1,549 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
No one in modern society, Schütz begins, can comprehend the whole of the world he depends on; we use technologies, markets, and legal orders through trust and routine rather than understanding. From this he builds a sociology of how knowledge is socially distributed, sorted through three ideal types: the expert, whose clear knowledge is narrow; the man on the street, content with recipes and feeling; and the well-informed citizen, who seeks reasonably grounded opinions on what concerns him indirectly. His engine is a theory of relevance—zones of interest shifting like contour lines, and chosen 'essential' relevances set against 'imposed' ones that arrive from anonymous powers. Since most of what we know is socially derived, he distinguishes eyewitness, insider, analyst, and commentator. The essay ends as a democratic warning: opinion polling can elevate the uninformed and press sanctioned ignorance on those who know better.
Wir besitzen immer weniger das Recht zu definieren, was für uns relevant ist und was nicht.
English translation: “We possess less and less the right to define what is relevant for us and what is not.”
Two rival traditions have worn the name individualism, and Hayek's Twelfth Finlay Lecture, delivered at Dublin in 1945, sets them against each other. The 'true' individualism of Locke, Mandeville, Hume, Ferguson, Smith, and Tocqueville begins from the narrow limits of any single mind's knowledge; the 'false,' Cartesian strain of Rousseau and the Encyclopaedists imagines society as something reason can design whole—and, on Hayek's reading, drifts toward collectivism. Individualism is first a theory of society, not a licence for selfishness, and its cardinal discovery is spontaneous order: the institutions that arise from human action but not human design. Because no authority can know in advance who knows best, coercion must be bounded by general rules that mark out protected spheres rather than steered toward chosen collective ends.
Man in a complex society can have no choice but between adjusting himself to what to him must seem the blind forces of the social process and obeying the orders of a superior.
Written weeks after Keynes's death, this memoir refuses to separate the theory from the man who made it: a Cambridge and Eton mind, mathematically gifted yet impatient with technique that did not bear on public action. Schumpeter reads the whole career as the slow forging of a single vision, first glimpsed in The Economic Consequences of the Peace, that laissez-faire capitalism had ended in 1914 and that thrift no longer served accumulation. The General Theory supplies that vision its machinery, reducing the economy to three schedules: the consumption function, the marginal efficiency of capital, and liquidity preference. Admiring the elegance yet insisting on the narrowness, Schumpeter accepts Hicks's verdict that this is the economics of depression, and grants Keynes a genuine school rivaling the Physiocrats and Marxists.
It does not make us Keynesians, it makes us better economists.
Empirical critics of the 1940s claimed that interviews and questionnaires had caught firms behaving in ways marginal analysis could not explain; the reply here is that they had misunderstood the theory they meant to refute. Economic theory, Machlup argues, is essentially a theory of adjustment to change, and its variables are the entrepreneur's own expected costs and revenues, not the observer's accounting magnitudes — a driver overtaking a truck responds to speed and distance without computing them. Reports of 'full-cost' pricing dissolve on inspection: average cost may smooth fluctuations over time, discipline a cartel, or hint at rivals' demand elasticity without contradicting marginalism. He is hardest on Richard Lester's wage-employment surveys, whose 'importance' ratings confuse frequency with marginal effect. The theory has not been disproved, he insists, though better empirical work, grounded in theory, is badly needed.
The business man does what he does on the basis of what he thinks, regardless of whether you agree with him or not.
Anti-Prussian sentiment ran high in the monarchy of 1870, yet at the Crown Council of 18 July—Franz Joseph, Andrássy, Beust, Kuhn, and Potocki around the table—Austria-Hungary chose neutrality with only preparatory armament. Engel-Janosi reads that choice not as simple weakness but as the sum of converging constraints. Potocki's federalist ministry, which would have granted the crownlands almost the status of American federal states, had deepened rather than resolved the monarchy's internal paralysis, while the Eastern Question tied any western war to Russia's designs on Constantinople and to unrest in Serbia, Romania, and Egypt. Drawing on ministerial protocols and American diplomatic reports, the essay presents neutrality not as grand design but as the only policy the Dual Monarchy's divided structure could sustain.
Prokesch hatte recht: es war, als seien die Segel eines Schiffes so gesetzt, daß sie gegeneinander wirkten.
English translation: “Prokesch was right: it was as though the sails of a ship had been set so as to work against one another.”
Confusion about the calculus, the authors contend, usually springs not from calculus itself but from shaky command of the algebra, geometry, and limits beneath it. Written for beginners rather than as a treatise on mathematical economics, this primer builds from graphing total cost against output toward the ideas an economist must handle to read the published literature: the limit, the derivative, marginal cost and marginal utility as special cases of it, maxima and minima, Lagrange multipliers for constrained cost minimization, Euler's theorem and the exhaustion of product under competition, least-squares regression, and Cramer's rule for market equilibrium. W. L. Crum credits Joseph Schumpeter with the volume's major additions, and the economic example — never abstract rigor for its own sake — governs every step.
The derivative of $y$ with respect to $x$ is the instantaneous rate of change of $y$ with $x$.
Take a single stretch of history and use it to test what economic analysis can and cannot do: that is Schumpeter's method here, applied to the American 1920s and the collapse that followed. He rejects both the reduction of the decade to monetary quantities and the treatment of it as self-contained, reading its prosperity instead as the American surface of a longer industrial transformation, automobiles, electrical utilities, corporate finance, whose effects were expansive and depressive at once. Prosperity was real but spotty, concealing falling farm and profit tendencies beneath rising output. On the crash he distinguishes why depression was likely from why it turned catastrophic, laying the disaster to speculation in 1927-29, a fragmented banking system prone to epidemics, and a mortgage crisis that turned price declines into panic.
Time series never tell the whole tale and must be supplemented by a detailed historical account of what actually happened in the economic organism.
Cheap money has a long pedigree of enemies of interest behind it, Bolshevik, Nazi, and easy-money reformers alike who picture creditors as idle rich and debtors as toiling poor. Mises overturns the picture: in a modern financial society the bondholders, savers, and insurance and social-security claimants harmed by depressed interest and depreciated currency are ordinary people. From the distinction between commodity credit, drawn from real savings, and circulation credit, conjured by banks as fiat money, he builds the familiar sequence, artificially lowered rates, false calculation, malinvestment, boom, and then either runaway inflation toward a 1923-style collapse or panic and mass unemployment. The crisis, he stresses, springs not from ending expansion but from the misdirection cheap money already produced. Interest expresses time preference and cannot be legislated away.
The artificial boom is not prosperity, but the deceptive appearance of good business.
To fix a price at all, one must already know how prices form—and confusing value with price, this essay warns, wrecks the attempt from the start. Contributed to the 1946 Bern anthology Konkurrenz und Planwirtschaft, Amonn's piece first pries apart two words ordinary usage runs together: price, the money ratio of a good, and value, its regular exchange ratio against other goods. He distinguishes indirect influence such as tariffs from direct price policy, showing how ceilings breed shortages and rationing while floors breed surpluses and quotas, and grounds the whole in modern functional supply-and-demand theory and elasticity. Economics can test whether measures suit a chosen aim, he concludes, but the aims themselves belong to politics—so direct policy should ordinarily aim at durable competitive equilibrium, best secured by curbing monopoly.
Die Wert- und Preistheorie ist eine unumgängliche Voraussetzung einer rationellen Preispolitik, wie einer rationellen Wirtschaftspolitik überhaupt.
English translation: “The theory of value and price is an indispensable prerequisite of a rational price policy, and indeed of a rational economic policy generally.”
Behind the cooperative movement lay a revolutionary dream, to abolish entrepreneurs, capitalists, and the wage system through producers' cooperatives owned in common. That dream, Mises argues in this report commissioned by the Petroleum Industry Research Foundation, failed utterly, and the surviving consumers' and farmers' cooperatives are simply large businesses. Patronage refunds are distributions of profit; undistributed surpluses accumulate capital exactly as any firm's do. What sustains cooperatives, on his account, is not superior efficiency but privilege, the tax exemptions, cheap credit, and legal favors that shelter high-cost operations from a genuine market test. He points to the contradiction between farmers' cooperatives seeking higher prices and consumers' cooperatives claiming to seek lower ones, and concludes that cooperatives can be legitimate in a free society only if they renounce these advantages and win consumers on their own.
Capitalism needs neither propaganda nor apostles. Its achievements speak for themselves. Capitalism delivers the goods.
The social Wunschbild, the anticipatory image of what economy and society ought to become, is treated in this 1947 rectoral address as an active economic factor rather than escapist fantasy. Because all economic processes take shape from the willing of living human beings, Kerschagl argues, economics cannot be a mechanics of things; yesterday's utopia may become today's reality, even as fulfilled ideals cease to press as ideals. He reads mercantilism, physiocracy, classical economics, Marxism, and the Austrian marginalists as mixtures of contradictory wishes, each torn between freedom and binding order—a plurality that turns destructive whenever one doctrine is enforced as total truth. Applied to postwar Austrian policy the thesis is austere: distribution can complement production but never replace it, and social aims must be judged by persuasion and human dignity, not coercion.
Es kann auf die Dauer nur das verteilt werden, was erarbeitet ist, und alle Verteilungssysteme können nur eine wichtige und notwendige Ergänzung der Erzeugung, aber kein Ersatz für diese selbst sein.
English translation: “In the long run only what has been produced by labor can be distributed, and all systems of distribution can only be an important and necessary complement to production, but never a substitute for it.”
Five lectures, delivered to Innsbruck workers in 1946, confront a ruined economy and ask whether Austria can be saved at all. Bayer's answer refuses fatalism: smallness did not doom the First Republic and need not doom the Second—Switzerland shows a small economy can prosper—but recovery must be planned, coordinating production, exports, credit, investment, and income rather than trusting automatic markets or monetary tricks. The lectures range across money and credit, the wage-price-currency tangle, social policy through unions and cooperatives, and socialization, defended here against Hayek's fear that planning must lead to serfdom. Real wages, Bayer insists, depend on the social product and not on nominal claims; money stays a servant, never wealth. Above all, the policy errors of 1918 to 1938 must not be repeated.
Sozialisierung ist mehr als die Summe einzelner Maßnahmen zur Verstaatlichung der Produktionsmittel, sie ist aber auch nicht, wie es manchmal dargestellt wird, gleichbedeutend mit der Durchsetzung einer sozialistischen Planwirtschaft mit völliger Aufhebung der Funktion von Geld und Markt.
English translation: “Socialization is more than the sum of individual measures for the nationalization of the means of production; nor is it, however, as it is sometimes portrayed, equivalent to the imposition of a socialist planned economy with the complete abolition of the functions of money and the market.”