3,801 works, 471 books, 3,267 articles, 60 other works, 3 awaiting classification, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Can a theory explain how value is assigned to productive factors without yet providing a workable way to measure it? This tension sharpens Schumpeter’s 1928 review of Carl Landauer’s book on functional distribution. He welcomes Landauer’s argument that such attribution is conceptually possible even without money, but presses a practical objection: a utility measure may itself change because of the changes it is meant to measure. His praise is equally specific. Landauer’s distinction between economic and extra-economic power advances, Schumpeter judges, beyond his own treatment. The review offers a compact encounter with Schumpeter’s standards of theoretical progress: clear distinctions and teachable reasoning count as scientific achievements, yet conceptual possibility must not be mistaken for an operational method.
A theory can fail without making its author historically negligible. In this brief 1928 review of Rodbertus-Jagetzow’s letters to Schumacher, Schumpeter judges Rodbertus’s land-rent theory both false and unfruitful—two distinct charges—yet explains why he attracted followers. A landed proprietor who combined socialist and conservative commitments, Rodbertus could command allegiances unavailable to thinkers identified with any one of those positions alone. Schumpeter consequently finds broader interest in R. Michels’s introduction than in the letters themselves: it reconstructs the milieu, personality and alliances through which Rodbertus exerted influence. The review offers a compact example of Schumpeter distinguishing theoretical achievement from historical significance, without allowing appreciation of the latter to soften criticism of the former.
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.”
Can a programme celebrate competition while placing industry under public supervision? In this 1928 critical article on Britain’s Industrial Future, Martha Stephanie Braun tests the British Liberals’ proposals against the economic discipline they profess to preserve. Her defence of competition is not a defence of small firms against large ones: private combinations may remain exposed to rival suppliers and imports, while legally protected monopolies escape those pressures. She asks why competent administration of universities or waterworks should imply competence in competitive manufacturing, and warns that cooperation between employers and workers can come at consumers’ expense. The article offers a pointed distinction between industrial coordination that remains answerable to markets and administrative arrangements that weaken that accountability, while acknowledging the programme’s pursuit of industrial peace.
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.”
Land can yield rent even when its owner cultivates it and no lease changes hands. That observation anchors Franz Xaver Weiss’s 1928 essay: ownership explains who receives rent, but not why land’s services have value. Writing within utility-value theory, Weiss treats a plot as a bundle of productive services whose valuation depends on scarcity and competing uses. His pointed reversal of differential rent theory is that inferior land does not create the value of superior land; its availability limits that value. Yet he does not simply discard classical explanations. Readers can discover why residual valuation and diminishing returns retain explanatory force, and how land’s immobility and restricted supply distinguish its income from temporary quasi-rents without requiring a separate theory of value.
Money cannot simply be added to a theory of barter without changing what that theory explains. This is the central contention of Mises’s short article, which locates an unfinished task within subjective value theory: explaining not merely changes in money’s purchasing power, but how that purchasing power arises. Mises treats monetary economics as essential to understanding market fluctuations and economic calculation, rather than as a specialist appendix. Yet his case for theoretical advance also insists on continuity: he credits Ricardo, not himself or Cassel, with purchasing-power parity theory. The article offers a compact view of why Mises regards abstraction from money as a useful beginning—and an inadequate stopping point—for economic analysis.
Capitalism can transform economic life without dissolving inherited social distinctions. In this 1928 lecture on German society, Joseph A. Schumpeter asks why industrial change sustains some older groups while creating new centres of power. His crucial distinction is between economic function and social belonging: entrepreneurial success does not itself establish a durable class position, and artisans can survive by serving the industries that displaced their former work. Against a simple division into owners and workers, he draws attention to the growing independence of salaried employees and officials. Readers encounter a conditional prognosis of accommodation rather than revolution—and a way of interpreting class change through family continuity, occupational adaptation, and administrative power rather than ownership alone.
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.”