1,549 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Divisions of knowledge are neither timeless truths nor mere administrative convenience: they are historical settlements, shaped by intellectual expansion, cultural purpose, and institutional power. Tracing the ordering of learning from Aristotle's theoretical-practical-productive triad and Porphyry's tree through Bacon's division into History, Poesy, and Philosophy, Dewey's decimal notation, and the four-faculty structure of the medieval and modern university, Machlup shows how branches split, fuse, vanish, and reappear as erudition grows. He restores science to its broad continental sense against the narrow Anglo-American restriction to natural science, and defends intellectual knowledge pursued for understanding, culture, or delight rather than utility. The second volume of his Knowledge project makes the map of learning itself the object of study, insisting that every classification is provisional and that no partition should be mistaken for the essence of what it orders.
But knowing for fun is a respectable human activity; and having fun need not be judged useless.
Not refutation but neglect scattered the Austrian economics that Mises and Hayek had led around 1930; exile, the Anschluss, and the rise of Keynesian thought did the rest. Ludwig Lachmann treats the later revival as a rescue: because the earlier concepts were forgotten or linguistically transformed, they must now be actively retrieved. He reopens Hans Mayer's causal-genetic account of how real market prices actually form, Hayek's problem of knowledge at once dispersed and diffusable, and the Knight-Austrian capital controversy, arguing that capital theory must be rebuilt from individual decision-making rather than from social aggregates that presuppose one evaluating mind. Offered as a birthday tribute to Terence Hutchison, the essay makes technical knowledge itself a weapon in competition.
Where the storage of ideas failed we must at least make an attempt at their salvage.
The fratricidal European war of 1914 ended a liberal international order of free trade, gold, open migration, and passport-free travel, and, in this survey prepared for the Antonio Feltrinelli Prize, becomes the starting point for sixty years of upheaval in the world economy, macroeconomic theory, and policy. Haberler reads the interwar catastrophe as the product of monetary destruction, delayed devaluations, and protectionism rather than any inherent flaw of capitalism; the postwar great surprise of prosperity he credits to sound finance, GATT liberalization, and Marshall Plan aid. Tracing the Keynesian revolution and the monetarist counterrevolution, he arrives at the stagflation of the 1970s, arguing that inflation is no permanent cure for unemployment and that monetary restraint must be joined to fiscal discipline and competitive, deregulated markets.
We now know that money had a lot to do with the Great Depression.
From Thomas Aquinas to Keynes, this posthumously published synthesis argues that the deepest disputes in economics never turned on economics alone but on rival patterns of Western reasoning—nominalist, universalist, organismic, and dialectic. Schooled in Viennese marginalism and hardened by his quarrel with the German historical school, Pribram traces economic doctrine as it emerges from Thomistic moral theology through mercantilism, Cartesian Physiocracy, and Ricardian mechanics into the marginalist, Marxian, and institutionalist controversies of the nineteenth century, and onward to fascist, Bolshevist, and Keynesian economics. Incompatible doctrines coexisted in the same universities, he contends, because their roots lay outside the discipline, in broader habits of thought. The labour of nearly half a century, it reads the history of economic analysis as a chapter in the history of thought.
The Ricardian economists had centered their analysis on problems of distribution; in the theories of their successors, problems connected with the allocation of resources occupied a primary rank.
'Autonomous' and 'induced' name positions in a causal story, not fixed labels stamped on the current account, the capital account, or official reserves. Against the habit of reading causation straight off the balance-of-payments table, Machlup insists that double-entry identities guarantee offsetting balances but explain nothing: a trade surplus is itself a capital export, and a current-account deficit is the logical correlative of a capital-account surplus rather than its cause. Using an oil-price shock to show that an importing country may cut consumption, raise exports, borrow, or draw down reserves, he weighs five rival doctrines of autonomy and ties each to a specific exchange-rate regime. His verdict is disciplinary: which flow dominates an episode must be established by historical and theoretical argument, never inferred from account headings alone.
Economists are prone to consider assumptions as almost perfect substitutes for knowledge, or perfect antidotes for ignorance.
Hayek's title is itself the thesis: reason is overestimated whenever it is credited as the source of civilization rather than its late and partial product. Inherited instincts were shaped for small face-to-face bands, and the extended society of strangers became possible only through culturally transmitted rules, property, honesty, promise-keeping, that suppressed or redirected those instincts and spread because the groups adopting them multiplied. Between instinct and reason he inserts a third term, custom and tradition, holding that people learned to behave before they understood why and that morality evolved through group selection, not design. Ranging through Hume, Ferguson, Smith, and Menger, he rejects Hegelian and Marxian laws of development and, in an oral supplement, defends religion's guardianship of property and family while dismissing Malthusian panic with Julian Simon's population data.
Die erste Alternative zu Instinkt ist nicht Vernunft, sondern Brauch und Tradition, die nicht Menschenwerk sind, sondern ein Erbe und das Ergebnis der Entwicklung.
English translation: “The first alternative to instinct is not reason, but custom and tradition, which are not the work of man but an inheritance and the outcome of evolution.”
Grant a single ruler complete command of monetary and fiscal policy, insulated from parliaments and pressure groups: what would a credible cure for stagflation actually require? Haberler's benevolent and enlightened dictator is a methodological fiction, benevolent in respecting consumer sovereignty, enlightened in trusting competition and private property over the central planning of Lange and Dickinson. The prescription that follows binds monetary restraint, with money growth cut to potential real GNP growth, to fiscal discipline, tax reform against bracket creep and phantom profits, and above all the withdrawal of the privileges that keep wages and prices rigid: farm supports, the Davis-Bacon Act, minimum-wage laws, closed shops. Freer trade, he argues, is the most powerful discipline on domestic monopoly, and inflation the fons et origo of the whole malaise.
A 2 per cent reduction in real GNP is a shock, but it is not a crushing burden.
Property, family, and religion endured, Hayek argues, not because anyone grasped their function but because the groups that observed them could sustain larger and more complex cooperation, the thread of this 1983 Zurich lecture, a compressed prospectus for what would become The Fatal Conceit. He shifts moral philosophy from justification to genealogy, asking how our morality arose and what it has done for us, and inserts inherited tradition as a third source between instinct and deliberate reason. Religion, on this view, carried 'symbolic truths' that guarded rules whose social utility stayed opaque. Rejecting Hegelian and Marxian laws of development and Malthusian alarm alike, he closes by returning to the market as a knowledge system that sets dispersed facts to work through prices no planner could ever compute.
Die Entwicklung der Moral ist ein Anpassungsprozeß und nicht, wie die rationalistischen Theoretiker glauben, ein Ergebnis bewußter menschlicher Entscheidung.
English translation: “The development of morality is a process of adaptation and not, as rationalist theorists believe, the result of conscious human decision.”
When Hume insisted that the rules of morality are not the work of reason, he supplied the thread Hayek follows through this 1983 plenary lecture, delivered at Chicago's conference on the unity of the sciences. Traditional morality, Hayek argues, is not a set of values that science can rationally construct but an inherited condition for the survival of modern humanity, the product of cultural evolution and group selection rather than design. Tracing the idea from Mandeville and the Scottish moralists to Darwin, he defends private property, the family, and religious sanction as unplanned restraints that made the extended order possible, and he indicts the rationalist line from Descartes to Marx and Keynes for treating such traditions as irrational. Socialism, he concludes, is the fatal conceit of an intelligentsia that trusts only what it can prove.
If you want to test this assertion, try to find a positivist who is not a socialist.
From a Buenos Aires lecture hall in 1958, weeks after Peron's fall, Mises spoke without a manuscript to Argentine students; the six talks, transcribed and given here in the German translation of the 1979 Economic Policy, treat capitalism, socialism, interventionism, inflation, foreign investment, and political ideas as one connected argument. Capitalism, he explains, is mass production for the masses, and rising wages flow from capital per worker, not decrees. Socialism collapses on the calculation problem, since without prices for the means of production planners cannot tell the rational project from the merely possible one. Interventionism, illustrated by a price ceiling on milk that breeds shortages and further controls, is no stable middle way. Civilizations, he closes, are not felled like plants but undone by false ideas and renewed by better ones.
Freiheit bedeutet auch die Freiheit, Fehler zu machen.
English translation: “Freedom also means the freedom to make mistakes.”
Britain's economic decline, in Hayek's diagnosis, begins with a price structure rendered impotent, above all in the labour market, where trade union privileges block the adjustment of relative wages that would send workers to where they are most valued. Across five parts of this IEA Hobart Paper, he treats the market as a telecommunications system whose competitive prices carry dispersed knowledge no planner could hold, and he charges Keynesian demand management with shifting the blame for unemployment from rigid wages onto government money. The closed shop, demarcation rules, and intimidatory picketing raise insiders' wages only by excluding outsiders; monetary expansion merely postpones a worse reckoning. Charles Hanson's postscript traces the union immunities back to the 1906 Trade Disputes Act and forward through the Thatcher-era reforms that began, incompletely, to revoke them.
The market is thereby deprived of the function of guiding labour to where it can be sold.
Every generation of economists, Rothbard notes, hunts for the next culminating doctrine after Keynes, and in the late 1970s supply-side economics seemed to furnish it, though without a systematic treatise, a single major theorist, or real doctrinal unity. This polemic grants the movement its one valid point, that lower marginal tax rates can spur work, saving, and investment, then attacks the fiscal myth grafted onto it: the Laffer Curve promise that tax cuts will pay for themselves and erase deficits with no confrontation over government spending. Supply-siders, he argues, are closer to Keynesians than they admit, tolerating deficits and cheap money while dressing managed currency in gold symbolism. Through Jude Wanniski's populism he exposes a doctrine that flatters voters by promising mutually inconsistent goods at once.
For the “gold standard” they want provides only the illusion of a gold standard without the substance.