1,549 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Long before the Austrians gave it a name, the mechanism had been discovered and lost under a dozen labels. This historiographical note traces the doctrine of "forced saving" — how new paper money or bank credit, entering through borrowers, temporarily shifts command over the existing flow of goods, so that rising prices and lagging incomes compel some to consume less while entrepreneurs invest more. Hayek finds the earliest clear statement in Jeremy Bentham's neglected manuscripts on "forced frugality," where monetary issue works like an indirect tax, and follows the thread through Thornton, Malthus, Mill, and Walras to Wicksell's gap between the money and natural rates of interest. Even Keynes, rejecting the label, preserves the problem when he describes investment exceeding saving. Cycle theory, the genealogy suggests, is less an Austrian novelty than a recurrent monetary insight.
Here, as in the above case of forced frugality, national wealth is increased at the expense of national comfort and national justice.
Where the theory was built, this second volume turns to the evidence — prices, output, employment, commodity markets, deposits, loans, and interest — reading every series as the trace of an evolutionary mechanism rather than a barometer that speaks for itself. Schumpeter's method is deliberately anti-barometric: no single index reveals the cycle's true shape, and the Kondratieff–Juglar–Kitchin schema must be used historically, never mechanically. The financial chapters refuse to crown interest as the master cause: it saturates capitalist calculation yet is fundamentally consequential, causal only in a secondary sense, and entrepreneurial demand for credit moves rates before rates move anything. He dissolves the rigid money-market/capital-market divide, denies any secular law of declining interest, and rejects the Hayek–Mises–Hawtrey claim that bank-initiated cheap money originates the cycle.
In this sense interest may indeed be said to hold a central position in the system.
A federation of formerly sovereign states can secure peace, this German-language essay argues, only as an economic union — yet that union disables much of the nation-state's interventionist repertoire and cannot simply hand it to a federal center. Free movement of goods, labor, and capital turns the federation into a single price area, stripping member states of tariffs, monopolies, and independent monetary policy. But protectionism cannot migrate upward either: the solidarities that sell a tariff as aid to "our" producers dissolve among peoples who share no thick common identity, and the same thinness defeats central planning, which presupposes agreement no diverse union possesses. The federation needs only a negative power — to stop states from rebuilding economic borders, not to plan in their place. Federalism, Hayek concludes, completes liberalism rather than enlarging the state.
Das Bundesgebiet wird ein einziger Markt und die Preise in seinen Teilen werden nur um den Betrag der Transportkosten differieren.
English translation: “The federal territory becomes a single market, and prices in its parts will differ only by the amount of transport costs.”
The vocabulary of freedom, Hayek warns, has been turned inside out — "liberalism" now names the restrictions that collectivists promise will free men from want. Written on the eve of war and anticipating The Road to Serfdom, this Chicago pamphlet argues that comprehensive planning threatens the liberties it claims to enlarge. Its logic is institutional, not conspiratorial: directing all economic life requires agreement on a ranked scale of social ends that plural societies simply lack, so planners must impose values and then manufacture belief in them. Prices, by contrast, combine dispersed knowledge no single mind commands. Because whoever controls the means controls the ends they serve, economic dictatorship cannot stay merely economic — propaganda and the suppression of dissent become essential parts of the system. Only competitive capitalism, he contends, keeps democracy from having to decide everything, and so from destroying itself.
Freedom and liberalism have become terms that are used to describe the exact opposite of their historic meaning.
Remembered by his contemporaries as a banker, abolitionist, and Evangelical of the Clapham circle rather than as an economist, Henry Thornton is here restored by Hayek to the front rank of monetary thought. The introduction to Thornton's Paper Credit of Great Britain reads the 1802 treatise as the point where classical monetary analysis begins, born of the crises of 1793 and 1797 and the Bank Restriction. Hayek credits Thornton with distinguishing internal from external drains, anticipating both liquidity preference and Wicksell's separation of the market and natural rates of interest, and framing the doctrine of forced saving. Against the reduction of everything to over-issue, and against Ricardo's later narrowing, the case is made for a disciplined practical banker who theorized the credit system from within.
“We are all City people and connected with merchants, and nothing but merchants on every side”
Germany's colonies, stripped away at Versailles and held under mandate, are the immediate provocation of this 1939 study, which recasts their loss as economic strangulation rather than wounded vanity. Yet Thurnwald's ambition is systematic: colonization as a recurring human phenomenon, older than capitalism, whose methods he compares across Portuguese slave-raiding, the Spanish encomienda among the Maya of Yucatán, the Dutch cultivation system in Java, the French Code noir and St. Domingue, and British expansion from Virginia to the Gezira cotton scheme. His own Deutsch-Neu-Guinea supplies the opening case, from Rabaul's plantations to goldfields opened by aircraft. He rejects a purely Marxist reading of empire, frames expansion as a biological and social movement of peoples, and ties its future to National Socialist colonial policy.
Kolonisation gehört zu den großen bewegenden und Geschichte schaffenden Kräften der menschlichen Gemeinschaften aller Völker und Zeiten.
English translation: “Colonization belongs among the great moving and history-making forces of human communities in all peoples and ages.”
The multiplier, in Keynes and Kahn, arrives as a timeless ratio linking investment to income; Machlup's 1939 intervention insists it can only be understood as a dated process. Public wages become shop receipts, which become factory receipts, which only later become incomes to be spent again — and between the rounds lie inventories, pay dates, and spending habits. He builds an 'income propagation period,' tentatively about three months, to measure how long expenditure takes to become income anew, and shows that a higher propensity to consume yields a larger eventual multiple but a longer road to it, so a government minding the coming fiscal year may collect only a fraction. Leakages, he adds, need not mean hoarding; saved funds may repay debt or buy securities, deferring rather than destroying the next round of spending.
For a discussion of time lags, transition phases, and other intertemporal relationships, Keynesian terminology is not well suited.
Crises follow not from overproduction or mass irrationality but from monetary disturbance that falsifies the signals prices and interest rates carry—such is the wager of this essay, given here in English translation from the 1935 German 'Preiserwartungen, monetäre Störungen und Fehlinvestitionen.' Hayek recasts equilibrium as the mutual compatibility of individuals' plans and expectations across time. When credit expansion pushes the market rate below the equilibrium rate, entrepreneurs lengthen production as though consumers had resolved to save, though they have not; the boom conceals the inconsistency until a scarcity of free capital halts it, leaving equipment idle for want of the complementary investment needed to complete it. The Wicksell-Mises account of malinvestment survives, now grounded in how expectations form rather than in crude aggregates of capital.
Every explanation of economic crises must include the assumption that entrepreneurs have committed errors.
The Ricardo Effect anchors this revision of Hayek's trade-cycle theory: when consumer-goods prices rise while money wages stay fixed, falling real wages make short-period, labour-using methods far more profitable than durable machinery, and firms retreat from the more capitalistic techniques. The result overturns the acceleration principle, for a rise in consumer demand can shrink demand for capital goods. Granting Keynes his unemployment and sticky wages, Hayek still rejects aggregate demand as a sufficient guide; he disaggregates capital into a vertical hierarchy of stage-specific industries and introduces the 'Quotient' to measure how slowly investment yields consumer goods. A boom ends not when all resources are employed but when the structure of production outruns the flow of goods, exposing a scarcity of capital whatever the money rate of interest does.
It is a cumulative process, indeed an explosive process, leading further and further away from an equilibrium position till the stresses become so strong that it collapses.
One word has been stretched to cover a family of unlike acts—postponed consumption, idle money holding, capital maintenance, investment, taxation, and the 'forced saving' manufactured by credit creation—and the confusion, Hayek argues, has misled theories of capital, interest, and depression. Borrowing Röpke's classification, the article separates saving in natura from monetary saving, and voluntary individual thrift from corporate, compulsory, and credit-driven kinds, insisting that only one answers to ordinary usage. Against underconsumptionist explanations of slumps, it admits only special cases: hoarding, violent swings in the rate of saving, and credit that simulates saving and provokes malinvestment. Hayek traces the modern machinery—banks, securities, insurance—by which abstention becomes command over resources, and ends on the determinants of saving, from income security to the rate of interest.
The original meaning of the term saving, keeping or preserving something for future use, has gradually been extended to cover a number of different activities more or less directly connected with the original sense of the word.
Confident opinion at the turn of the century assumed democracy's advance was as irreversible as the tide; by 1938 Bolshevism, Fascism, and National Socialism had made that assumption look naive. Across six lectures given on the Harris Foundation at Chicago, Rappard defines democracy not by its etymology but by the paired ideals of liberty and equality, then traces its uneven rise from Athens through Britain, France, and his native Switzerland. He reads the three great dictatorships as offspring of the World War—Lenin's from defeat, Mussolini's from disappointed victory, Hitler's from Versailles and slump—and diagnoses the strain within surviving democracies as a crisis of parliamentarism rather than of democracy itself. The remedy he presses is unfashionable: a retreat of the state from economic life, without which self-government becomes an illusion.
Democracy thrives on peace, and dictatorships on war.
Few concepts are invoked so often and interrogated so rarely, Hayek observes, as a 'constant amount of capital'—and once change is admitted, it dissolves. Maintaining capital, the essay shows, cannot mean preserving identical goods or an unchanged money valuation; it is a derivative rule for avoiding unintended encroachment on future income. Sparring with Pigou over physical-loss and index-number criteria, Hayek holds that foreseeable obsolescence must be amortized like ordinary wear, that windfall profits are not freely consumable income, and that no expectation-free standard of 'net' saving or investment survives in a changing world. Foresight thus moves to the centre of capital theory, and the warning carries into monetary policy: in a boom, rising asset valuations mistaken for income invite the quiet consumption of capital itself.
It is not likely that in the whole field of economics there are many more concepts which are at the same time so generally used and so little analysed as that of a “constant amount of capital.”