3,801 works, 471 books, 3,267 articles, 60 other works, 3 awaiting classification, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Can science remain neutral toward values when that neutrality permits the destruction of free inquiry? In this 1934 article, Emil Lederer distinguishes the limits of scientific proof from an obligation to accept every creed. His central claim is methodological as well as political: research requires hypotheses that evidence can overturn, not conclusions imposed in advance. Drawing on the debate over value judgments associated with Max Weber, Lederer connects scientific independence with democracy’s right to defend the conditions of public criticism. His discussion of authoritarian rule exposes a particular tension: modern states need scientifically trained citizens while seeking to prohibit independent thought. The article offers a precise account of why objectivity requires commitments to truth and criticism rather than indifference to science’s own survival.
Confronted with Depression-era watchwords that promised quick relief—Ankurbelung, work-sharing, autarky, debt cancellation, demurrage money—this guide for the educated layman tests each against the interdependence of prices, costs, and capital. Machlup argues that credit expansion can simulate revival but, unmatched by real saving, only sustains investments the crisis has already condemned; that unemployment is at bottom a problem of enterprise profitability, not of a fixed quantity of work to be divided; and that protection granted to any branch of production is a national sacrifice paid by consumers and other producers. Defending gold as a restraint on discretionary credit and saving against consumptionist fashion, he closes on the socialist calculation problem: lacking market prices for production goods, no central plan can reckon. First published in Vienna in 1934.
Das Problem der Arbeitslosigkeit ist zur Hauptsache ein Problem der Rentabilität der Unternehmen.
English translation: “The problem of unemployment is, in the main, a problem of the profitability of enterprises.”
How do comparative advantages become the money-price differences that actually direct exports? This is a central test Gottfried Haberler applies to R. F. Harrod’s International Economics in his 1934 review. Admiring the book’s originality, Haberler nevertheless finds its trade theory insufficiently connected to its account of monetary adjustment. His criticism turns on concrete mechanisms: changing factor valuations, the timing of receipts and expenditures, and increased demand in countries receiving international transfers. He also tests managed-currency proposals against the conflicting demands of domestic price stability, fixed exchanges, and protectionist politics. The review offers a compact encounter with Haberler’s insistence that analytical ingenuity must explain how adjustment occurs—and why monetary management cannot simply remove rigidities in wages and other costs.
Abolishing private ownership would not settle how much leather should go into shoes or how resources should be divided between agriculture and railways. In this 1934 newspaper article, Wilhelm Röpke shifts the dispute over capitalism from intentions to the practical means of choosing among competing needs. His objection to comprehensive planning grants administrators intelligence and integrity but questions how they could calculate without market valuations. Yet his defence of markets is conditional: purchasing power is unequal, monopoly severs profit from performance, and capitalists themselves may evade competition or shift losses onto society. The article makes a precise distinction available to readers: preserving the coordinating work of prices need not mean endorsing every existing distribution of wealth or excluding public enterprise and redistribution.
Problems of production must be approached first through the real relations of goods, Strigl argues, and only then through the veil of money — the reverse of the usual procedure. Published in the Zeitschrift fur Nationalokonomie in 1934, this essay reconstructs capital as a wage fund: a stock of subsistence goods that carries workers through the roundabout processes of production, bound into intermediate goods by investment and released again as finished consumer goods. He reconciles the old wage-fund doctrine with marginal-productivity theory through the interest rate, which regulates the length of production, and then turns to money capital as an independent factor. Drawing on the Wicksell-Mises circulation-credit theory, he shows how bank credit finances longer processes without a matching subsistence fund, tearing apart the structure of production until liquidation forces a crisis.
Die unzureichende Freisetzung von Kapital in der Gestalt von Fertigprodukten muß Anlaß zur Krise werden.
English translation: “The insufficient release of capital in the form of finished products must become the occasion of a crisis.”
A machine’s future services and the labour committed to making it describe capital from opposite directions. In this 1934 article, Hayek asks how these perspectives—discounted output and investment through time—can be joined without losing what each explains. His distinction between goods still in production and durable goods already yielding services makes timing central to valuation: neither physical quantities nor a single average production period can adequately measure capital. The interest rate is largely taken as given, allowing the analysis to focus on how it connects commitments with returns. Readers can discover why inherited equipment constrains new investment without dictating its form, and why maintaining output requires attention to when existing services expire and replacements become available.
Economic theory can expose the costs of protecting a factory or an occupational group—but can it decide whether those costs are worth bearing? In this 1934 review of Oskar Morgenstern’s Die Grenzen der Wirtschaftspolitik, Martha Stephanie Braun accepts that political ends need not coincide with maximum material welfare, while defending liberalism’s attention to the interconnected effects of policy. Her disagreement turns on the difference between deliberately accepting economic losses and imagining that intervention can escape its consequences. She also rejects the inference that governmental independence from sectional interests requires authoritarian rule. The review offers a compact encounter between liberal economic analysis and practical political choice: theory cannot select society’s ends, yet policymakers remain responsible for understanding what their chosen means will do.
Eugen Philippovich helped bring Austrian economic theory to German readers without abandoning his commitment to state-directed social reform. In this brief encyclopedia entry, first published in 1934 and reprinted here in 1959, Hayek explains why Philippovich’s reputation as a leading Austrian-school economist needs qualification. His influential textbook mediated between Austrian theory and the German historical school; his growing theoretical interests sharpened his criticism of reform proposals rather than ending his pursuit of an economy that was neither pure capitalism nor socialism. Hayek’s portrait offers a compact example of how transmitting a school’s ideas differs from belonging to it—and how theoretical scrutiny can coexist with a sustained political commitment to intervention.
In Buin, shell currency could secure pigs, pigs could furnish feasts, and feasts could turn wealth into standing. Richard C. Thurnwald’s 1934 article follows these connections to ask how calculation and profit operate within relationships of kinship, dependence, and reciprocal obligation. Drawing on fieldwork in Bougainville and comparison with his earlier observations, he describes chiefs who lend valuables, households reluctant to slaughter their own pigs, and wealthy men whose exchange skills challenge hereditary rank. The tension is concrete: circulation sustains authority but also gives others the means to contest it. His account lets readers examine the transactions behind his proposed pig-based standard of value, while distinguishing those observations from his more conjectural explanations of currency’s origins and social development.
Financial independence required more than a declaration: Czechoslovakia’s first finance minister stamped Austrian banknotes and withdrew half those presented through a compulsory loan. In this brief encyclopedia entry, republished in 1937, Karel Engliš uses such measures to make Alois Rašín’s organizing achievement concrete. His portrait holds admiration for Rašín’s determination alongside criticism of his narrow views and harsh methods. A distinctive tension emerges between building the state’s financial machinery and opposing reliance upon the state. Engliš also asks, implicitly, how fiscal policy acquires moral authority: in his judgement, Rašín’s violent death transformed balanced finances from a political commitment into an unwritten national law.
Walther Rathenau sought to reorganize industry while fearing that a more equal society would lose its cultural vitality. In this compact biographical encyclopedia entry, Emil Lederer places that tension beside Rathenau’s practical achievements as an industrialist, wartime organizer and diplomat. Producer-consumer guilds, inheritance reform and coordinated planning promised to restore responsibility and meaning to work; yet, in Lederer’s judgement, Rathenau could imagine redistribution more readily than a transformation of cultural life. Lederer challenges his assumption that art depended on a wealthy upper class, arguing that social reconstruction could also alter relations between creators and audiences. The entry offers a sharply focused encounter with a reformer whose organizational ambitions exceeded his confidence in the society they might produce.
An economist need not be an original thinker to shape generations of administrators. In this brief encyclopedia entry, first published in 1934 and reprinted here in 1954, Karl Pribram explains Karl Heinrich Rau’s influence through the teaching framework of his textbook: economic principles, economic policy, and public finance. Pribram distinguishes the authority of this synthesis from theoretical innovation, locating Rau’s more enduring contribution in his insistence that expenditure and taxation be judged by their effects on production and economic well-being. The entry offers a compact account of how textbook organization and fiscal reasoning can leave a legacy beyond an economist’s waning doctrinal influence.