1,549 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
When an economist calls a country's troubles 'structural,' Machlup suspects he is more often excusing a policy than analyzing a problem, and here he puts the word on trial. He sorts its economic uses into three piles: clear senses worth keeping, such as the structure of production or econometric structural equations; vaguer senses better avoided, where structure means the slow-moving or the merely institutional; and a crypto-apologetic group in which structural imbalance props up cartels, price controls, exchange restrictions, and import barriers. Diagnosing a situation as structural disequilibrium, he argues, usually substitutes terminology for analysis. In a candid postscript he concedes that his least favorite examples happen to be policies he dislikes, an admission that his own politics may color which meanings he finds clear.
Structure, I am afraid, is often a weaselword used to avoid commitment to a definite and clear thought.
The demand that produced the Federal Reserve was for a 'more flexible currency,' but Sennholz reads flexibility as legalized discretion rather than market responsiveness. Tracing the system to the panic of 1907 and to European models—the Bank of England's lender-of-last-resort doctrine, the Reichsbank's elastic note issue—he dissects its three instruments of credit control: rediscounting, open-market operations, and reserve requirements. Each, he argues, lets appointed governors manufacture money by administrative decision, while member banks' nominal ownership of the Reserve Banks masks decisive political control. The charge is that a body advertised as neutral monetary technique is in fact the governing board of a socialized monetary industry—the engine of dollar depreciation, boom and bust, and deficit finance. Written for American Opinion in 1958, the essay ends not in reform but abolition.
For in payment for securities the Federal Reserve merely draws, on itself, a check which constitutes newly created money.
Neither instant copying nor a permanent monopoly serves an economy: some delay rewards the innovator who bore the sunk costs, but prompt competitive imitation is what turns one firm's advance into a general rise in productivity. From that premise Machlup builds a spare model of quasi-rents discounted over an expected imitation lag, and uses it to doubt that patents earn their keep. Long fixed terms, he argues, are a blunt instrument, too generous for cheap innovations, too weak for costly ones, and undercut anyway by circum-invention, substitutes, and discounting. The strongest case for a patent system, he suggests, is that it fosters a socially useful illusion of protection; the true optimum lag lies far closer to an innovator's natural head start than to sixteen years of statutory delay. The essay honors Fredrik Zeuthen.
To buy innovation by paying with unnecessarily long delays of imitation is a poor bargain for society to make.
The sprawling ambition here is a synthesis: to show that economics cannot be severed from philosophy, sociology, history, and value, and to read the modern economy through recurring tensions rather than static equilibrium. Bayer sorts a vast empirical field, from consumer sovereignty undone by advertising through class stratification, social security, nationalization in Austria and Britain, European integration, and the rival plans of China, India, and Russia, into four fundamental tensions: absolute versus relative values, production versus consumption, money versus goods, and individual versus totality. The immoderation he ascribes to so-called capitalism follows, he argues, from absolutizing what are merely relative values. His remedy is Wirtschaftsgestaltung, economic design built from below through firms, cooperatives, municipal economy, and codetermination, with only residual tasks reserved for the top.
Der Mensch ist mittelbar und unmittelbar Gestalter und Ziel der Wirtschaft.
English translation: “Man is, both indirectly and directly, the shaper and the goal of the economy.”
Across every front of postwar economic policy—money, cartels, rents, agriculture, public finance—Amonn diagnoses the same disorder: isolated, "pointillist" interventions that each summon the next until a market order slides toward central planning. Invoking Eucken's interdependence of orders, he shows how cheap money invites credit expansion, inflation, and then price controls. He reads the 1957 Law Against Restraints of Competition as a prohibition so laced with exceptions that it becomes abuse-control by another name, defends rent decontrol against entrenched tenant privilege, attacks cost-covering agricultural prices, and rejects Keynesian deficit finance and redistributive taxation alike. His guiding maxim, aligned with Erhard's "prosperity for all," is in dubio pro libertate—when in doubt, decide for freedom.
Will man den einkommenschwachen Schichten, die es nötig haben, helfen, so kann dies — und soll dies — durch sozialpolitische Maßnahmen geschehen, wie es bis anhin als Regel gegolten hat. Das ist etwas wesentlich anderes als die Umverteilung der Einkommen.
English translation: “If one wishes to help the low-income strata who are in need, this can — and should — be done through social-policy measures, as has hitherto been the rule. That is something essentially different from the redistribution of incomes.”
Although Husserl never engaged the concrete problems of the social sciences, his analyses of intersubjectivity, inner time-consciousness, appresentation, and typification supply, on Schütz's account, exactly the tools those sciences lack. The essay first clears away hasty appropriations, Edith Stein, Gerda Walther, and the early Scheler among them, and reads Ortega y Gasset's insistence on the ego's radical solitude as exposing the unresolved circularity in Husserl's constitution of the alter ego. The decisive move is to relocate Husserl's importance from transcendental theory to the natural attitude, the pregiven world taken as self-evident until called into question. Linking Husserl to Weber's problem of meaningful action, Schütz sketches a program, sedimented stocks of knowledge, relevance, reciprocity of perspectives, signs and symbols, and concludes that social science belongs to a constitutive phenomenology of the natural attitude, not a transcendental one.
Max Weber hat gezeigt, daß alle Phänomene der soziokulturellen Welt in sozialem Handeln gründen und auf soziales Handeln zurückverwiesen werden können.
English translation: “Max Weber has shown that all phenomena of the socio-cultural world are grounded in social action and can be traced back to social action.”
On the centenary of On Liberty, the liberal problem is deliberately displaced: from the legal freedom of discussion to the harder matter of readiness to discuss. Mill's defense, Voegelin argues, rests on an anthropology of 'improvement' that treats liberty not as a metaphysical right but as an instrument of social order, and so cannot secure the very goods it protects. To recover what rights cannot supply, the essay turns to Plato's Protagoras, where prolixity of speech becomes the model technique for preventing rational inquiry, and where virtue proves teachable only when rooted in episteme, a knowledge of the order of life rather than a stock of rules. Its refusal, Voegelin insists, is amathia, folly; and modern ideological culture has confined reason to weak but genuine enclaves in a jungle of unreason.
Rationale Diskussion der Ordnung in der Existenz des Menschen und der Gesellschaft ist nur möglich unter der Bedingung des Wissens um transzendente Erfüllung.
English translation: “Rational discussion of the order in the existence of man and society is possible only under the condition of knowledge of transcendent fulfillment.”
Political liberalism, in this encyclopedia article, names something narrower and older than democracy or progress: the Anglo-Dutch and above all Whig tradition of limiting and binding state power. Hayek condenses its classical form into three interlocking principles — freedom of opinion, the rule of law, and private property with its competitive economy — and traces the idea from post-Glorious-Revolution England through its rationalist French mutation, its late and failing German career under Bismarck, to its revival after totalitarianism. The French turn is his pivot: confidence in free social development gives way to confidence in a plan, shifting the question from limiting power to seizing it. His sharpest warning is that political and economic liberalism cannot be prised apart, contra Croce; replace competition with direction and the rule of law is hollowed out even where basic rights remain.
Tatsächlich hängt die Eigentums- und Vertragsfreiheit auf das innigste mit der Herrschaft des Gesetzes zusammen: die eine ist ohne die andere nicht möglich.
English translation: “In fact, freedom of property and contract is most intimately connected with the rule of law: the one is not possible without the other.”
Time, in G. L. S. Shackle's De Vries Lectures, is not a neutral point on a calendar axis but the setting where imagination, decision, and expectation occur—his 'moment-in-being' destroying any easy analogy between economics and mechanics. Lachmann accepts the attack on homogeneous naturalistic time yet resists its solipsistic edge: if every present were wholly self-contained, learning and plan revision would become unintelligible. His repair distinguishes the discontinuity of ends from the relative continuity of knowledge about means, adding to subjective utility a subjectivism of interpretation. Where Shackle's dynamics stays close to the isolated individual, Lachmann extends it to forward markets, which give plans a socially observable form and coordinate expectations without predicting them. Economics forgoes positive forecasting but keeps negative prediction and the interpretive reconstruction of purposes.
As soon as we permit time to elapse we must permit knowledge to change, and knowledge cannot be regarded as a function of anything else.
Machlup gathered definitions of statics and dynamics from Comte through Patinkin and laid them side by side, only to find the terms pulling in incompatible directions: social order versus progress, stationary states versus growth, undated versus lagged variables. His mischievous observation is that economists tend to call their own theories dynamic and their rivals' static. Rather than legislate a single meaning, he builds a six-part typology that lets a theory like Schumpeter's qualify as dynamic under half a dozen headings at once, and shows how the supposed war between equilibrium and evolutionary economics dissolves once the labels are unpacked. His practical advice: retire the two words where possible in favor of exact ones, growth theory, sequence analysis, period analysis, trend analysis.
The trouble, as I see it, is not that the division of economic analysis into Statics and Dynamics makes no sense, but that it makes too many senses.
Nuclear weapons, delivery systems, and the sheer speed of technological change have made national defense a strategic problem that inherited military categories can no longer grasp. Treating the arms race as a grim equilibrium, Morgenstern argues that neither side can safely reduce effort unless reductions are mutual, credible, and enforceable, so survival becomes a constraint prior to any budget. Defense is never a matter of the single best weapon but of strategies tested against an adapting opponent: interception screens answer yesterday's threat while the next generation is designed to evade them, and stopgaps such as keeping bombers permanently airborne founder on fuel and logistics. Cities, valuable and hard to protect, pose the severest problem. Rejecting both panic and wishful thinking, he makes the case that creative technical thinking, not standardized production, will decide survival.
Unilateral action to reduce the arms race is impossible and not compatible with the desire for national survival.
The blind Theban seer knew things to come yet could change none of them, and in that useless certainty Schütz finds the perfect foil for a phenomenology of anticipation. Testing the seer against the playwright, the historian, and Laplace's calculating demon, he shows that flawless foreknowledge in a finite mind is simply incoherent. Ordinary humans predict differently: from a socially inherited stock of knowledge at hand, we grasp coming events only as types, trusting the idealizations 'and so forth' and 'I can do it again' until they explode against experience. Action reaches still further, projecting a completed deed in the future perfect, modo futuri exacti, so that foresight becomes a kind of anticipated hindsight, open until the event occurs. The essay closes on the Socratic prayer that we be spared the goods we mistakenly ask for.
"A fearful thing is knowledge, when to know helpeth no end," says Tiresias in Sophocles' Oedipus, King of Thebes.