1,549 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Does social science possess a unified object, or must it splinter into a natural science of mass regularities and an ethical history of institutions? Delivered as an inaugural lecture at the University of Vienna in 1881, this essay stages that apparent dualism — unplanned phenomena like price formation, custom, and population change set against consciously organized associations, firms, and positive law — only to dissolve it. Inama-Sternegg argues that even the 'natural' phenomena are socially conditioned: child mortality, illegitimacy rates, and market order depend on law, habit, and collective ideas of welfare. The unity of the science lies in studying all that is socially conditioned and reconstructing the causal system behind it. Method follows object: observation and statistics wherever facts can be counted, but history as statistics' necessary twin, since a present state must be understood through its development.
Die Sozialwissenschaft ist die Wissenschaft von den Handlungen der Menschheit, durch welche sie die Idee der Wohlfahrt zu verwirklichen strebt.
English translation: “Social science is the science of the actions of mankind by which it strives to realize the idea of welfare.”
Behind the putting-out worker's apparent independence lies subordination to the entrepreneur who supplies the work and dictates its terms, the premise from which this expansive programme of home-work legislation proceeds. Schwiedland explains why employers favour dispersed production: it lowers fixed capital and workshop costs and shifts the risk of falling Konjunktur downward onto the household. Against this he assembles a coordinated arsenal, registration, compulsory sickness insurance, sanitary licensing of workrooms, co-liability of landlord and Verleger, worker organization, wage schedules and binding minimum rates, surveyed comparatively across Australia, North America, England, and the Austrian crownlands, down to Galician locksmiths and Gablonz glass cooperatives. Yet he warns against rigid, schematic rules: home work is too diverse for a single formula, and only statute, self-help, and administration together can reach the emerging fifth estate.
Der Käufer der Verlagsarbeiter aller Kategorien ist nicht »Kunde«, sondern »Verleger«.
English translation: “The buyer of the putting-out workers of every category is not a »customer« but a »putter-out«.”
When Guerry coined the phrase moral statistics in 1833, he attached a single name to investigations of crime, marriage, and social conduct, and, Inama-Sternegg warns, opened the door to metaphysical system-building on half-tested data. His sustained target here is A. von Oettingen, whose Christian social ethics dressed speculative social-ethical laws as inductive results. Worldview may orient inquiry, the essay concedes, but must never be smuggled into the proof. The sharpest methodological blows fall on international comparison, where tables juxtapose crimes, marriages, and illegitimacy governed by incompatible legal and administrative regimes, and where the law of large numbers only manufactures pseudo-truths. His alternative is historical and contextual: moral statistics is no autonomous discipline but a viewpoint within general statistics, answerable always to carefully analyzed social reality rather than to a doctrine fixed before the facts.
Der ehrliche Forscher verzichtet von vornherein darauf, aus der bloß äußeren Erfahrung die sittlichen Prinzipien, die die Welt erhalten, abzuleiten.
English translation: “The honest investigator renounces from the outset any attempt to derive from mere external experience the moral principles that sustain the world.”
When a farm passes undivided to a single heir while the others take compensating claims, the law is doing something ordinary private law cannot — and defending that exception is the work of this 1882 essay. Inama-Sternegg's premise is that land is no ordinary item of private wealth: fixed, productive, socially indispensable, bound to settlement, credit, and family continuity. Against the demand that private law be uniform, he argues that agrarian law, like commercial law, is not caste privilege but a legal response to a distinct sphere of economic relations. Anerbenrecht is no romantic restoration: its aim is to keep money economy, credit, and world-market competition from destroying viable holdings through irrational fragmentation and inheritance debt. His solution preserves ownership and testamentary freedom while converting coheirs' claims from parcels of land into secured, yield-based rents measured by the holding's net return.
Die nationalökonomische Eigenart von Grund und Boden hat sich zu allen Zeiten auch im Rechtssystem ausgeprägt.
English translation: “The economic peculiarity of land and soil has at all times also expressed itself in the legal system.”
Two economic logics pull against each other in the world politics of 1904, and Inama-Sternegg's aphorisms turn on the contradiction between them. Within their own borders, the cultural states hem in the peasant's holding and inheritance, wrap the artisan in corporative controls, and cultivate what he mockingly calls a policy 'for the little man' — a defensive localism born of distrust in ordinary economic initiative. Outward, imperial and commercial competition demands coordination on a far larger scale. He refuses to read British imperialism or American expansion as mere lust for domination, seeing instead a contest for secure shares in an expanding world economy, and rejects both doctrinaire free trade and isolated protection. His preferred path is institutional reciprocity — the 1892 Central European treaties, the Brussels Sugar Convention, American reciprocity — over fragmented, item-by-item tariff bargaining.
Der Bauer wird neuerdings unter eine strenge Vormundschaft gestellt; er soll sein Gut nicht zerteilen und beliebig vererben, über eine gewisse Grenze nicht verschulden.
English translation: “The peasant has of late been placed under a strict guardianship; he is not to divide his holding or bequeath it as he pleases, nor is he to encumber it with debt beyond a certain limit.”
Borrowed dishes, a borrowed samovar passed off as a family heirloom, a fur coat defended as the very emblem of one's credit: the Dobler household sustains its claim to be 'better people' entirely on appearances, while the father hides seven months of unemployment. This three-act Viennese comedy, written with Alexander Engel, sets the son Toni's philosophy of debt and strategic marriage against his sister Martha, who advertises herself as a piano teacher, refuses to snare a suitor by concealing the family's poverty, and insists that the better people are simply the better human beings. Around a widower's phantom inheritance and a chain of scheming courtships, the play turns the comedy of social masquerade into a quiet argument for honest labour over genteel pretence.
Der Pflanz, Martha, der ist ja eine soziale Notwendigkeit.
English translation: “Keeping up appearances, Martha — that's a social necessity.”
An imaginary land called Utopien is the stage for the rise and ruin of a revolutionary who abolishes private property, inheritance, marriage and the family in the name of a 'Sun State.' Jean Marot, a stable hand turned self-taught intellectual, seizes power under the slogan 'bread and work' and forces the king to proclaim collective ownership and state-reared children, only to watch his order breed shortages, informers, and a new kind of crime in which theft merely imitates official expropriation. The chancellor Reinhart's counterrevolution, an adulterous entanglement with Queen Regine, and a mob that turns on its liberator drive Jean to the scaffold. Gans-Ludassy dramatizes, years before the socialist calculation debate, why a collectivism imposed on egoists devours itself.
Der Staat ist mit Vernunft erfunden für Vernünftige. Auf Stimmungen des Herzens und auf Empfindsamkeiten des Gemüt's kann er nicht Rücksicht nehmen! Laßt mich gehen!
English translation: “The state is devised by reason for the reasonable. It cannot take account of moods of the heart and sensitivities of the temperament! Let me go!”
A strike in Vienna's men's ready-made clothing trade in January 1903 becomes, in Ettinger's hands, a test case for the whole problem of home work and social reform. Starvation wages, tuberculosis, and overcrowded workrooms are read not as an isolated moral scandal but as symptoms of a structurally irrational market — a chain running from Konfektionäre through Stückmeister to dispersed Heimarbeiter, squeezed by export decline, customs burdens, and destructive underbidding. Against this he sets the enforceable minimum-wage tariff, backed by wage books, control commissions, and arbitration, citing Australia's statutory compulsion as the model that works. He defines home work economically rather than legally — labor done for another's account and risk, far below the general wage — and closes with a program of organized employers, organized workers, and public policy: not communism, not anarchism, but rationally organized individualism.
Von einer gelungenen Operation kann man nur sprechen, wenn der Patient bei derselben nicht stirbt.
English translation: “One can speak of a successful operation only if the patient does not die in the course of it.”
Economic theory must begin not from an abstract calculator but from the acting person, whose bodily, instinctual, and affective constitution shapes conduct in advance. Dedicated to the psychiatrist August Forel, this essay builds a layered anthropology, reflex, instinct, character, habit, suggestion, and traces economic behaviour to instinctual complexes of nutrition, protection, possession, power, and vanity that differ sharply in urgency. Schwiedland's sharpest tool is a distinction economics had blurred: Begier, desire, generates its own activity and seeks heightened pleasure, while Bedürfnis, need, is provoked by deprivation and drives toward its removal. The essence of economy, he insists, lies not in consuming but in procuring goods for future satisfaction. Culture is the refinement of striving; luxury is ambiguous, capable of both waste and invention; and economic reform, he concludes, must include the education of wants.
Die soziale Therapie besteht ja zum besten Teil in einer Beeinflussung des inneren Menschen.
English translation: “Social therapy consists for the most part in influencing the inner man.”
Modern competition, Ettinger contends, throws up the very associations meant to restrain it. Cartels are neither an invention of academic economists nor a creature of legislation, but practical answers to ruinous price wars, overproduction, and unstable relations among firms. With a foreword by Carl Menger, this legal-economic study refuses both a naive faith in laissez-faire and the reflex of treating every combination as criminal conspiracy. If private associations already regulate prices, output, and risk across whole branches, the state cannot pose as a neutral onlooker; it must decide how such power is supervised and where stabilizing coordination shades into private domination. Ettinger works through cartel forms as stages in an industry's self-organization — from loose price agreements, vulnerable to evasion, toward integrated cooperatives that turn rivalry into collective calculation — and supplies model statutes for the promoters and lawyers who would build them.
Dem Kartellprobleme kann und darf der Staat nicht länger als stiller Beobachter gegenüberstehen.
English translation: “The state can and must no longer stand before the cartel problem as a silent observer.”
Neither doctrinaire free trade nor blanket protection survives Schüller's scrutiny, which rests a rational tariff policy on a fact both camps overlook: within a single country the same good is produced at widely unequal costs, in layers reaching from the most favorable conditions to the marginal ones that fix the price. From this — and from the marginal-utility line that runs through Menger, Wieser, and Zuckerkandl — he derives when imports enrich a nation and when they merely displace home production and depress wages and rents. He weighs foreign 'superiority' against real export capacity, defends measured grain tariffs against Brentano's objections, takes apart Germany's and Russia's excessive duties, and treats commercial treaties as the arena where an import harmful in isolation may be admitted for compensating export concessions. The work carries a dedication to Carl Menger.
Der größte Irrtum jedoch besteht darin, daß die Exportfähigkeit als gleichbedeutend mit der Überlegenheit aufgefaßt wird, während es für die Exportfähigkeit ebenso sehr auf die in der Regel ganz übersehenen Konsumverhältnisse als auf die Produktion ankommt.
English translation: “The greatest error, however, consists in the fact that export capacity is regarded as synonymous with superiority, whereas export capacity depends just as much on consumption conditions—which are usually entirely overlooked—as on production.”
A generation earlier, Europe's cities had buried more of their inhabitants than were born in them, surviving only by immigration; now, Inama-Sternegg observes, they grow from their own surplus of births. This essay from the Österreichische Rundschau warns against reading that reversal as simple urban flourishing. The vanished 'Lebensdefizit' rests less on sanitation, water, and food inspection than on the altered age-structure of a population fed by vigorous young rural migrants — so the city's vitality is borrowed, and the deeper reproductive strength of the people still rests on the land. The second half turns the lens around: rural factories, commuter suburbs and annexations, and spa and resort towns carry urban economy and habits outward, weaving town and country into a single circulatory system in which each feeds the other.
So bewirken schließlich alle Kräfte, welche das städtische Leben entwickelt, eine Nivellierung des Gegensatzes von Stadt und Land, indem sie dem Lande höhere Lebensformen zuführen, sich selbst aber von den überschüssigen Säften des flachen Landes nähren.
English translation: “Thus, in the end, all the forces which urban life develops bring about a leveling of the opposition between town and country, in that they bring higher forms of life to the countryside, while nourishing themselves from the surplus vital sap of the flat land.”