1,549 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Addressing an international savings-bank congress in 1963, Hayek defends thrift as economic fact, moral habit, and political condition at once. Against the intuition that spending helps others while saving is sterile — an intuition he traces from Franklin and mercantilist praise of luxury through Keynesian underconsumption theory — he restates the old truth that real capital forms only when a society produces more than it consumes. Yet volume is not the point: what a nation spends on capital formation matters far less than what comes of it, and only decentralized owners testing dispersed knowledge can find its best uses. He warns that inflation, forced 'frugality' through taxation, state growth planning, and expansive social security all corrode the widely shared habit of reckoning in capital rather than income on which a free economy rests.
Ein Volk wird nur dann eine erfolgreiche Unternehmerschicht hervorbringen, wenn eine vielfach größere Zahl von Menschen Gelegenheit hat, sich in der nutzbringenden Anwendung von Kapital zu versuchen.
English translation: “A people will bring forth a successful class of entrepreneurs only if a many times greater number of people have the opportunity to try their hand at the profitable use of capital.”
Two kinds of order must be kept apart, this essay argues: the organization that someone deliberately makes, and the spontaneous, polycentric order that no one designs. From that distinction Hayek builds an account of how the coordinated action of millions can arise without a coordinator, further separating concrete arrangements that can be perceived or commanded from abstract orders that encompass many manifestations at once. Language, law, morality, money, crystal formation, and the market's division of labor all display complex order emerging without central design, sustained by general rules of conduct that let individuals use dispersed local knowledge. A free society, he concludes, must rely on such abstract general rules rather than concrete command — a thesis set pointedly against Carl Schmitt's concrete-order jurisprudence.
Die Hauptschwierigkeit ist, daß die Ordnung sozialer Geschehnisse nicht mit den Sinnen wahrgenommen, sondern nur vom Verstand nachgebildet werden kann.
English translation: “The main difficulty is that the order of social events cannot be perceived by the senses, but can only be reconstructed by the intellect.”
Cultivation, not engineering: that metaphor governs this presidential address on 'Economic Budgeting,' the non-coercive sharing of forecasts and investment intentions among entrepreneurs. Lachmann keeps it strictly apart from Communist central direction and Nazi-style corporatism, presenting it instead as an attempt to make private plans mutually intelligible before resources are irreversibly committed. His conceptual pivot is the contrast between the neoclassical equilibrium of Walras, Pareto, and Cassel, where all plans are already consistent, and the open market economy, whose profits exist precisely because knowledge is dispersed and expectations conflict. Because capital goods are heterogeneous and complementary, isolated investment breeds excess capacity and stranded facilities; a scheme that diffuses entrepreneurial knowledge might reduce such malinvestment before it occurs. The verdict stays deliberately restrained—markets are vindicated as processes of learning, not as engines of equilibrium.
The market process tends to eliminate the results of malinvestment but cannot prevent its occurrence.
Neither the blurry category of Mittelstand nor sheer firm size captures Bayer's object: the person-shaped enterprise, formed and carried by an entrepreneur rather than run as a self-perpetuating institution. Continuing his project on the firm as economic stabilizer, this volume asks whether such medium firms still hold a stabilizing function, and why, if they do, their position keeps eroding. He credits them with pioneering, agility, specialization, individualization, and supplier roles, then separates the difficulties that policy could remove, chiefly discriminatory turnover taxes and a cartel law that treats their cooperation as suspect, from the endogenous tensions they must bridge themselves. Invoking subsidiarity and drawing on some three hundred visited firms, he argues that federative working groups, research-institute links, and reformed finance let medium firms complement the large institutionalized enterprise rather than dissolve into it.
Im September 1960 waren mehr als ein Drittel aller in der Industrie Beschäftigten (Betriebe mit zehn und mehr Arbeitnehmern) in der mittleren Industrie tätig
English translation: “In September 1960, more than one-third of all persons employed in industry (in establishments with ten or more employees) were engaged in medium-sized industry.¹⁶”
'Natural right' has hardened, over centuries of scholastic and modern doctrine, into a supposed stock of immutable norms, and undoing that hardening is the essay's whole aim. Reading Aristotle's difficult page on physei dikaion in the Nicomachean Ethics through the frame of the Politics, Voegelin recovers natural right as a symbol of noetic experience rather than a code. Aristotle's 'nature' is equivocal, physical, divine, human, so that the right by nature is at once universally valid in its divine essence and changeable in its human realization, identical not with eternal legal propositions but with the paradigm of the best constitution. The second section turns to phronesis, the existential virtue through which the divine order of the cosmos comes to its truth in concrete action, with the mature spoudaios, not an abstract rule, as the measure.
Die Wahrheit der Existenz erfüllt sich dort, wo sie konkret wird, das ist im Handeln.
English translation: “The truth of existence fulfills itself where it becomes concrete, that is, in action.”
Long read as the skeptic who woke Kant from dogmatic slumber, David Hume reappears here as something else entirely: the most coherent theorist of liberty under law. Hayek strips away the myth of a single Enlightenment, setting French constructivist rationalism against a British-Scottish line running through Mandeville, Smith, Ferguson, and Burke, in which durable institutions grow rather than get invented. Justice, property, and promise-keeping, on Hume's account, precede government and arise from convention among partial, ignorant, and scarcity-pressed beings; law must therefore be general and inflexible, never a case-by-case reckoning of merit or utility. The closing pages set Hume against Rousseau, whose democratic enthusiasm displaced this sober Whig liberalism and fed later doctrines of popular sovereignty.
Er wußte, daß die größten politischen Werte, Frieden, Freiheit und Gerechtigkeit, ihrem Wesen nach negativ sind, eher ein Schutz gegen Unrecht als positive Gegebenheiten.
English translation: “He knew that the greatest political values—peace, liberty, and justice—are by their very nature negative, rather a protection against injustice than positive givens.”
To ask why taxes exist, this textbook contends, is really to ask why the state exists — every tax system is at bottom a theory of the state. Kerschagl's teaching text moves from the history of the tax state through Adam Smith's four canons, tax justice, universality, and the interdependence of prices, wages, and shifting that dissolves the tidy line between direct and indirect taxes, to a claim central to the welfare age: even the fully socialized Soviet economy cannot replace taxation with enterprise profit, leaning instead on a turnover tax that works as a consumption tax. A long comparative part then dissects the fiscal constitutions of the United States, the USSR, Italy, France, both Germanys, Benelux, Scandinavia, England, and Austria, exposing how divergent tax systems threaten EEC and EFTA integration.
Der Wohlfahrtsstaat des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts ist eben ein riesiger Ausgleichsmechanismus, durch den etwa die Hälfte aller originären Einkommen einem Prozeß der Neuverteilung unterzogen wird.
English translation: “The welfare state of the twentieth century is nothing other than a gigantic equalization mechanism, through which roughly half of all originary incomes is subjected to a process of redistribution.”
Are there limits to the use of mathematics in economics? The question, this essay answers, is wrongly posed: the obstacle lies not in the subject but in whether economists understand what mathematics is and formulate their problems well. Morgenstern dismisses the usual objections — psychology, non-quantitative data, expectations, unmeasurable utility — by noting that mathematics is not merely quantitative, that no deep gulf separates a simple addition from an integration. Economics erred not by too much formalism but by shallow model-building, borrowing equilibrium from mechanics and casting agents as solitary maximizers under fixed conditions. Game theory marks the conceptual break, supplying a mathematics fitted to strategic interdependence; expected utility, axiomatized, replaces cumbersome indifference curves. Since natural science once remade mathematics, he expects social science to do the same, leaving no fixed boundary that can honestly be drawn.
Nichts ist leichter, als die eigene Beschränktheit für die der Methode oder des untersuchten Gegenstandes zu halten.
English translation: “Nothing is easier than to mistake one's own limitations for those of the method or of the subject under investigation.”
Economic figures acquire authority because they look precise, and that appearance, Morgenstern argues, is often typographical rather than epistemic. His revised methodological study insists economics learn what the natural sciences long ago accepted: every observation carries an error, and no serious use of data can ignore its size. Ranging across foreign trade and gold-movement statistics, business accounting, national income, and growth-rate computation, he shows how paired export and import reports fail to match, how revisions never settle, and how deliberate concealment distinguishes economic data from a nature that does not lie. The demand is not for less quantification but for more honesty about it: reliability estimates, stated error ranges, and a refusal to let refined econometric operations amplify the illusion of knowledge. Data, on his account, become scientific information only when integrated with theory.
We must carefully distinguish between what we think we know and what we really do and can know.
Can economists understand one another when a word like wealth, consumption, or competition shifts meaning from writer to writer? This slender essay answers that careful definition, though never a substitute for empirical research, is the precondition of coherent debate. Machlup traces a lineage of terminological housekeeping through Malthus, Nassau Senior, Richard Whately, and the quantitative pioneer Henry Moore, showing how each labored to strip ambiguity from the vocabulary of political economy. He endorses Senior's insistence that everyday terms be defined to match their ordinary educated use, while resisting Senior's extreme anti-empiricism. The result is a compact defense of semantic clarification as necessary but never sufficient: a discipline of language that clears the ground for knowledge without pretending to be knowledge itself.
Some people regard exercises in semantics as a waste of time. I consider them useful, if not indispensable, if we care to understand one another.
At the centenary of the Dortmund Chamber of Industry and Commerce, Hayek turns economic freedom into a constitutional question. His diagnosis is terse: the modern Rechtsstaat has decayed into a mere Gesetzesstaat, no longer able to tell Recht, binding rules of just conduct, from Gesetz, whatever a competent legislature happens to enact. General, abstract, prospective rules that bind rulers and ruled alike can accommodate factory and health regulation; what destroys liberty is discretionary intervention, price fixing, licensing, quotas, that lets officials treat like persons unlike. Reading Article 19 of the Bonn Basic Law rigorously, he argues that such controls should be unconstitutional, and proposes a bicameral remedy separating the making of rules from the direction of government, echoing Oakeshott's contrast between nomocratic and telocratic order.
In Form solcher Gesetze läßt sich jeder Befehl kleiden.
English translation: “In the form of such statutes any command can be clothed.”
Returning to a European lectern between his Vienna youth and his years in London and Chicago, Hayek uses his Freiburg inaugural to ask how scientific integrity survives contact with policy. Following Max Weber, he insists that causal analysis be kept distinct from valuation, yet demands that economists name the ideals guiding their questions rather than feign neutrality. The lecture's sharpest section dismantles social justice: commutative justice rewards the value one's services hold for others, while distributive justice would require a coercive authority imposing a single hierarchy of ends. Because market prices carry more dispersed knowledge than any planner can gather, policy's proper task is to build a framework that is systemgerecht, not to steer particular outcomes. Honoring Walter Eucken, Hayek binds Weberian rigor to Ordnungspolitik.
Distributive Gerechtigkeit verlangt so nicht nur persönliche Unfreiheit, sondern auch die allgemeine Durchsetzung einer unbestrittenen Hierarchie der Werte, das heißt, ein im strengsten Sinne des Wortes totalitäres Regime.
English translation: “Distributive justice thus requires not only personal unfreedom but also the general enforcement of an uncontested hierarchy of values—that is, a totalitarian regime in the strictest sense of the word.”