1,549 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Weighing how to set Austria-Hungary's currency on a sound footing, Landesberger enters the monometallism-versus-bimetallism quarrel with a strategist's caution. Rather than commit doctrinally to pure gold, which he holds would force ruinous silver sales, deepen the long price depression running since the 1870s, and sharpen a global scramble for scarce gold, he urges a French-type limping standard, saturated with silver yet legally equal to gold, that keeps open the path to a future international bimetallic union. His distinction between gold agio and gold premium lets him defend the Bank of France's practice of shielding reserves through a premium rather than punitive discount hikes. A second essay recasts the 'Relation' as a legal problem: how to convert debts contracted in depreciated paper into gold justly, by averaged conversion periods instead of a single reform-date rate.
Called to testify before the Austro-Hungarian Currency Inquiry Commission, Menger delivered not a plea for gold but a program for replacing an unstable, politically exposed valuta with a legally credible and fair one. He rejects a return to full silver and treats national bimetallism as a road to depreciation, granting international bimetallism only theoretical respect; gold is the sounder anchor because it ties the monarchy to the commercial world. His distinctive caution concerns execution: a great buyer cannot assume a neutral gold market, so the conversion ratio should not be fixed nor new gold forced into circulation before the reserves are secured. Throughout, the guiding norm is the just gulden that enriches neither creditor nor debtor, and money is treated as a legal and market institution at once.
Man hat uns allerdings wieder die beruhigende Versicherung gegeben: zum Kaufe gehörten wie zum Heiraten zwei Personen; es müssten sich bei uns Leute finden, welche die Effekten kaufen.
English translation: “We have, to be sure, once again been given the reassuring assurance that, as with marriage, a purchase requires two persons; there would surely be people among us willing to buy the securities.”
Emigration, on this account, is an 'elemental' movement — a structural fact of modern life driven by land scarcity, indebtedness, and cheap transatlantic transport, not a pathology the Reich can prohibit away. Compiled for the Verein für Socialpolitik, the volume gathers state-by-state reports on Bavaria, Baden, Hessen, Württemberg, Mecklenburg, Saxony, Hamburg, Bremen, and Prussia, tracing emigration law from mercantilist and military prevention toward the modern task of protecting migrants against fraudulent agents and ruinous routes. Philippovich's Baden material grounds the thesis in social geography: people leave poor soils, insecure vineyards, and districts industry cannot absorb. Against both laissez-faire neglect and fantasies of retention, he argues for organized freedom — migrants free to go, yet informed, supervised, and steered where possible, with emigration policy tied to trade, settlement, and German interests abroad.
Damit ist aber der Abfluß eines Teiles der Bevölkerung zur Notwendigkeit geworden.
English translation: “With this, however, the outflow of a portion of the population has become a necessity.”
Migration knows no political frontier, yet official statistics must halt at the state border — a mismatch this 1892 Viennese dossier sets out to repair. Prompted by Austro-Hungarian and German agreements of 1890–91, Inama-Sternegg frames the diplomacy and the resolution of the International Statistical Institute, while Heinrich Rauchberg's memorandum builds the technical program: exchange not aggregate tables but individual census cards, so a home state can classify its nationals abroad by age, occupation, and origin exactly as it classifies its domestic population. Nationality supplies the operative basis, birthplace a substitute where it is not recorded. Throughout, the authors draw a juridical line: names omitted, the records reserved for statistics alone — making mobile populations visible without turning census counts into surveillance.
Jede Ausbeutung derselben zum Zwecke der Ermittlung gewisser Individuen soll grundsätzlich ausgeschlossen sein.
English translation: “Any exploitation of these data for the purpose of identifying particular individuals shall in principle be excluded.”
A conversion rate is never neutral. It allocates gains and losses, fixes expectations, and can compel restrictive policy, which is why Austria-Hungary's move to gold is handled here as a problem of value rather than of coinage. Because the 1879 suspension of silver coinage had left the gulden standing above its metal value, no foreign precedent applies, and everything reduces to the Übergangsschlüssel — how much coined gold should replace the existing gulden, since the coin's gold content, not its name, will measure every debt and tax. Menger judges the government's proposed crown too heavy and its retrospective averages misleading, because gold itself had appreciated. His central move is that appreciation is no improvement: an overvalued currency redistributes wealth against debtors and taxpayers as surely as a debased one.
Österreich und Ungarn sind vor die Nothwendigkeit gestellt, ihr Geldwesen in durchaus selbständiger Weise zu ordnen.
English translation: “Austria and Hungary are faced with the necessity of ordering their monetary system in an entirely independent manner.”
When Austria-Hungary debated exchanging its silver gulden for gold, Markus Ettinger — dedicating his study to Carl Menger — warned that no monetary reform is ever merely technical. Fix the gold gulden too high, or let gold keep appreciating, and reform becomes a hidden tax levied on producers, debtors, workers, and the state for the benefit of creditors and secure capital. His argument turns on an asymmetry: wholesale and export prices fall quickly under dearer money because world competition forces them down, while rents, food, and shop prices stay sticky, so cheaper commodities need not mean a cheaper life. Reversing the era's common view, he contends that silver had not fallen — gold had risen under swollen monetary demand — and that any just reform must preserve what the existing gulden actually buys at home.
Die Engrospreise passen sich an den steigenden Geldwert oder den schwereren Goldgulden an, indem sie entsprechend sinken, — die Consum- oder Detailpreise nicht.
English translation: “Wholesale prices adjust to the rising value of money, or to the heavier gold gulden, by falling accordingly — consumer or retail prices do not.”
Once the medieval guilds hardened from ladders of advancement into closed, capital-dependent monopolies, the author argues, the modern worker question was born. Rosenberg surveys the full arc of remedies proposed for it in 1890s Central Europe: consumer and productive cooperatives from Rochdale to Schulze-Delitzsch, English trade unions, conciliation chambers, profit-sharing on the model of Leclaire's Paris workshop, factory inspection, and the new German and Austrian schemes of sickness and accident insurance. He rejects Lassalle's iron law of wages as a literal economic law, treating wages instead as prices set by exchange, subjective valuation, and relative bargaining power, and defends the strike as a last-resort instrument rather than a revolutionary weapon. Ranging from Thomas More through Saint-Simon, Fourier, and Marx, he closes by urging liberal social reform over repression.
Dieses „eherne" Gesetz steht auf thonernen Füssen.
English translation: “This "iron" law stands on feet of clay.”
How could two thinkers arrive at nearly identical ideas while only one founded a science? Feilbogen builds his whole inquiry on that contrast between Adam Smith and Turgot, Smith's most advanced predecessor, arguing that the practical individualism usually blamed on Smith was in fact stated more radically by the Frenchman—that so-called Smithianism is a moderated Turgotism. Against reducing the Wealth of Nations to laissez-faire, he insists its organizing principle is labor, not freedom or egoism, and that Smith's liberty is social and conditional rather than an absolute natural right. Drawing on Menger, Roscher, and Hasbach and applying Mill's method of difference to intellectual history, he locates Smith's true superiority in the transformation of the physiocratic revenu net into the net product of labor.
Die Arbeit rühmen heisst das Volk rühmen; die Arbeit belauschen heisst das Volksleben belauschen.
English translation: “To praise labor is to praise the people; to listen in on labor is to listen in on the life of the people.”
Professor Macvane, defending Ricardo, had charged the Austrians with smuggling cost into their theory as an afterthought once marginal utility failed. Wieser's rejoinder — which swells from polemic into a full essay against Ricardo himself — turns the accusation around: cost is no rival to marginal utility but a special modification of it, the form value in use assumes under capitalistic production. He dismantles the reduction of all costs to labor, insisting that no actual cost-account contains labor alone, since machines are built with machines and materials with materials. Wages, too, are graded by productive service and scarcity, not by the pain of toil. Exchange itself, he argues, is intelligible only as a mutual gain in use-value; and against Jevons, he holds that value in an age of capital reckons the sacrifice of material means, not merely of effort.
By no form of computation can the factor ‘capital’ be eliminated from the cost of capital.
Never, Böhm-Bawerk writes, has interest in economic questions been so lively—and this inaugural essay for a new journal turns that public urgency into a program for the vocation of economic science. Modern life has grown interdependent: harvests, currencies, tariffs, transport, and labor conflict now bind individual welfare to remote causes, piling the tasks of the age into a threefold structure of daily policy, new economic forms, and the enduring social question. Against methodological warfare he pleads for cooperation among theory, statistics, history, and law, and for a journal that hosts unsettled questions rather than proclaiming finished truths. Invoking Bastiat's distinction between the seen and the unseen, he defends theory's power to reveal hidden causes, and favors durable social reform—insurance, schooling, regulated hours—over gains that wage competition might dissolve.
So türmen sich die wirtschaftlichen und sozialpolitischen Aufgaben unserer Zeit gleichsam in dreifachem Aufbau.
English translation: “Thus the economic and social-political tasks of our time pile up, as it were, in a threefold structure.”
Addressed to an audience of jurists, this lecture presents the silver gulden as an institutional anomaly whose purchasing power has come loose from its metal content — a coin that holds its ground while the bar silver inside it falls. Menger explains the split historically, from the post-1848 paper regime through the vanishing of the silver agio in 1878 to the 1879 halt on private minting, and warns that a return to a genuine silver standard would mean outright devaluation. The heart of the argument is juridical: conversion to gold must follow the Valutenrelation, the market value of coined gulden, not the Barrenrelation of raw bullion, for a debtor borrowed money with full purchasing power. What justice demands is neither a large nor a small gulden but a just one, working no shift of wealth.
Es wäre demnach eine grobe Ungerechtigkeit, nach der Barrenrelation überzugehen.
English translation: “It would therefore be a gross injustice to transition on the basis of the bullion ratio.”
Can costs be the final explanation of value, or only an intermediate link within it? Against Heinrich Dietzel's defense of cost theory, Böhm-Bawerk concedes the empirical force of a law of costs for freely reproducible goods and then denies its finality: the value of the cost-goods themselves still demands explanation, and that explanation runs back to marginal utility. He dismisses the charge that his theory hides inside Robinson Crusoe examples, insisting Robinson is merely a methodological test dummy, and shows cost theory caught between a Scylla of labor-quantity facts it cannot fit and a Charybdis of circular reasoning. Even the exact-looking cost figures of the market, he argues, are only stabilized resultants of countless subjective valuations, moods and whims included, so that costs do not eliminate feeling from value but aggregate it.
Die simple Wahrheit bleibt doch, daß es endgültig eine Lokomotive ist, die den letzten Wagen zieht, und nicht ein letzter Wagen, der die Lokomotive zieht!
English translation: “The simple truth remains that in the end it is a locomotive that pulls the last carriage, and not a last carriage that pulls the locomotive!”