1,549 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Could a better science of business cycles let policymakers smooth the waves of boom and bust? Mises answers that this is a matter of policy and popular pressure, not theory. Writing in 1933 and here in English translation, he takes the circulation-credit, or monetary, theory of the cycle as the prevailing doctrine, then asks why governments keep returning to credit expansion. The appetite for low interest rates, the contradictory political demand for high producer prices and low consumer prices at once, and union wage rates held above market levels all conspire to make pump-priming perennially attractive. He warns that entrepreneurs will not take the bait once they expect expansion to be curtailed, and singles out falling prices as the terrain where economic theory remains weakest.
The credit expansion which evokes the upswing always originates from the idea that business stagnation must be overcome by "easy money."
Austria's spring 1933 gold-clause and foreign-exchange ordinances did not revalue every gold debt at a stroke; they built a classified transition from nominal schilling parity to regulated value payment. Writing as the paper schilling broke openly from gold—127.49 paper schillings for 100 gold schillings on 28 March—Kerschagl turns a vague “gold clause” controversy into a sequence of legal tests: whether an obligation is effective or merely a value clause, whether it sounds in foreign valuta or gold schillings, what kind of debt it is, and whether its Stichtag has arrived. His reading of the Goldschuldenerleichterungsverordnung shows the pattern plainly—revalued mortgage capital paired with longer maturities and reduced interest, temporal redistribution rather than repudiation. Throughout, he insists that technical wording is distributive power.
Also mithin: bei Hypothekentilgung: gleiche Raten, aber mehr Raten, bei Pfandbriefen: aufgewertetes, aber später zu leistendes Kapital.
English translation: “Thus, in short: for the amortization of mortgages, equal installments, but more of them; for mortgage bonds, revalued capital, but payable at a later date.”
Medicine can name and treat the body's diseases; the science of society, by contrast, has barely learned to diagnose the disorders of collective life. Rejecting cheap analogies from biology and mechanics and the abstractions of German philosophical sociology, Thurnwald makes personality the "atom" of social analysis, with character understood as a dynamic product of biological potential and environmental fate. From this unit he builds family, male associations, leadership, and the problem of fitting the right man to the right place through automatic or planned social sifting. American Prohibition serves as his cautionary case of law enacted without regard to social psychology, breeding illegal trade and corruption; race questions in Hawaii and Fiji become social-psychological problems, and Germany, he argues, needs social inventions to match its technical ones.
Wir werden vielfach irregeführt von dem Gedanken, daß Verordnungen, Gesetze, Vorschriften ausreichen, das Gesellungsleben zu regulieren.
English translation: “We are frequently misled by the notion that ordinances, laws, and prescriptions suffice to regulate communal life.”
A plot of fifteen hundred to three thousand square meters, enough for vegetables, potatoes, fruit, poultry, rabbits, perhaps a goat, anchors this Depression-era proposal for Vienna. The wager is that industry, even in recovery, will not again employ everyone eight hours a day, so the unemployed need a supplementary livelihood rooted in the soil rather than merely healthier housing. Mahr designs the whole settlement economy: land secured by lease or hereditary building right rather than costly purchase, construction cheapened through voluntary labor service, serial building, and local materials, even an industrial labor service in which future settlers make their own bricks and window frames against credited wage claims. Financed by domestic loans at roughly fifteen hundred Schilling per holding, Stadtrandsiedlung leaves a lasting productive asset where ordinary public works leave none.
Aus diesen Gründen erscheint die Behauptung durchaus gerechtfertigt, daß die Förderung der Stadtrandsiedlung gegenwärtig unter den Zielen der staatlichen Wirtschaftspolitik an erster Stelle stehen sollte.
English translation: “For these reasons, the assertion appears entirely justified that the promotion of suburban settlement should presently stand in first place among the aims of state economic policy.”
Read as an economic program rather than a devotional text, Pius XI's encyclical Quadragesimo anno becomes, in Bayer's hands, a diagnosis of the Depression. He begins from the paradox of apparent overproduction: goods stand abundant while unemployment destroys the income that would buy them, each production cut breeding fresh joblessness. Against this he defines the economy's rational goal as durable maximum value—rising output adapted to need, income tied to contribution, distribution as even as possible—and finds it confirmed in the encyclical. His remedy is neither socialist planning, which lacks price formation and calculation, nor unrestrained competition, which decays into destructive underbidding and then monopoly. Bayer locates the world crisis above all in monopoly pricing by finance-controlled cartels and in the 'Fehlrationalisierung' of misdirected investment, prescribing a flexible corporative order to hold competition within bounds.
Es ist also weder die freie Konkurrenz noch die mit ihr in ursächlichem Zusammenhang stehende Monopolgestaltung in der Lage, aus sich heraus eine Heilung der Volkswirtschaft herbeizuführen.
English translation: “Thus neither free competition nor the monopoly formation causally bound up with it is able, of itself, to bring about a healing of the national economy.”
Mandeville and Adam Smith showed that a market can turn private self-interest into social coordination; Strigl's 1933 offprint, printed for the Association of Austrian Banks and Bankers, denies that this licenses the state to grant favors to particular firms and trades. He tests the interventionist slogan that every branch of national labor has a claim to protection and finds it hollow: imports do not make employment vanish but merely shift it while raising costs, wages, and consumer prices, and rescuing loss-making firms diverts scarce capital from productive uses. Such policy he names anti-selectionist, since it freezes existing arrangements against necessary structural change, and he traces a self-reinforcing spiral in which crisis breeds intervention and intervention deepens crisis. Every measure, he insists, must face one objective test: whether it serves the whole or only a favored few.
Eine gefährliche Schraube ohne Ende.
English translation: “A dangerous screw without end.”
The paired terms Kapitalbildung and Kapitalaufzehrung conceal an ambiguity: in a boom, a society may genuinely accumulate productive wealth or merely bid up the monetary valuation of assets it already holds. Pursuing that distinction drives Schiff's contribution to early empirical business-cycle research, issued through Vienna's Institute for Business Cycle Research with acknowledged help from Hayek, Morgenstern, and Machlup. Working in the Austrian tradition of Böhm-Bawerk, he treats capital not as a stock of things but as a value-form — the capitalized stream of expected returns — so the same plant signifies differently as interest rates and profit expectations shift. Vertical malinvestment in the upswing, over-lengthened roundabout production, and the crisis felt as capital shortage amid idle capacity organize an argument haunted by the fear of secular capital shrinkage.
Die Theorie, die das Wesen des Kapitalwertes als diskontierten oder kapitalisierten Ertrages vielleicht am meisten betont und die belangreichsten Folgerungen daraus ableitet, ist die Kapitaltheorie Fishers.
English translation: “The theory that perhaps most strongly emphasizes the essence of capital value as discounted or capitalized yield, and that draws the most significant conclusions from it, is Fisher's theory of capital.”
When the Methodenstreit pitted Menger's theoretical economics against the German historical school, the deeper logical question, whether a science of human action is even possible, went unanswered. Mises returns to it here, arguing that sociology, with economics as its most developed branch, yields universally valid laws rather than Max Weber's ideal types. Scarcity, choice, and the economic principle are not habits of the capitalist epoch but conditions of all action; Gresham's law and subjective value theory hold wherever their premises obtain. He faults historians who imagine they work without theory while leaning on outdated folk economics, and rejects the historicist and Marxist claim that economic laws are bound to particular epochs, a device, he argues, for evading criticism of socialist calculation. History, he concludes, begins only where theory leaves off.
Ohne Theorie ist Geschichte nicht zu denken.
English translation: “History is unthinkable without theory.”
Between the causal explanation of what exists and the normative account of what ought to be, Engliš carves out a third, autonomous form of reason: teleology, the logic of whatever is willed. On that foundation the second volume of his teleological system, given here in the German of the 1932 Czech original, constructs the state economy as a purposive order governed not by any individual's satisfaction but by an objective 'human and national ideal.' Needs, utility, cost and yield reappear as formal categories, and from them he derives a theory of taxation in which burdens fall first on the highest incomes, producing a steep progression that levels from above, checked only by the need to preserve productive incentive. A sustained critique of Hans Ritschl's rival doctrine closes the book, faulting it for lacking any central ordering purpose.
Proportionalität oder Progressivität sind keine Steuergrundsätze, sondern bestimmte Konstruktionen von Steuersätzen, die sich erst aus den Steuergrundsätzen ergeben müssen.
English translation: “Proportionality or progressivity are not principles of taxation, but particular constructions of tax rates, which must first be derived from the principles of taxation.”
No sect, no school: the new discipline gathering around Econometrica is, on Schumpeter's telling, not a mathematical faction but the explicit recognition that a large part of economics is already numerical. Prices, unlike many physical magnitudes, need no artificial measuring procedure invented for them; they exist socially as numerical relations, which lets him call economics the most quantitative of all sciences, physics not excluded. Econometrics simply faces the consequences of that fact. He reconstructs the history of the field as an unfinished quantitative tendency running through Petty, Gregory King, Ricardo, Cournot, Thünen, Walras, Marshall, Fisher, and Moore, then diagnoses the present ailment as institutional: theorist, statistician, and fact-collector work past one another. The remedy is cooperation on concrete numerical problems rather than methodological polemic, disinterested work whose practical uses arrive only as by-product.
There is high remedial virtue in quantitative argument and exact proof.
Marxism stands or falls with its theory of value—and by that measure, this 1933 polemic sets out to demolish it. Presenting Marx largely in his own words before turning to a factual but uncompromising critique, Kerschagl reverses the Marxian causal order: labor does not create value; labor is undertaken because a purposively valued good is sought. Socially necessary labor time becomes a fiction unable to compare heterogeneous work or accommodate scarcity and demand, while the money chapter convicts Marx of a crude metallism blind to credit and purchasing power. The book's sharpest thrust is the calculation argument—by admitting only one factor of production, Marxism destroys the very measures a planned economy would need to know which processes waste labor and capital. Class struggle, he concludes, dissolves nation, law, and religion into organized antagonism.
Geldschöpfung, Angebot und Nachfrage, Marktprobleme existieren für Marx überhaupt nicht.
English translation: “Money creation, supply and demand, market problems simply do not exist for Marx.”
By 1934 the Grundsätze had grown almost impossible to obtain, even as the doctrines it launched spread across Europe—an obscurity Hayek's essay sets out to correct. His claim is that Menger did not merely share the marginal-utility discovery with Jevons and Walras but gave it the causal-subjective form from which Austrian method, value theory, price theory and monetary analysis all descend; the ideas Böhm-Bawerk and Wieser refined were at bottom Menger's own. Reading the Grundsätze closely, he shows economic activity as planning for the future, value as ordinal and quantity-dependent, productive factors priced by imputation, and money emerging through degrees of saleability. The Untersuchungen and the Methodenstreit with Schmoller become a defense of theory itself, grounded in an individualist method and an insight into the unintended order of social life.
But it is not unduly to detract from the merits of these writers to say that its fundamental ideas belong fully and wholly to Carl Menger.