1,549 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Legislation cannot undo an injury, Mataja begins, but it can decide who bears the unavoidable loss—and that allocation, he argues, is at bottom an economic question. Turning the law of damages over to national economics, he attacks the Roman-derived dogma that accidental loss simply falls where it lands and that liability outside contract requires proven fault. Where an enterprise generates risks borne by others, non-liability produces a false valuation of goods, since the owner reaps the benefit while the harm is externalized; better, he contends, to ground liability in enterprise risk, control, and benefit. The book carries the case into employer liability, compulsory accident and old-age insurance, and the subjective value theory of Menger, Böhm-Bawerk, and Wieser, distinguishing damnum emergens from lucrum cessans.
Ökonomisch muß aber hier schon deshalb eine irgendwie geartete Verantwortlichkeit gefordert werden, weil andernfalls durch das Recht eine volkswirtschaftlich falsche Wertschätzung der Güter hervorgerufen wird.
English translation: “Economically, however, some form of responsibility must be demanded here, if only because otherwise the law would produce an economically false valuation of goods.”
The form an economy takes and the principle by which it operates are two different questions that earlier economists persistently confused—so Groß contends in this 1888 contribution to the theory of how a national economy is organised. A state railway and a private one may differ utterly as economic subjects, he argues, yet run on the same private-economic principle of exchange. On that hinge he builds a taxonomy of economic forms—individual, family, collective, both free and compulsory, and subjectless—and of four principles: self-economic, private-economic, common-economic, and charitable. Drawing on Wagner and Schäffle while claiming to correct them, he charts the steady advance of the common-economic principle through roads, post, and schooling, but marks its absolute limits: luxury and differentiated needs, the valuation of intellectual work, the family, and the incentives on which productive effort depends.
Das privatwirtschaftliche Prinzip gestattet die vollkommenste Entfaltung aller wirtschaftlichen Kräfte, aber auch die rücksichtsloseste Anwendung derselben.
English translation: “The private-economic principle permits the most complete development of all economic forces, but also their most ruthless application.”
Economists since Adam Smith had borrowed the everyday word Kapital and pinned it to artificial scientific categories, and the result, Menger argues, was not precision but systematic confusion. This offprint from the Jahrbücher für Nationalökonomie und Statistik dismantles three reigning definitions in turn — capital as income-yielding wealth, as means of production, and as Smithian products devoted to further production — showing that the distinction between nature, labor, and product belongs to technical genealogy, not economics: wild timber and cultivated timber of equal quality do the same work. In place of these aggregations he restores the Realbegriff, capital as money sums devoted to acquisitive enterprise, and demotes interest to one case within a wider theory of Vermögensertrag, the yield of wealth.
Der Weg zur Beseitigung der auf dem Gebiete der Kapitaltheorie herrschenden Verwirrung ist die Rückkehr zum Realbegriffe des Kapitals.
English translation: “The way to eliminate the confusion prevailing in the field of capital theory is a return to the real concept of capital.”
A state budget can be read as a record of political transformation, and Baden's — traced from the near-sovereign fiscal year 1868/69 to the imperial order of 1888/89 — registers the passage of a German Land into the Reich. Foreign affairs, military command, and postal administration move upward; education, welfare, roads, and railways swell the accounts that remain. Philippovich shows how Matrikularbeiträge and imperial transfers made the budget dependent on decisions taken from afar, and how railways, which he refused to treat as ordinary profit-seeking enterprises, became the chief weakness in the state's balance through mounting railway debt. Successive tax reforms — capital-rent, the Erwerbsteuer, and the 1884 income tax — redistribute burdens, yet direct taxation stays the core of Baden's finances.
Man muß sich daran gewöhnen, die Eisenbahnen nicht als gewerbliche Unternehmungen zur Erzielung eines Geschäftsgewinnes anzusehen, sondern als unentbehrliche Grundlage des Volkswohlstandes unserer Zeit, als ein Mittel zum Zweck der menschlichen Gesellschaft.
English translation: “One must become accustomed to regarding railways not as commercial enterprises for the attainment of business profit, but as an indispensable foundation of the popular welfare of our time, as a means to the ends of human society.”
Setting exchange deliberately aside to observe what happens inside a single self-contained economy, this inquiry—dedicated to Carl Menger—seeks the root of value in the factual relation between scarce useful forces and recurring needs. Komorzynski develops a law of the continuity of needs and a 'steady state' of the stock of goods, then measures a force's economic significance by the permanent loss its disappearance would inflict on the least urgent satisfactions still secured. He credits Menger's marginal value theory with escaping the errors of the older German use-value school—concrete quantities, multiple needs, complementary production goods—yet faults it for leaving available quantities unexplained and for treating consumer and production goods inconsistently. Value, on his account, belongs only to continuously effective forces and always presupposes the economy's possible reorganization.
Das Product ist stets ungetheilt das Ergebnis der Wirksamkeit der aufgewandten Produktionsmittel.
English translation: “The product is always, undivided, the result of the joint action of the means of production employed.”
Since 1879 the Austrian gulden had puzzled observers by circulating well above the market value of the eleven and a half grams of fine silver stamped into it — a premium the German thaler and the French five-franc piece could not explain, since those coins drew their value from gold circulating beside them. Here the anomaly is traced instead to scarcity: when the state suspended private silver coinage, it blocked the money supply from expanding as silver fell, and the coined gulden acquired a scarcity value resting on a mere unit of account. The outcome was a domestic measure of value steadier than most, yet exposed to grave danger, since a single administrative decree resuming coinage could cut the real worth of every claim by a fifth.
Der Zustand des österreichischen Geldwesens bietet seit ungefähr zehn Jahren das Bild einer volkswirtschaftlichen Anomalie dar, welche zu den interessantesten und merkwürdigsten in der Geschichte der Umlaufsmittel gehört.
English translation: “For about ten years the state of Austrian monetary affairs has presented the picture of an economic anomaly which belongs among the most interesting and remarkable in the history of the media of circulation.”
When Lujo Brentano told a Vienna audience in 1888 that classical economics had erected its doctrines on an abstract, gain-driven phantom of a human being, and that the abstract method itself had bred the labor theory of value, the wage-fund, and the iron law of wages, Böhm-Bawerk answered him here. He grants the two charges that stick: the classics did reason with abstract agents, and they did teach grave errors. But the causal link, he argues, is a post hoc fallacy, since marginal utility theory sprang from the same isolating analysis and fits self-interest better. Errors were the fault of individual theorists, not of method; abstraction remains the necessary first sketch, like a crude relief map awaiting detail. His closing motto refuses the whole quarrel: the future belongs to history and theory together.
Es gibt in ihrer Psychologie nur zwei Triebfedern menschlichen Handelns: nämlich das Streben nach dem größtmöglichen Gewinn und den Geschlechtstrieb.
English translation: “In its psychology there are only two mainsprings of human action: namely, the striving for the greatest possible gain and the sexual instinct.”
Delivered to the Gehe-Stiftung in Dresden on 10 March 1888, the day after Kaiser Wilhelm's death, this lecture drew an unexpectedly large audience for strict economic theory. Sax argues that German economics, for all its achievements in history and social policy, lacks the pure theory that stands to applied practice as physics and chemistry stand to technology. That foundation, he contends, is the psychology of scarcity: economics is applied psychology, the study of the mental processes by which dependence on limited external means motivates action. Value is no objective property of goods but a subjective excitation, measurable through exchange and money as heat is measured by a thermometer. From this single law of value he claims to derive prices, capital, interest, and public finance alike, treating fees and taxes as value phenomena rather than questions of justice.
Die Werthgröße ist umgekehrt proportional dem Güterbefiße, direct proportional der Stärke der fraglichen Bedürfnisse eines Individuums.
English translation: “The magnitude of value is inversely proportional to the possession of goods, and directly proportional to the intensity of the individual's needs in question.”
A hundred years after Friedrich List's birth at Reutlingen, this commemorative essay separates his lasting insight from the protectionism later built in his name. Menger traces the phases of a life that did not run in the quiet paths of a German professor — the Württemberg liberal reformer prosecuted as a Demagog and driven into American exile, the railway promoter and Zollverein advocate, the author of the 1841 Nationales System der politischen Oekonomie. His central claim is that List invented a national conception of political economy for a fragmented Germany: free trade within, protective tariffs without, yet tariffs meant as a temporary schooling of productive forces rather than a permanent creed. Later economists, Menger warns, turned that national egoism into a mask for class privilege and particularism.
Die Bedeutung List's als bahnbrechender Reformator der volkswirtschaftlichen Ideen wurde erst nach seinem Tode erkannt.
English translation: “List's significance as a pioneering reformer of economic ideas was recognised only after his death.”
In the aftermath of the Methodenstreit, the quarrel over method that divided Menger's Austrians from the German historical school, this offprint steps back from doctrines of value or price to ask how economic knowledge should be ordered. The threat it names is an encyclopedic political economy that dissolves everything economic into one externally arranged aggregate. Against it Menger distinguishes sciences classed by their object from sciences classed by their cognitive aim, and sorts the field into historical-statistical, morphological, theoretical, and applied branches, each with its own legitimacy. His sharpest defense is reserved for practical economics: against the positivist claim that science may treat only what is and what has been, he argues that applied sciences furnish conditional knowledge of means to chosen ends — not recipes, but reasoned procedures requiring judgment.
Die Lösung der hier berührten methodologischen Probleme ist ein dringendes Bedürfnis unserer Wissenschaft.
English translation: “The solution of the methodological problems touched upon here is an urgent need of our science.”
Inama-Sternegg treats the medieval Salland — the demesne land the great lord worked on his own account — as the hinge between estate administration, farming technique, and social power. Across four studies he tracks the Carolingian villa system into its long decline: royal, secular, and ecclesiastical estates lose active command of production, the Cistercian granges reclaim wilderness as model self-cultivating enterprises, and the demesne hufen operate as advance posts of a more intensive agriculture. The decisive agent of dissolution is the Meier, the estate steward who fixes deliveries, appropriates dues, and makes his office hereditary until he emerges as a ministerial lord. Once corvée labour is commuted into money, the lord's own husbandry becomes impossible, and productive leadership passes from the old great lordship to a rising rural nobility — a victory, in modern terms, of labour over capital.
Die Wirthschaftsgeschichte eines Volkes ist immer zugleich die Geschichte seiner sozialen Ordnung.
English translation: “The economic history of a people is always at the same time the history of its social order.”
Because public law rests on a contested theory of the state, and on a will that both makes law and is bound by it, it is, Landesberger argues in this 1889 Vienna dissertation address delivered under imperial auspices, uniquely unstable and best approached historically. He begins from Kant, for whom the state's sole task is to posit and protect law, then charts how history outgrew that legal-protection state: the French Revolution's separation of powers, the collapse of the Holy Roman Empire, and Fichte's national conception. The modern Rechtsstaat emerges as a Kulturstaat animated by a unified state will and answerable to 'society,' the dynamic stratification of a people; equality before the law figures less as an individual right than as society's freedom against class domination. The speech closes on the Habsburg motto Viribus unitis.
Der Rechtsstaat ist nicht die politische und culturelle allein, er ist auch die ethische Organisation eines Volkes!
English translation: “The Rechtsstaat is not merely the political and cultural, it is also the ethical organisation of a people!”