1,549 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Werner Sombart's Der moderne Kapitalismus had synthesized universal economic history and monumental theory; here that theoretical scaffolding is dismantled piece by piece from the standpoint of Robert Liefmann's 'sozialindividualistische' economics. Groß confines himself strictly to Sombart the theorist, attacking in turn the notion of money-seeking as an acquisitive drive, the treatment of Wirtschaftssysteme as historical agents, and the confusion of technique with economy. Against Sombart's grand categories—spirit, institution, productivity, capitalist organism—he sets a theory of individual planning: money becomes an abstract unit of account that keeps plans revisable, and market order emerges from the mutual adaptation of individual plans rather than from any institutional idea. Capitalism, on this reading, is not a productive force but heightened commerce governed by rentability, the quantitative counterpart of a psychically abstract economic principle.
Kapital nennen wir das zum Gelderwerbsmittel gemachte Geld.
English translation: “We call capital the money that has been made into a means of acquiring money.”
Every human gathering, this essay argues, acquires structure almost at once: amorphous mass exists only in the first instant before attractions, repulsions, subgroups, and leaders crystallize out of it. Thurnwald names the winnowing of leaders Siebung and separates it sharply from biological selection—masses actively choose whom to follow—then shows why institutional leadership, fixed in statutes, offices, and inheritance, must sooner or later collide with the natural kind. Sociation itself he treats as process and complementarity: persons associate because they need and complete one another, from sex and age in the family to the division of labor in a workshop. He classifies its forms as Masse, Ballung, and Kristallisation, argues that organizations gain a life of their own by depersonalizing relations, and closes on the conviction that neither individual nor mass alone explains any social form.
Das Führertum ist eine Komplementärerscheinung der Masse. Masse braucht Führertum, der Führer Masse.
English translation: “Leadership is a complementary phenomenon of the mass. The mass needs leadership, the leader needs a mass.”
L. Albert Hahn's Volkswirtschaftliche Theorie des Bankkredits, revised for its third edition, made credit sovereign over money, savings, capital, interest, and the whole business cycle — and it is exactly that supremacy Reisch sets out to dismantle. Admiring Hahn's dialectical gifts but distrusting his taste for paradox, he rejects the metaphor of the money-holder as a national creditor and the fiction of a cashless economy that has never existed. Where Hahn holds that lending itself conjures the deposits banks lend, Reisch answers with clearing, liquidity, collateral, and public trust; drawing on Böhm-Bawerk's roundabout production, he insists that real capital is machines and subsistence goods, not an abstract power to command them. The book, he concludes, is a veiled plea for inflationary credit.
Niemals aber vermag inflatorischer Kredit „Güter aus dem Nichts zu ziehen“.
English translation: “Never, however, is inflationary credit able to "draw goods out of nothing.”
Single-cause explanations of mass unemployment are the target here. Unemployment turns chronic, Mahr argues, when shocks to profitability collide with rigid union wages, monopoly pricing, monetary disturbance, and political insecurity, forces that in the Depression's depths coincided all at once. The analytic core is marginal productivity: wages driven above the marginal product of labor raise unit costs, restrict output, and displace workers, an effect that often surfaces only later, when demand falls or fixed capital must be replaced and wages prove unable to fall. Rationalization forced by excessive wages generates no compensating rise in labor demand. From these distinctions follow conditional remedies, credit-financed public works chosen for real social utility, wage cuts matched by price cuts, work-sharing at unchanged hourly rates, while Germany's recovery stays hostage to reparations.
Die Steigerung der Löhne über die Grenzproduktivität hinaus, die Überhöhung der Löhne führt so zur Entstehung von Arbeitslosigkeit.
English translation: “The raising of wages beyond marginal productivity, the excessive level of wages, thus leads to the emergence of unemployment.”
When Keynes's long-awaited Treatise on Money appeared, it drew from Hayek a two-part review that would open the lasting divide between the two economists. He grants that Keynes moves rightly in tying money to saving, investment and interest, but argues the effort collapses for want of a theory of capital. Keynes reasons in aggregates—total profit, total saving, total investment—and so cannot see the uneven gains and losses across the stages of production, nor the shifts toward longer or shorter methods that drive the cycle. Borrowing Wicksell's contrast of natural and market interest rates while discarding the capital theory that gives it force, he wants a theory's conclusions without its foundations. Depression, for Hayek, is no mere shortfall of purchasing power but the wreckage of an unsustainable production structure built during the boom.
It is a priori unlikely that an attempt to utilize the conclusions drawn from a certain theory without accepting that theory itself should be successful.
When formalism, intuitionism, and logicism each stake a claim to the foundations of mathematics, the deeper trouble, Kaufmann contends, is one of sense: symbolic forms, abstractions, and abbreviations get mistaken for independent objects. This 1931 essay reworks the received theory of abstraction, recasting it not as the stripping-away of features but as the holding-fixed of an invariant structure while others vary, and turns it against conceptual realism and extensional logic alike. Expressions like properties of properties and functions of functions are legitimate only as translatable abbreviations. Natural number, on this account, is neither a class of equinumerous classes nor a property of collections but an abstraction from the ordered act of counting; Peano's axioms define that structure, and complete induction merely excludes further determinations. Undecidability, where it appears, signals not metaphysical depth but presuppositions that have failed to fix their object.
The central problem in the theory of a science lies in clearly grasping the sense of the relevant propositions.
Weimar's debate over Rationalisierung becomes, in this 1931 study, a theory of capitalist dynamics. Against the compensation doctrine that markets quietly reabsorb workers displaced by machinery, Lederer argues that labor-saving innovation can leave durable structural unemployment whenever its tempo outruns capital formation and the growth of jobs. His engine is the organic composition of production: modern progress means more capital and fewer workers per unit of output. A model of dynamic equilibrium disturbed by innovation in coal mining shows the mechanism — the rationalized mines draw capital from static sectors, produce the same coal with roughly half the labor, and shrink the economy's capacity to place workers, so the wage bill falls further than the social product. Neither anti-machine reaction nor laissez-faire optimism will do; what he urges is social control over the pace and direction of technical change.
Bei einem sehr schnellen Tempo des technischen Fortschritts können dann die Freisetzungswirkungen zu einer strukturellen, d. h. die Depressionsperiode überdauernden Arbeitslosigkeit führen.
English translation: “At a very rapid pace of technical progress, the effects of labor displacement can then lead to structural unemployment—that is, unemployment that outlasts the depression period.”
Delivered to the Royal Institute of International Affairs as the slump deepened, this 1931 address refuses the comfort of ideology: the Depression, Somary insists, spared neither capitalist, syndicalised, nor socialised economies alike. He traces the collapse to gold hoarding and a failing gold-exchange standard, to raw-material prices that cratered while finished goods and wages held firm, and to speculation fed by New York's call-money market. Communism, he argues, is the lesser danger; war is the greater, as distress feeds radical nationalism and the Hitler movement. His remedies—wage reductions, the breaking of cartels, state purchases of cheap raw materials, and a Franco-German confidence rebuilt under British leadership—frame his closing warning that the years ahead may earn the historian's name 'Between Two Wars.'
Europe has no lack of capital; what she needs is confidence.
Schumpeter offers a deliberately tentative diagnosis of the world slump, reprinted from the American Economic Review in 1931, and refuses every single-factor story, stock speculation, wages, tariffs, reparations, or monetary policy alike. His method is causal layering. First he separates outside shocks from disturbances capitalism generates itself: even without wars or bad harvests, changes in methods of production create the maladjustments that produce recession, so the crisis is at once cyclical and historical, the interference of long waves, Juglar cycles, and shorter forty-month movements. Then he ranks the aggravating factors, agrarian overcultivation, gold-standard deflation, reparations, capital flight, rigid wages, resistant long-term interest rates. Wages did not cause the depression, he grants, but intensify it once present; cheap credit alone cannot revive firms with no appetite to borrow. Diagnosis is possible; the patients will not take the cure.
It is easier to dampen prosperity by a high rate of interest than to alleviate depression by a low one.
Full shop-windows and idle furnaces at the same moment: the Depression, this 1931 lecture argues, is a crisis of abundance without purchasing power, not a shortage of goods, gold, or effort. Lederer catalogues its causes — cyclical overinvestment financed by credit outrunning real saving, world markets glutted by mechanized grain, rubber, coal, and copper, a swollen German labor supply after conscription's end, and labor-saving rationalization that no longer absorbs workers as the railways once did — then diagnoses why the usual liquidation fails. Cartels and trusts fix prices and quantities, dump losses onto competitive sectors, and block the price falls that would reallocate capital; wage-cutting proves largely a dead end. His verdict is that capitalist automatism has failed, leaving a fixed economy without a plan that only conscious social direction and economic self-government can set right.
Die kapitalistische Wirtschaft ist reich an kostspieligen Paradoxien.
English translation: “The capitalist economy is rich in costly paradoxes.”
That mass unemployment is proof of excessive wages, and that cutting wages will clear the labor market, was the reigning Depression orthodoxy Lederer set out to demolish in this 1931 lecture. He grants that a ruthless wage fall might absorb idle workers for a moment, then shows why the concession dissolves: shrinking consumption, technical unemployment that no compensation doctrine repairs, the combine harvester displacing labor faster than cheaper grain can reabsorb it. Against Cassel and Clark he insists the labor market cannot be read in isolation. In the German winter of 1930/31, with cartels holding prices rigid and plants idled by quota, wage cuts could only deepen deflation while strengthening the National Socialists whose rise frightened capital abroad. Unemployment, he concludes, is structural and institutional, not a mere error in the price of labor.
Eine Lohnsenkung vermehrt aber noch nicht den Absatz, sondern verschiebt nur die Kaufkraft vom Arbeiter auf den Unternehmer.
English translation: “A wage reduction, however, does not yet increase sales; it merely shifts purchasing power from the worker to the entrepreneur.”
Both the narrative of unbroken progress and the fashionable theory of cultural cycles come under fire here as ego-centered, value-laden, and half-mystical—the notion of peoples and states ageing through youth, maturity, and decline among them. What can actually be compared across cultures, Thurnwald argues, is only material culture and knowledge: tools, procedures, medicine, natural science, which diffuse far more readily than law, morals, or religion, as Japan's selective adoption of European technology shows. He reconstructs apparent cycles from the recurring encounter of cattle pastoralists and hoe-farmers—exchange, tribute, warfare, sacred kingship, bureaucracy, dynastic collapse—as situational patterns rather than mystical recurrence, drawing analogies from Central Africa to Egypt, Rome, and tsarist Russia. Development and cycle, he concludes, can be clarified only through value-free socio-psychological analysis of situation-types and chains of effect, never through subjective valuation.
Während rückschauend — je nach unseren Kenntnissen der technischen und Wissensgeschichte —, die verzweigten Linien des Aufspeicherungsvorgangs verfolgt werden können, ist es vorausblickend nicht möglich, die entscheidende Bewegungsrichtung herauszufinden.
English translation: “While in retrospect—depending on our knowledge of technical and intellectual history—the branching lines of the accumulation process can be traced, prospectively it is not possible to discern the decisive direction of movement.”