1,549 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
A prediction come true frames this 1932 pamphlet: the crisis, its author had forecast, would end only after Italian banking reconstruction, the collapse and reorganization of Germany's banks, Britain's suspension of gold, and the fall of the Kreuger concern. With those grim preconditions fulfilled, Somary asks whether the turn has come. He indicts moratoria and the German Stillhalteabkommen as evasions that postpone necessary write-downs, argues that commodity prices have reached a despair point from which raw-material countries will lead recovery, and reads France's vast hoarded gold reserve—explained through the memory of John Law and the assignats—as a latent support. His proposals bind reparations to guaranteed purchases of American wheat, cotton, and copper, cut expenditure to revenue, and rehabilitate currencies by telling the truth and writing down claims.
Mit „Kreditschöpfung“ ist wenig zu erreichen, es fehlt nicht an Kapital noch an Kredit, sondern an guten Schuldnern.
English translation: “Little can be achieved with "credit creation"; what is lacking is neither capital nor credit, but sound debtors.”
Haberler delivered this lecture with the Depression as backdrop, but treats panics, bank failures and crashes as secondary drama; the real object of explanation is the recurrent rhythm of expansion and contraction in business activity. Money is a necessary condition of the cycle, though not in the crude quantity-theory sense: stable prices in the 1920s, he argues, concealed a "relative inflation" in which credit expansion masked the fall that rising productivity should have produced. The decisive shift is from the level of prices to the vertical structure of production. When bank credit pushes the market rate of interest below the rate warranted by voluntary saving, entrepreneurs lengthen production into more roundabout, capital-intensive projects that consumers have not chosen to fund — a maladjustment that the depression, painfully, corrects. Reflation aimed merely at purchasing power risks reviving the very disproportions that need liquidating.
The fundamental appearance of the business cycle is a wavelike movement of business activity
By 1932 capitalism had, on Lederer's reading, long ceased to be a purely free economy: tariffs, cartels, subsidies, emergency decrees, and bank rescues had already rewritten circulation and investment. The real question was not whether planning should enter an untouched market, but whether the planning everywhere present would stay defensive and irrational or become conscious coordination. Free economy and planned economy, he argues, are opposites only in principle; in practice they interpenetrate. He proposes a planned emergency sector, idle factories and unemployed hands producing necessities distributed outside ordinary sale, and locates the true lever in credit, whose control becomes control over production itself. Planning, he insists, is not nationalization; a socialized firm still bound to the market must obey it. Against Mises he holds that prices, money, and consumer choice survive the plan, leaving economic calculation intact.
Das Problem der „Wirtschaftsrechnung“ in der Planwirtschaft ist also ein Scheinproblem.
English translation: “The problem of "economic calculation" in the planned economy is thus a pseudo-problem.”
A hostile notice in the Prenzlauer Zeitung, picking up a foreign source's reading of an article he had written for the Lloyds Review, forced Schumpeter to explain himself to his faculty dean. The letter reconstructs the piece's reluctant, patriotic origin, commissioned through Lloyds Bank and Sir William Dampier and taken up only after an appeal to his national feeling, and restates its transfer-theoretical core: reparations cannot be treated as a bare legal demand when world protectionism, and France's Kontingentierungspolitik in particular, block the German exports through which alone they could be paid. Insistence on the claim, he argues, must be tested against willingness to accept German goods. By authorizing the dean to circulate the letter, he turns a private defense into a document of Weimar intellectual politics.
Wenn das Bestehen auf der Reparationsforderung keine böse Schikane sein soll, so müsste sich die Welt im Allgemeinen vom Protektionismus abwenden und Frankreich im besonderen seine Kontingentierungspolitik aufgeben, was das wahre Kriterium der Annahmewilligkeit und doch nicht unmöglich wäre.
English translation: “If insistence on the reparations claim is not to be sheer malicious harassment, then the world in general would have to turn away from protectionism, and France in particular would have to abandon its quota policy—which would be the true criterion of a willingness to accept payment, and yet would not be impossible.”
Accused by the Prenzlauer Zeitung of denying Germany's capacity to make further tribute payments, Schumpeter answers the newspaper directly, and his grievance is as much logical as political. To prove an impossibility, he explains, one first states the conditions under which the thing would be possible and then shows that they do not obtain; the paper had seized only that first, conditional step and reversed the argument into its opposite. He notes that the editors relied uncritically on a source known to be unfriendly to Germany, that a telephone call would have spared them the error, and that a German teacher was hardly likely to hold the position ascribed to him. Nationalist in tone yet formal in method, the short letter defends argumentative accuracy under the pressure of the reparations crisis.
Reißt ein feindlicher Bericht das erste Glied heraus und lässt er die Bedingungen, deren Unmöglichkeit die Unmöglichkeit des Tributs erweist, weg, so ist das Argument in sein Gegenteil verkehrt.
English translation: “If a hostile report tears out the first link and omits the conditions whose impossibility proves the impossibility of the tribute, then the argument is turned into its opposite.”
Taking up Karl Knies's proposal to rank means of exchange as a third class beside consumer and producer goods, Mises, read here in the English translation of the 1932 original, builds a subjective theory of money's value. Its worth, he argues, springs from demanded monetary services, not from any intrinsic material use, and analysis must start from the individual's cash balance rather than aggregates like velocity or the equation of exchange. He rescues the quantity theory's core while discarding its mechanical version: new money enters through particular hands and redistributes wealth before prices adjust, never proportionally or all at once. A sharp line separates money proper, fully backed certificates, and unbacked fiduciary media, the last being what truly moves prices and interest. Perfectly stable money, he concludes, is a wish to escape the temporal nature of capitalism itself.
Only with the use of money is it possible to compare the marginal utility of goods in all alternative employments.
When one people takes over the tools, rites, and ideas of another, what is adopted rarely keeps its old function. Acculturation, Thurnwald argues here, is a dynamic socio-psychological process rather than a mechanical transfer, driven by individual learning, imitation, and leadership, and passing through distinct phases: initial suspicion, eager imitation, the fear of losing one's identity, and eventual recovery or self-assertion. He distinguishes selective, rejective, eliminative, and transformative responses, drawing on New Guinea, Africa, Japan's reopening, Europe, and Indigenous North America, and stresses that what passes between peoples depends on the receiving culture's own traditions. Wars, migrations, and political upheavals, he concludes, are only the visible climaxes of these deeper and slower adaptations in the life of cultures.
The acquisition of any civilizatory accomplishment is not limited to the act of acceptance like the moving of an object from one case in a museum to another.
No stable middle ground exists between a free economy and a fully controlled one — that is the verdict Vleugels reaches after examining the neglected theory of officially bound prices. Following Mises, he separates Ordnungstaxen, which merely track competitive prices and disturb little, from echte Taxen, genuine controls set below them, and shows how the latter set off a chain reaction. A maximum price below the market cuts supply, diverts goods elsewhere, and forces controls onto substitutes, then onto factors of production and wages, until — invoking Wieser's notion of production relatedness — the whole price structure must be bound together. Neither an enduring order nor a gentle bridge to socialism, genuine price-fixing emerges here as a primitive interventionist measure that harms the very people it means to protect.
Ebensowenig wie ein ausgebautes Taxsystem als Endzustand der Volkswirtschaft denkbar wäre, ebensowenig kommt es praktisch auch als Anfangszustand zur Überleitung in eine sozialistische Wirtschaft in Frage.
English translation: “Just as a fully developed system of price fixings is inconceivable as the terminal state of an economy, so too is it practically out of the question as an initial state for the transition into a socialist economy.”
The Great War left Europe's monetary circulation almost wholly in the hands of central banks, which now furnish money rather than merely regulating it — the departure point for Reisch's practical observations, built on Menger, Mises, and Wieser. He reconsiders the banknote itself: once cash payments were suspended, its promise of redemption became a fiction, so the modern Schilling note is better read as a certificate of value whose parity the bank must defend. A discount rate held below the natural rate, he warns, drives production into overlong roundabout processes that end in liquidation and crisis; a wholly cashless economy, against Hahn, remains a fantasy; and the central bank stands as a primus inter pares disciplining the giro-money creation of private banks.
Es ist daher gewiß richtig, wenn die Federal Reserve-Banken die ihnen überreichlich zufließenden Goldmengen in weitem Maße „unausgenützt“ in ihren Kellern einsperren und nicht als Grundlage weiterer Kreditexpansion verwenden.
English translation: “It is therefore certainly correct that the Federal Reserve Banks largely lock away "unused" in their vaults the excessively abundant gold flowing to them, and do not use it as a basis for further credit expansion.”
No explanation of the world crisis can dispense with the business cycle, and none can make do with it alone: from that double warning Schumpeter narrows a broad diagnosis to Germany's emergency policy of cutting prices and incomes together. Were every price, income, and value to fall at the same instant and in equal proportion, nothing real would change, but because book values, debts, inventories, and expectations cannot adjust uniformly, administrative deflation breeds the paralysis it claims to cure, driving unemployment toward seven million. Its one rational function is temporary, a strategic thrust to strengthen the mark and shift the reparations argument, to be dropped the moment it succeeds or clearly fails. The essay closes on fiscal causality, arguing through counterfactual that disciplined spending since 1924 could have spared Germany, since here public finance is destiny.
Für Deutschland sind die Finanzen Schicksal, rationelle Wirtschaft Lebensfrage.
English translation: “For Germany, finance is destiny, and rational economic management is a matter of life and death.”
The one hopeful element in Franco-German relations, Schumpeter argues in this 1932 view written for Lloyds Bank Monthly Review, is the economic factor, yet economics alone cannot overcome a political psychology shaped by victory, defeat, and the memory of war. Reparations are the crucial mixed case: economically damaging, since Germany cannot pay while creditor nations bar the exports that would earn the foreign exchange, but politically indispensable to a France that reads them as right and security, so that no ministry can revise them without courting political death. Against nationalist rhetoric he insists the two economies are complementary rather than antagonistic; agriculture divides them little, and disputes in porcelain, nitrogen, potash, coal, and automobiles are negotiable through committees and cartel-like compromise. French capital cannot substitute for confidence; loans that merely paper over political maladjustment only postpone the crisis.
No party or ministry can afford to neglect them unless it is prepared to encounter political death.
How does one write the life of a statesman without dissolving it into general history or shrinking it to private psychology? Engel-Janosi answers with a political biography of Alexander von Hübner, the illegitimate Viennese boy, rumor made Metternich his father, who rose through the State Chancellery to become one of Franz Joseph's sharpest diplomatic observers. The book follows him through the 1848 collapse in Milan and his near-lynching at Brescia, the Paris embassy under the Second Republic and Napoleon III, his advocacy of the Crimean alliance against Russia, a brief tenure as police minister, and finally Rome, where he watched the temporal power of the papacy fade. Formed by late-Romantic Catholic legitimism, Hübner distrusted mass politics and industrial modernity, holding to a unifying imperial idea over any written formula.
Die Konstitutionen lassen sich nicht erfinden.
English translation: “Constitutions cannot be invented.”