1,549 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Before 1914, Reisch observes, payments between nations moved smoothly because trade was freer, exchange rates were stable, and gold served as a common standard; the wreck of that order — through inflation, the abandonment of gold, and what he takes to be erroneous theory — is the disorder this book proposes to cure by stages. He rejects Keynes's money as a mere state-defined unit of account and Hahn's notion of banks conjuring purchasing power from nothing, insisting that credit always rests on real goods or claims. With Ernst Ružička he sketches a subsidiary payment system: neighboring states set up foreign trade banks and reciprocal gold-denominated credit lines, issuing Valutabons whose A coupons cover favored imports and whose B coupons, carrying a customs premium, cover tolerated ones — Leistungskompensation in place of shipping gold.
Die Vermengung der Begriffe Zahlungsmittel und Kreditbefriedigungsmittel erweist sich jedoch als verhängnisvoll: Geld ist wohl Gegenstand der Gewährung von Kredit, Kredit aber ist kein geeignetes Mittel, beliebig viel neues Geld zu schaffen.
English translation: “The conflation of the concepts of means of payment and means of satisfying credit proves to be disastrous: money is indeed an object of the granting of credit, but credit is not a suitable means for creating arbitrary amounts of new money.”
Could the money already spent on the dole be reorganized so that the unemployed produce necessities for one another? That is the wager of this 1937 monograph, which treats postwar joblessness as structural rather than cyclical and finds ordinary relief a guarantee of idleness and emergency public works too costly to generalize. Mahr first dismantles rival schemes: Lederer's disguised socialization of idle plant and the substitute-currency plans of Graham and of Eaton, Cheadle, and Ewing, which would leak into the money economy and dump discounted goods on ordinary producers. His own Hilfswerk rests on binding advance orders, payment in restricted vouchers redeemable only within the scheme, and the inclusion of farm surpluses and part-time settlement, so that a disciplined emergency economy sustains the excluded without inflation or market displacement.
Wäre die ganze Produktion auf Vorausbestellungen aufgebaut, gäbe es natürlich auch keine Absatzkrisen, weil eben dann nur die Waren erzeugt würden, welche schon im Vorhinein ihre Abnehmer gefunden haben.
English translation: “If the whole of production were built on advance orders, there would of course be no sales crises either, because then only those goods would be produced which had already found their buyers in advance.”
From Poggio Bracciolini's first sustained notice, through Enea Silvio Piccolomini's richly imagined portrait, to Louis Le Roy's culminating myth, Voegelin traces how Renaissance humanists built and handed down an image of Timur. The conqueror served in turn as proof that modern deeds could rival antiquity, as an emblem of fortuna balanced against Bajazid's fall, and finally as the violent founder-sign of a new cultural age, comparable to Alexander before Hellenism. Voegelin's method is to catalogue the recurring anecdotal elements—the humble origin, the sworn band of first companions, Ankara, the three tents, the claim to be God's wrath—and to show that their very selection, stripped of Mongol political history, is what lends the portraits their characterological force. Only widening knowledge of Oriental sources and source-critical philology finally dissolved the fixed image.
Das persönliche Charisma, die Schöpfung eines Bundes und die Steigerung der erobernden Vernichtung bis zur Idee einer Exekution des göttlichen Willens sind die innersten Sinngehalte, bis zu denen die Humanisten in ihrem Bild von Timur vordringen.
English translation: “Personal charisma, the creation of a covenant, and the intensification of conquering destruction into the idea of an execution of the divine will—these are the innermost layers of meaning to which the humanists penetrate in their image of Timur.”
Naturally among the poorest countries in Europe, yet per head the richest in capital: from this paradox Somary's ten theses, delivered at the University of Zurich in February 1937, unfold a warning to a small neutral state. Switzerland's fortune, he argues, rests on four centuries of peace and a liberal order that replaced power between states with achievement between individuals—an order now collapsing. The decisive modern conflict, he contends, lies not between liberalism and socialism but between a peace economy and a war economy, in which the sovereign consumer becomes a burden and bureaucratic allocation supplants the market. He tracks the exposure of Swiss creditors to German debts, condemns Britain's 1931 devaluation as a spreading contagion, and grounds the country's last defense in the inviolability of life, liberty, honor, and property.
Auf das dringendste muß gefordert werden, daß die Pandorabüchse der Abwertung endgültig versiegelt und künftig nie anders als bei Kriegsgefahr geöffnet werde.
English translation: “It must be demanded in the most urgent terms that the Pandora's box of devaluation be sealed once and for all, and henceforth never opened except in the event of the danger of war.”
Strip away its empirical content, and equilibrium theory is merely a "Pure Logic of Choice" — true by definition, silent about the world. In this 1937 presidential address Hayek asks what must be assumed about the knowledge of separate minds before such analysis can say anything causal. Equilibrium, he argues, means the compatibility of individual plans through time, and "correct foresight" is not a premise added from outside but the very thing equilibrium describes. The familiar appeal to a perfect market merely disguises omniscience as market form. What economics neglects is the division of knowledge — as fundamental as the division of labor — and the learning by which dispersed, situated fragments come into alignment. The essay marks Hayek's turn toward his mature account of markets as coordinators of knowledge no single mind could hold.
The situation seems here to be that before we can explain why people commit mistakes, we must first explain why they should ever be right.
Meant to arm the reader against vulgar economic slogans and the reflexes of interest-group politics, this 1937 textbook compresses the secured foundations of economics into a single systematic course. Strigl begins from the free-market price as a selective mechanism, builds through diminishing returns, the Malthusian population law and its qualification by capital and technical progress, and marginal productivity as the key to wages and distribution. Capital enters as roundabout production and a subsistence fund, interest as the marginal product of capital-time. The later chapters carry the apparatus into money and the gold standard, the credit-driven boom and its Harvard-barometer crisis, tax shifting, comparative costs and the case against protection, and finally the socialist calculation problem. Throughout he insists that economics studies the consequences of measures and must never prescribe political ends.
Eine Darstellung wirtschaftlicher Zusammenhänge muß sich gegenüber allen Fragen der Politik neutral verhalten.
English translation: “A presentation of economic relationships must remain neutral with respect to all questions of policy.”
Neither wealth in itself nor a lever that could hoist an economy out of distress from the monetary side alone, money and credit are for Bayer indispensable but strictly serving institutions. Cast as twenty-two questions for workers' education, this booklet moves from the emergence of money out of barter and the division of labour, through coinage, banknotes, and cashless giro payments, to banking, the credit market, the stock exchange, and the note bank's discount policy. Its governing norm is neutrality: currency serves best when it merely facilitates the course of the economy. From that standard Bayer dismisses the fashionable reform schemes of the day—index currency, and above all Silvio Gesell's depreciating 'Freigeld'—and reads the 1932 Wörgl experiment not as proof of shrinkage-money theory but as an unusual method of collecting municipal taxes, its losses falling on small traders.
Das Geld als Zahlungsmittel ist aber ebensowenig Kapital wie der elektrische Leitungsdraht elektrische Kraft ist.
English translation: “Money as a means of payment is no more capital than the electrical conducting wire is electrical power.”
The more capital goods an economy produces, the lower the return on further investment must fall — so runs the static inference this sharp intervention in trade-cycle theory sets out to break. The confusion, Hayek locates in the ambiguity of "capital": aggregate value versus the concrete form and arrangement of capital goods. Investment comes in complementary chains, and once specific fixed capital is sunk, its owners accept prices barely above operating cost, transferring the expected interest to later stages — so that completing a project begun under a 4 percent expectation stays worthwhile even at rates that would have blocked it. A hydroelectric plant may turn unprofitable yet still generate demand for motors. Past investment can thus raise, not lower, the demand for funds, with credit expansion the chief practical trigger.
The success of current investment will depend upon this expectation being fulfilled.
For the fiftieth-anniversary volume of the Revue d'Economie Politique, Strigl described how economics was actually taught in the universities of his own Vienna — here in the French translation prepared for that Paris series. Long a marginal subject lodged within the law faculties and pushed late in the curriculum, economics had, he explains, been reduced for many students to an examination hurdle despite teaching of the first rank in the Austrian School tradition. He works through the old regulations, the 1935 reform that lengthened legal study and introduced early exercises in basic economic concepts, and the little-used Staatswissenschaft doctorate, before turning to the technical schools and the Austrian Institute for Business Cycle Research. His closing claim is plain: the worldwide reputation of the Austrian School is itself the best evidence for the quality of that teaching.
Pendant longtemps, l'enseignement économique, rattaché exclusivement aux facultés de droit, n'occupait, dans les programmes d'enseignement juridique, qu'une place peu saillante.
English translation: “For a long time, economic instruction, attached exclusively to the faculties of law, occupied only a minor place in the programs of legal education.”
A productive service is never simply a thing but a quantity applied over an interval, and from that observation Machlup builds a patient dismantling of loose talk about the marginal product. Labour-hours, acre-seasons, machine-days: each unit depends on divisibility, and highly qualified labour may be hired by the minute at one extreme or by five-year contract at the other. 'Efficiency units' tempt the theorist into circularity, since a theory meant to explain factor prices cannot first define factor quantities by those prices. What matters for a firm's hiring, he argues, is neither extra bushels nor their value at an unchanged price, but an expected, dated, discounted money net product framed by a definite competitive situation — marginal productivity rendered conditional rather than emptied of meaning.
This third dimension is, then, the time interval between the application of any productive service, say a labor-hour, and the enjoyment of its product.
Kerschagl's 1938 inaugural lecture surveys Austria's contribution to modern economics as both doctrinal history and methodological self-portrait, and its verdict is pointed: scientific economics on Austrian soil begins not with cameralism or mercantilism but with the marginal-utility school. Menger supplies the foundations of subjective value and imputation; Böhm-Bawerk extends them into capital, interest, and taxation; Wieser gives the theory a broader social cast—before Mises, Hayek, Schumpeter, Morgenstern, and Haberler enlarge the field. What unites them, he argues, is not uniform doctrine but an elastic analytical core, and he plays down the Methodenstreit with the German historical school as an exaggerated quarrel. Universalist organic economics, associated with Spann, earns cautious respect: valuable for recalling economists to society, but unable to replace causal explanation with metaphysical totality.
Die Ökonomie kann daher auch selbstverständlich keine größere Sicherheit bieten, als eben die beschränkte der Erfahrung selbst.
English translation: “Economics can therefore of course offer no greater certainty than the limited certainty of experience itself.”
Every government that gathered at Geneva professed the Cobdenite creed that commerce breeds peace; every government, called to concrete concessions, reached instead for the tariff, the quota, and the bargaining duty. Delivered as the Cobden Lectures at the London School of Economics in February 1938, these three lectures reconstruct two decades of League conferences—Brussels, Genoa, the bold 1927 resolution to halt and reverse the rise of tariffs, the wrecked London gathering of 1933—and ask why they failed. Rappard sorts the protectionist arguments by purpose rather than chronology, weighing infant-industry claims and agrarian defenses, and locates the deepest cause not in ignorance or private greed but in the fear of war, which drove nations toward autarky. From Geneva, he warns, no honest message of optimism can come.
Thus those who could, will not, and those who would, cannot.