the mundane intersubjectivity that cultural and social science actually study. What these disciplines need, he argues, is not a Lockean catalogue of mental states but an eidetic, constitutive phenomenology of the natural attitude. Charting the lifeworld's structures of Umwelt, Mitwelt, Vorwelt, and Folgewelt, he concludes that Max Weber's interpretive sociology and its ideal type still await precisely this foundation.
Die phänomenologische Philosophie ist vor allem eine Philosophie des Menschen.
English translation: “Phenomenological philosophy is above all a philosophy of man.”
Grant the planners their most ingenious model, and the calculation problem still bites—such is Hayek's verdict on competitive socialism in this German essay. Two earlier chapters of the debate may be closed, he allows: calculation in kind, and the fantasy of solving equilibrium's equations. The third, advanced by Oskar Lange, Fred Taylor, and H. D. Dickinson, keeps consumer choice and marginal-cost rules for managers while handing the pricing of producer goods to a central board that adjusts by trial and error. Hayek's objection turns on speed and knowledge: administered prices lag the daily flux of local conditions, made-to-order capital goods resist listing, and without free entry no cheaper method can underbid an incumbent. What survives is only quasi-competition—and, once investment is centrally directed, a standing threat to freedom.
Mit anderen Worten, wenn man wirklich alle diese Gleichungen wissen könnte, so wäre das einzige Mittel, das den menschlichen Kräften zu ihrer Lösung zur Verfügung stünde, die praktische Lösung zu beobachten, die der Markt vornimmt.
English translation: “In other words, even if one really could know all these equations, the only means available to human powers for their solution would be to observe the practical solution that the market carries out.”
American tariff policy cannot be read off a welfare diagram, this 1940 address insists: protection in the United States preceded the republic itself and grew inseparable from the young nation's drive to make its independence economically real, in a world still organized by empire and war. Schumpeter treats the tariff as a historical institution rather than a technical deviation from free trade, and presents America as an unusually strong case for the Hamilton–List infant-industry argument — a continental market and natural wealth muting protection's usual distortions while it hastened industries likely to arise anyway. He concedes the standing objections, and the high-cost dependents such as wool and sugar, yet concludes that in a mercantilist, conflict-prone world protection's value as a shield for an established industrial order remains as strong as ever.
Protection—or non-intercourse acts and so on—then was simply the economic complement of political independence or of the will to buttress that independence.
Why are peaceable peoples so thoroughly organized for war? Rappard, invited by A. Lawrence Lowell to lecture as a second war broke out, sets that paradox against the wreckage of the first peace. He follows the Wilsonian ideal of organized peace from the Fourteen Points into the Covenant's three great instruments—arbitration, collective security under Articles 10 and 16, and disarmament—and charts their erosion across the Geneva Protocol, Locarno, the Kellogg-Briand Pact, and the Disarmament Conference that Germany abandoned in 1933. The League could judge, he argues, but not police; the Aaland Islands were peacefully settled while Abyssinia was left to conquest. Behind each failure stands American abstention and, in Pascal's phrase, a justice never armed with force. His one remaining hope is federation.
Would Marshall's message fade like Mill's or Smith's? This semi-centennial appraisal, read here in G. Bombach's German translation, answers with a deliberate doubleness: Marshall's specific tools, methods, and results are no longer ours — obsolete much as older physics was superseded — yet his influence endures because he built research instruments rather than a closed system. Schumpeter reconstructs the originality behind the Principles: partial equilibrium chosen over Walrasian generality, and the apparatus of elasticity, quasi-rent, consumer surplus, internal and external economies, and the representative firm. He argues that Marshall understated his own debt to mathematics, traces his paternity of imperfect-competition theory through Sraffa and Joan Robinson, and credits him with designing an economics open enough to be revised — and measured — by the discipline that followed.
Seine Vorstellung vom Wirtschaftsablauf, seine Methoden und seine Ergebnisse sind nicht mehr die unsrigen.
English translation: “His conception of the economic process, his methods, and his results are no longer ours.”
Austria's long transformation from the Ottomans' frontier antagonist into their guarantor, the price of holding Russia back from Constantinople, frames this account of how Vienna met the birth of the Greek kingdom. Engel-Janosi weighs Metternich's reluctance, who saw in the war of independence only a rebellion, against King Ludwig of Bavaria's dynastic investment in his son Otto, and gives Prokesch-Osten, Austria's envoy in Athens, the central role: a conservative trying to shore up an independent Greek monarchy amid the rivalry of Britain, France, Russia, and Bavaria. Through the Armansperg and Rudhart ministries, the constitutional revolution of 1843, and the duel of Maurokordatos and Kolettis, the project decays. Austrian passivity, great-power intrigue, Greek factionalism, and Otto's weakness, he concludes, made an independent conservative Greece untenable.
Staaten hat noch niemand geschaffen; sie schaffen sich selbst.
English translation: “No one has ever created states; they create themselves.”
'I am not running a drug store,' Schumpeter told the Economic Club of Detroit in the spring of 1941 — no pills to hand out, only a diagnosis. Wartime defense spending, he warned, could be the catalyst that turned America's excess reserves and government-monopolized gold stock into inflation, no greenbacks required. The deeper argument is constitutional: gold was never essential to money, but like Supreme Courts and constitutions it restrained the freedom of action of government, telling the truth, like a naughty child, about a nation's finances. Planned economies resent exactly that discipline, so gold's old function is gone — though he allows it a narrower postwar life within an Anglo-American convention or bullion standard, if governments will accept limits on their own sovereignty.
Gold has no function, for planned economy has come to stay.