1,549 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
A country may be poor with no promising resources to develop, or rich while sitting on vast undeveloped opportunities — 'how splendid to be rich and yet underdeveloped,' Machlup remarks, and the irony sets the tone for this 1957 map of development economics. Rather than treat 'economic development' as one measurable thing, he sorts the field's quarrels into disputes over definitions, objectives, recommendations, and theories, showing that total income, income per head, output per worker, and mass living standards can each move in opposite directions. Ends get confused with instruments: full employment, industrialization, and 'economic independence' harden into doctrines prized for their own sake. Behind the policy clashes he finds contested theories — autarky, infant-industry protection, balanced growth, terms-of-trade strategy — and asks of each exactly what exception to comparative advantage is being claimed.
The recommendation of labor-saving, capital-using investments in countries with abundant labor and scarce capital is a genuine paradox.
Menger, Böhm-Bawerk, and Wieser shared marginal utility with Jevons and Walras, yet Kauder argues that Vienna gave the doctrine a shape found nowhere else. The distinguishing marks are not subjective value itself but philosophical realism and social ontology: an Aristotelian search for the essences behind economic appearances, a suspicion of equations and functional interdependence, and a genetic-causal method that unfolds complex phenomena from consumer valuation. Menger's rejection of Walras's mathematics becomes a symptom of this deeper conception of science. Kauder then reads the school's politics against its Habsburg setting: shaped by Aristotle, Aquinas, Josephinism, and Metternich's bureaucratic paternalism, all three admired competition without embracing Manchester liberalism, and Wieser drifted toward order, charity, and organized social power. Economic method, on this telling, carries an inherited philosophy of reality and society inside it.
For Menger and his followers the model is the photography of a reality behind the appearances of every day life.
Value, on this reading, is an objective and eternal quality grasped in feeling as color is grasped in sight, the thesis Schütz places at the center of Scheler, Husserl's most original successor. The study moves in two arcs. First an epistemology that treats phenomenology as an attitude of eidetic seeing and distinguishes natural, scientific, and phenomenological facts, crowned by the doctrine of three kinds of knowledge: knowledge of control, of essence, and of salvation. Then a material ethics built against Kant, whose formal law Scheler charges with mistaking every material content for the merely empirical, and so excluding love, sympathy, and emotional moral insight. Values form a hierarchy, sensory, vital, spiritual, holy, disclosed in preferring; obligation is grounded in value, never the reverse; and the person, a non-objectifiable center of acts, bears moral worth first of all.
Das emotionale Leben hat auch seinen ursprünglich apriorischen Gehalt, der unserer eidetischen Anschauung zugänglich ist und der eine Phänomenologie des emotionalen Lebens und damit eine Phänomenologie der Werte ermöglicht.
English translation: “Emotional life, too, has its own originally a priori content, which is accessible to our eidetic intuition and which makes possible a phenomenology of emotional life and thus a phenomenology of values.”
Written as prison letters to a daughter, Jawaharlal Nehru's Glimpses of World History becomes, in Engel-Janosi's reading, a revealing experiment in universal history composed from outside the conventional Western centre. He grants the book's flaws—no developed system, uneven proportion, a heavy tilt toward the modern age—while arguing that its very subjectivity gives it significance: India, China, Islam, and the Mongol world stand contemporaneous with Europe rather than subordinate to it. Nehru's premises mix anti-imperial nationalism, a Marxian account of the distribution of wealth, secular ethical religion, and faith in science and progress, aligning him at points with Wells and Toynbee even as his interest in Asia is lived inheritance rather than detached comparison. The essay presents Glimpses less as a solution to universal history than as a document of world history turning genuinely global.
Von den ungefähr 1000 Textseiten beschäftigen sich 400 mit der Periode seit dem Ersten Weltkrieg, während die Zeitalter bis zum Ende des Mittelalters mit 240 auskommen müssen.
English translation: “Of the roughly 1,000 pages of text, 400 deal with the period since the First World War, while the epochs down to the end of the Middle Ages have to make do with 240.”
The slim volume in which Hicks reworked the demand theory of Value and Capital gets a patient, skeptical reading here. Machlup follows Hicks through weak ordering, the derivation of the law of demand, and the awkward Giffen case that requires an inferior good, a small substitution effect, and a large budget share at once. He sorts out the four consumer's surpluses Hicks had once collapsed into one, the First and Second Substitution Theorems, and the reciprocity of cross-effects. His verdict is measured: the revisions change neither policy nor prediction, but they honor Occam's razor by resting demand theory on fewer primitive terms, an important reconstruction, he grants, though difficult and joyless to read.
An important book is sometimes enjoyable to read. Unfortunately this cannot be said about this book.
Grant an inventor exclusive rights over a new process, and you plant a monopoly in an economy that otherwise prizes competition, the tension Machlup was asked to weigh when the Senate patent subcommittee commissioned this study. He traces the institution from Venice's 1474 law and England's Statute of Monopolies through the free-trade antipatent movement of 1850 to 1873, when the Netherlands actually repealed its patent law, and dissects the four classic defenses: natural property in ideas, monopoly as just reward, monopoly profit as incentive, and disclosure traded for temporary exclusivity. His conclusion is a famous refusal to conclude, that on present knowledge economics can pronounce the system neither a clear gain nor a clear loss to society.
To confuse an important invention with the patent that excludes people from using it is like confusing an important bridge with the tollgates that close it to many who might want to use it.
To be responsible for a deed and to be responsible to an authority are, Schütz shows, two different relations, and confusing them makes responsibility look simpler than it is. A further ambiguity divides third-person imputation from first-person experience: where no one else calls me to account, responsibility appears instead as remorse, guilt, and the anguish of an irreversible past. Drawing on Weber's contrast between subjective and objective meaning, this short essay follows the concept as it fractures across laws, duties, determinism, and the deeds of groups. A law means one thing to the legislator, another to the offender or the court; duty shifts when self-imposed rather than laid on from without. Antigone, Orestes, the atomic scientists, and the Nuremberg defendants each mark the gap between what an authority may demand and what an agent inwardly answers for.
Eines ist es, wenn in den Nürnberger Prozessen die Naziführer von den Alliierten zur Verantwortung gezogen werden, und ganz etwas anderes ist es, wenn sie vom deutschen Volk verantwortlich gemacht worden wären.
English translation: “It is one thing when, at the Nuremberg trials, the Nazi leaders are held to account by the Allies, and quite another when they would have been held responsible by the German people.”
'Equilibrium,' in Machlup's hands, is a word doing too many jobs at once: a literal accounting balance, a methodological device for isolating cause, a description of durable historical states, and a smuggled value judgment. The confusion, he argues, comes from sliding among these senses unawares. To label a situation observed in the world an equilibrium commits what he calls the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, since the same facts fit rival models as equilibrium or disequilibrium; to build full employment or price stability into the definition is disguised politics. He carries the critique into international trade theory, praising Joan Robinson's relativism while faulting Nurkse, Ellsworth, and Kindleberger for defining the equilibrium exchange rate through the very policies they happen to favor.
Equilibrium is not a Good Thing, and disequilibrium is not a Bad Thing.
Freedom, in this 1958 Princeton lecture to the Mont Pelerin Society, is neither a gift of nature nor the aristocrat's inherited privilege but a social achievement resting on private property. Mises separates modern liberty from the oligarchic freedoms of Greece and Rome, which shielded a minority while the propertyless surplus was left to coercion, and locates the decisive break in capitalism—defined not as machinery but as mass production to satisfy the needs of the masses. Entrepreneurs, on this account, are revocable mandates of the buying public, disciplined daily by profit and loss. From that premise he argues that freedom is indivisible: whoever cannot choose among brands of soap will not long choose among parties either. Against Lenin's post-office socialism and legal theorists who call property a private government, he defends the market as the infrastructure of dissent.
Government is essentially the negation of liberty.
Joan Robinson's The Accumulation of Capital drew admiration for its rigour, but Lachmann reads its 'Generalisation of the General Theory' as neither Keynesian nor Marxist so much as a Ricardian revival—distribution, accumulation, and technique handled through class categories rather than marginal choice. His critique fastens on what he calls the integrability condition: Robinson must treat the capital stock as the summed total of past net investment, and her 'golden age' is the moving-equilibrium device that keeps that stock measurable under change. But technical progress defeats it. Innovation brings failed experiments, fossilized equipment, and capital gains and losses the model cannot house. Behind the technical objection lies an epistemological one: Robinson's stylized workers, rentiers, and entrepreneurs suppress the divergent judgments and market process through which industrial progress actually occurs.
Homogeneity and progress are at bottom incompatible with each other.
Neither Rome's obedient arm nor a secularizing enemy: the Habsburg monarchy appears in this first volume as a great Catholic power whose dynastic and geopolitical interests repeatedly limited its usefulness to the papacy. Built largely from previously unused diplomatic correspondence out of Vienna and Paris, Engel-Janosi's study runs from the conclave of 1846 through the pontificates of Pius IX and Leo XIII to 1903, tracing the papacy's passage from reformist hope to defensive sovereignty across the revolutions of 1848, the flight to Gaeta, the 1855 Concordat, papal infallibility, and the fall of Rome in 1870. The Italian question sharpens every tension, for temporal power was Rome's own condition of freedom—yet Vienna, defeated and isolated, could not indefinitely subordinate raison d'état to papal restoration. What emerges is a study of mutual dependence in which each side wanted from the other what the other could not give.
William B. Lloyd, Jr. crossed to Switzerland after the Second World War to answer a question historians of great powers seldom pose: how so small and cantankerous a nation, divided in speech and faith, had held itself together and at peace while Europe tore itself apart. Rappard's short preface to Lloyd's book honors the American for mining the arid minutes of the old Diet for an answer of real use. The secret, on Lloyd's telling, lay not in institutions but in temper—conciliation and mediation pursued with patience, a mutual defense accepted only with reluctance, and a neutrality upheld in the wider service of peace. In a few pages Rappard folds another man's inquiry back into the study of Swiss unity that had absorbed his own career.
Here in the heart of the Old World was Switzerland which, throughout the centuries, had succeeded in maintaining within her own narrow borders the peace that her infinitely more powerful neighbors had constantly striven for in vain.