1,549 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
A tennis player’s racket interrupting a ball in flight gives Strigl his governing image: economic theory can explain motion between externally given changes in the data, but not the intervention itself. This inquiry into the applicability of economic theory maps the border between economic law and everything that alters its material — needs, technology, law, organization, nature, expectation, and social psychology. Strigl’s central taxonomy divides exogenous data changes, which theory must accept as altered facts, from the narrower endogenous ones that arise within the economic process through saving and the intertemporal ranking of wants. Where an exogenous shift breaks the chain, theory meets a Bruchstelle it cannot bridge; it can only register that something has changed. From this boundary work he projects a future Datentheorie to discipline the application of economic law.
Es ist nun ganz unbezweifelbar, daß außer diesen exogenen Datenänderungen auch noch endogene Datenänderungen möglich sind, das sind solche, welche aus dem wirtschaftlichen Geschehen selbst und kraft der Gesetzlichkeit der Wirtschaft folgen.
English translation: “It is now quite beyond doubt that, apart from these exogenous changes in the data, endogenous changes in the data are also possible—namely, those which follow from the economic process itself and by virtue of the lawful regularity of the economy.”
All economic activity unfolds through time, and static theory, by treating every exchange as if prices formed at a single instant, suppresses a central function of prices: coordinating production and consumption across dates. Extending rather than abandoning equilibrium analysis, Hayek argues that even a stationary economy needs different prices for technically identical goods available at different moments, exactly as it accepts different prices for goods in different places. From this he derives a sharp critique of price-level stabilization: when productivity rises, equilibrium requires prices to fall, and any currency—gold or deliberately managed—that resists this movement falsifies the intertemporal signals allocating resources between present and future, with effects analogous to inflation. Monetary disturbance is thus not mere change in the value of money but disruption of the whole intertemporal price structure through which dated plans are coordinated.
Alles Wirtschaften erstreckt sich in der Zeit.
English translation: “All economic activity extends through time.”
What social function does entrepreneurial profit actually perform, and does taxing it away threaten only privilege or the machinery of development itself? Writing amid capitalism's measurable material success and mounting political hostility, Schumpeter disentangles the entrepreneur from the owner, capitalist, manager, monopolist, and risk-bearer with whom he is habitually confused. Profit, he argues, arises only from new combinations—new goods, methods, markets, forms of organization—and is temporary, eroded by imitation and competition. The essay then follows this function into the trustified economy, where laboratories, committees, and salaried executives replace the intuitive founder, and where large units make possible advances impossible under free competition. Against those who read concentration as vindicating socialism, he insists public enterprise merely borrows techniques bred in private business, and that regulation must be judged by its effects on saving and innovation, not by resentment.
Neues durchzusetzen ist die Funktion, deren Erfüllung das Wesen des Unternehmers ausmacht; der Gewinn, der sich daran knüpft, ist der eigentliche Unternehmergewinn.
English translation: “To carry through the new is the function whose fulfilment constitutes the essence of the entrepreneur; the gain attaching to it is the true entrepreneurial profit.”
Profit, in the strict sense, is no reward for risk, no wage to the manager, and no return on capital—it is a surplus of value with no place among the ordinary income categories. From that austere premise this 1928 essay reconstructs entrepreneurial profit as the fruit of a single non-transferable act: the economic disposition over means of production toward a concrete purpose. Drawing on Schumpeter's new combinations, Amonn separates the static entrepreneur who merely continues an enterprise from the dynamic one who genuinely undertakes something, treats the shareholder rather than the director as the true entrepreneur, and argues that competition never levels such gains but abolishes them once the innovation is imitated. Entrepreneurial profit, he concludes, has no normal rate and no guaranteed duration.
Es besteht keine Ausgleichungstendenz für den Unternehmergewinn.
English translation: “There exists no equalizing tendency for entrepreneurial profit.”
Social structure is class structure—but class here means nothing so simple as income, occupation, or ownership of the means of production; it names durable groupings of families, ways of life, and probable conduct. Reading interwar Germany against both liberal confidence and Marxist schematism, Schumpeter rejects the single social pyramid for a layered formation in which agrarian, aristocratic, artisanal, capitalist, proletarian, and bureaucratic elements coexist and transform rather than vanish. The nobility recedes; the shrinking peasantry gains conservative weight; the artisan survives through repair and subsidiary work; entrepreneurs rise and fall too quickly to form a ruling caste. Workers, bound to the order by wages and insurance, become stakeholders rather than revolutionaries. His boldest forecast concerns the new middle class of salaried employees, officials, and professionals, whose bureaucratic consciousness he expects to stamp Germany's future.
Das einheitliche proletarische Klassenbewußtsein ist unzweifelhaft eine Treibhauspflanze und kein natürliches Gewächs.
English translation: “The unified proletarian class consciousness is undoubtedly a hothouse plant and not a natural growth.”
Does Marx's sharp line between capitalist and proletariat still describe Weimar Germany? The answer, delivered to an organized employees' milieu, is that the basic relation holds — the mass remains separated from the means of production — but the proletariat is no longer a homogeneous body of factory hands. It is a stratified class of workers, salaried employees, civil servants, technicians, and small rentiers, deliberately divided by rank, title, and the old authoritarian state's politics of teile und herrsche. Mechanization expands output without expanding manual labor, so only by fusing workers, employees, and officials into one Arbeitnehmerschicht does the dependent population become a democratic majority. Salaried employees may not yet call themselves proletarian, Lederer argues, but they increasingly share the proletariat's fate — and emancipation requires unity without erasing internal difference.
Der gesellschaftliche Zustand ist das Werk des Menschen, er ist gestaltet, ist gestaltbar und umgestaltbar.
English translation: “The condition of society is the work of man; it is shaped, it is shapeable and reshapeable.”
By 1928 the Reich's finances had slid from the surplus of 1924 into renewed deficit, and roughly half a billion marks in new taxes had to be found somewhere. Schumpeter narrows a sprawling debate to a single question: can the inheritance tax be raised substantially without economic injury? His answer is no—but on situational rather than doctrinal grounds. A levy defensible in one country or period may harm another, and Germany, drained of foreign assets and burdened by reparations, needs capital formation above all. Distinguishing the tax object from the tax source, he shows that the inheritance tax normally consumes the estate itself, converting capital into current income, while also weakening the dynastic motive that drives saving. Even Rignano's ingenious scheme of taxing successive transfers more heavily he rejects as fiscally inadequate for Germany.
Sie kann im Jahre 1800 falsch und trotzdem im Jahre 1900 richtig, sie kann heute in Amerika oder England richtig und gleichwohl in Deutschland falsch sein.
English translation: “It may be wrong in 1800 and nevertheless right in 1900; it may be right today in America or England and yet wrong in Germany.”
Interwar enthusiasm for monetary planning fixed on two dreams: a money of stable purchasing power and a capitalism cleansed of the business cycle. Both exaggerate what policy can know and do. Purchasing power, Mises argues, cannot be measured objectively, since every index imports arbitrary weights, so Fisher's compensated dollar and Keynes's managed currency rest on pseudo-measurement. Gold he defends not as stable but as comparatively shielded from political hands. The second half builds the circulation-credit theory of the Konjunkturzyklus: bank-created fiduciary media push the loan rate below the natural rate, financing production that real saving cannot complete, so the crisis only reveals capital already misdirected. Cycles recur because opinion demands cheap money; his austere remedy extends the Currency School's rule to deposits and abandons the illusion that banking technique can conjure prosperity.
Erst die Konjunkturtheorie läßt uns in der wirren Fülle von Geschehnissen den Wellenzug der Konjunktur erkennen.
English translation: “Only business-cycle theory enables us to discern, amid the confused abundance of events, the wave-motion of the cycle.”
Postwar Europe made international combines suddenly fashionable, even as large-scale business organization still drew hostility—a paradox Schumpeter treats as symptom rather than conversion. War had stripped firms of markets, patents, and networks; expanded capacity, unstable currencies, reparations, and fears of dumping pushed producers toward private agreements that governments could not supply. Beneath these emergency motives he locates a deeper structural drift: as production units grow, competitive organization becomes unsustainable, national trusts form, and protected industries collide in world markets. Cartels, then, are private machinery for regulating contradictions bred by tariffs, overcapacity, and scale—their real business the control of prices, output, and market territory. He weighs their restriction of output and burden on consumers against possible long-run gains in coordinated invention and reduced duplication, judging them as evolutionary forms thrown up by industrial concentration rather than mere legal offenses.
The tariff is done away with, but what the tariff is calculated to do, is done much more efficiently by the combine, so the free-trader has little reason to rejoice.
The 1927 Geneva World Economic Conference matters to Pribram less for its resolutions than for the assumption that made agreement possible at all: that sovereign states, unable to accept binding supranational norms, might still find cooperation mutually advantageous. This inaugural Frankfurt lecture sets international economic policy, grounded in such utilitarian calculation, against international social policy, grounded in an ethical claim to protect the economically weak. The first speaks the language of reciprocal interest but cannot command obedience; the second can invoke obligation yet lapses into abstract minima, framing hours and wages as though production would simply readjust. Both, he insists, must learn to think in categories of the world economy—its cycles and interdependence—if international understanding is to move beyond isolated national balances.
In dieser schwierigen Lage blieb eigentlich nur ein Ausweg übrig: die Anwendung utilitaristischer Erwägungen auf das gegenseitige Verhalten der Staaten; in der Annahme, daß ihre Interessen, soweit die Gestaltung ihrer wirtschaftlichen Beziehungen in Frage kommt, zum Teile wenigstens, übereinstimmen.
English translation: “In this difficult situation only one way out really remained: the application of utilitarian considerations to the mutual conduct of states, on the assumption that their interests, insofar as the shaping of their economic relations is concerned, coincide, at least in part.”
Turning a politically charged demand into an analytical problem, Schumpeter asks which way causation runs between wage formation and capitalist development—and denies that long-run wage growth can be credited chiefly to unions or labor legislation. Durable increases require a rising social product; American wages stand high precisely where European-style union power is weakest. He shrinks the imagined surplus available for redistribution, showing how taxes, replacement costs, and investment needs limit what can be transferred without damaging production. The theoretical core is dynamic: entrepreneurs introduce new combinations, win temporary profits, then face imitation that lowers prices and lifts real income. Wage-led demand arguments he dismantles case by case—transfers merely reshuffle purchasing power, credit expansion yields inflation—concluding, with deliberate asymmetry, that development raises wages while imposed wage increases usually impede development.
Edgeworth unterscheidet 80 Jahre später in seiner berühmten Abhandlung über denselben Gegenstand 256 Fälle, von denen keiner ganz ebenso zu behandeln ist wie ein anderer.
English translation: “Edgeworth, 80 years later in his famous treatise on the same subject, distinguishes 256 cases, none of which is to be treated in quite the same way as any other.”
Set aside wars, politics, and social conflict: the real question is whether capitalism harbors an economic tendency toward its own breakdown. Schumpeter's answer is narrow and paradoxical—the system of business conditions is unstable because innovation ceaselessly disrupts equilibrium, yet the capitalist order is not economically self-destructive. Defining capitalism by private initiative, market production, and above all credit, he first defends static equilibrium theory, then locates the disruptive force not in mere growth of population or savings but in innovation: the discontinuous shift of resources into uses hitherto untried. From this follow entrepreneurial profit, credit creation, and endogenous business cycles that cluster into boom and depression. Trustified capitalism, absorbing risk and routinizing research, tames that very instability—so capitalism's eventual transformation, he insists, will be sociological, not a law of economic collapse.
And we may phrase the result we reach in our terminology by saying that there is, though instability of the System, no economic instability of the Order.