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.
Economic policy, Braun insists, is not a catalogue of desirable social ends nor an administrative handbook, but an analytical science of what state intervention actually does. Grounded in the value and price theory of the Vienna school after Menger, the work makes a sharp methodological cut: economics cannot pronounce on the legitimacy of political aims — those spring from shifting cultural ideals and collective needs — but it can trace how any measure alters the exchange constellations through which production and distribution run. A state cannot simply decree a market result; its measure either changes some datum of price formation or remains economically inert. From this principle Braun builds a taxonomy of interventions — price fixing, price burdens, price relief, influences on demand and supply — judging each by the market relations it disturbs and the reactions it sets loose, without endorsing or condemning intervention as such.
Volkswirtschaftspolitik ist die Lehre von den Wirkungen, die durch Maßnahmen von Staat und Gemeinden auf die Tauschkonstellationen ausgeübt werden.
English translation: “Economic policy is the doctrine of the effects produced by measures of the state and of municipalities upon exchange constellations.”
Where earlier theory chose between technique and valuation, the first part of Engländer's system attempts to weld the two together. The objective-technical structure derives relative prices from labor and production conditions; the subjective-social derives them from valuation and income. Grounding value in the psychic phenomena of desiring goods and avoiding evils, he builds from primary values through economic value, cost, and yield to market price, insisting there is no necessary link between a good's higher marginal utility and a higher price. Rent emerges as scarcity plus the differential advantage of fertility and location; wages and capital interest are handled as factor prices. Yet interest, he concedes, resists convincing derivation here, and its fuller treatment is postponed to the theory of money in Part II.
Nach dem Sprachgebrauch der klassischen Schule erklärt der objektiv-technische Preisaufbau wohl den natürlichen Preis, aber nicht den um den natürlichen Preis oszillierenden Marktpreis.
English translation: “According to the usage of the Classical School, the objective-technical price structure indeed explains the natural price, but not the market price oscillating around the natural price.”
How does the cost of higher-order productive goods relate to the value of the finished products they make? This youthful essay of 1876, printed only decades later in Wieser's collected papers, answers by dismantling the cost theory of value from within. Starting with a single economizing agent, one scarce input, and several consumption goods, Wieser shows that the apparent proportionality between product value and cost is an illusion of good management, not a transfer of value from input to output. Value flows the other way: needs and scarcity impute worth to the productive good through its expected marginal product. His decisive move makes any cost rule normative rather than descriptive—it ought to be, not it is—valid only while its presuppositions hold. This is an early Austrian account of imputation and opportunity cost.
Der Wert der Güter ist nicht bestimmt durch ihren wirklichen, sondern durch ihren, soweit unsere Erkenntnis reicht, wirtschaftlich gebotenen Gebrauch.
English translation: “The value of goods is determined not by their actual use, but by the use which, so far as our knowledge extends, is economically enjoined.”
No single psychological impulse, neither abstinence nor Böhm-Bawerk's alleged underestimation of future needs, can carry the weight of interest. Working at the crossroads of Austrian capital theory, marginal productivity, and monetary economics, Mahr rebuilds the theory around the productivity of roundabout production, distinguishing horizontal expansion, which repeats existing methods, from vertical expansion, which lengthens production through new stages. Whether longer methods pay depends on technology, market size, and above all wages. He then abandons the fiction of one capital market and one rate: money markets, bond markets, and stock markets communicate imperfectly, their rates parting over the cycle. Modifying Wicksell, he locates the trigger of booms not in a single natural rate but in a discount rate held below the normal money-market level. The result fuses Böhm-Bawerkian roundaboutness with institutional and monetary realism.
Die Kenntnis der Gesetze des Produktionsertrages ist eine unentbehrliche Voraussetzung der Zinstheorie wie überhaupt jeder Einkommenstheorie.
English translation: “Knowledge of the laws of the yield of production is an indispensable prerequisite of the theory of interest, as indeed of any theory of income.”
A binding obligation need not be a contract. In this 1929 encyclopedia article, Richard Thurnwald makes that distinction the basis of a comparative inquiry into what secures agreements: ritual acts, prescribed words, political authority, or dependence on another’s resources. Against Mauss and Davy, he rejects customary gift obligations as a universal origin of contract. His cattle-leasing examples give the problem a concrete edge: an arrangement for subsistence can also sustain political subordination, blurring the boundary between private agreement and public authority. The article offers readers a way to examine consent alongside rank, kinship, and enforcement, while its ethnographic comparisons expose tensions within Thurnwald’s own proposed progression from binding acts through verbal formulas to consensual agreement.
What distinguishes regular administration from the exercise of authority? In this brief 1929 encyclopedia entry, Richard Thurnwald sets a precise threshold: an archaic state must have developed an officialdom with assigned functions that constitutes a distinct social stratum. The entry offers a compact definition rather than an extended argument, making specialization and social differentiation—not merely rule—the criteria for administration, before directing readers to “Staat” for fuller treatment.
Marriage prohibitions and sexual conduct do not necessarily coincide: this distinction opens Richard Thurnwald’s brief encyclopedia article, Verwandtenheirat (1929). He tentatively connects restrictions on marriage between relatives with alliances among communities, rather than explaining them by blood relationship alone. Maternal or paternal right and neighboring customs further shape the permitted unions. The entry offers a compact glimpse of his comparative approach to kinship: marriage rules emerge through relations both within communities and between them, while their existence does not establish how people actually behave.
Somary, lecturing at Heidelberg in the war's long aftermath, argues that 1918 recast not merely currencies and trade routes but the very axes of economic politics: state construction, market scale, and world-power position now cut across the old party labels. Liberalism and socialism, once international programs, have both curdled into national interest parties. From this his German survey moves through spaces rather than doctrines, a Britain sunk from ingenious solver to land of unsolved problems, a United States crossing from colonial periphery to world power as the Federal Reserve and New York displace London, a Europe fragmented by tariff walls into a caricature of itself. His boldest proposal is a Franco-German economic union marrying French capital to German labor; his sharpest observation, that the great capitalist organizer and the socialist planner converge in their appetite for monopoly and stabilization.
Das Europa von heute ist eine Karikatur dessen, was es sein sollte.
English translation: “The Europe of today is a caricature of what it ought to be.”
Nineteenth-century England supplies the model: there fiscal reordering, tariff change, and industrial expansion moved as a single process, proof that public finance is never neutral bookkeeping but an invisible tariff running through the economy. From that premise Schumpeter attacks Weimar's stagnation—two years of unemployment and high interest that no ordinary downturn explains—and traces it to a fiscal structure that taxes future productive capacity. His organizing concept is Kapitalbildung: reserves are not hoarding or privilege but the fund from which equipment is renewed and output extended, and progressive income and business taxes fall hardest on the margins where reserves form. A real reform must shift burden toward tobacco and alcohol consumption, as Stolper's plan proposes; even a limited change, well placed, could lower interest rates and unblock recovery. Doing nothing, or replacing private saving with state compulsion, he rejects outright.
Jede Finanzpolitik ist auch Wirtschaftspolitik, bewußte oder unbewußte.
English translation: “Every fiscal policy is also economic policy, whether consciously or unconsciously.”
Markets without centralized states, wealth accumulated for obligatory generosity, and shared food alongside individually owned tools unsettle familiar divisions between economic systems. In this 1929 encyclopedia article, Richard Thurnwald asks how subsistence, exchange and work become intelligible through the social relations that organize them. Drawing on ethnography, Oceanian observations and ancient history, he resists both a compulsory sequence of economic stages and the assumption of universal acquisitive self-interest. Festival markets on the lower Augusta River and the circulation of Kula valuables give concrete substance to his distinctions between profit, prestige and obligation. His hierarchical terminology and broad cultural generalizations require critical scrutiny, but his comparisons offer a precise question to pursue: when does control over goods become authority over people?
The household, rather than the individual craftsman, anchors Richard Thurnwald’s explanation of craft guilds in this compact encyclopedic entry. He asks how skills guarded by families and concentrated in particular settlements become the basis of corporate organization. His comparative perspective links kinship and technical mastery to political obligations: artisan communities owe collective payments in kind to the state, with their head responsible for delivery. Yet organization need not bring prestige, as his South Arabian examples suggest. Read as a proposed genealogy rather than a continuous institutional history, Zunft offers a way to distinguish occupational specialization, social standing, and corporate authority without assuming that the familiar arrangements of medieval European crafts were guild organization’s original form.
More intensive cultivation need not make a farm more viable. In this report of a 1929 Heidelberg institute excursion to Pomerania, Emil Lederer, Käthe Bauer-Mengelberg, and Svend Riemer examine estates whose technical efforts collide with poor soils, costly transport, depressed prices, and debt. Estate visits and accounts—given particular prominence by the Pommerscher Landbund’s invitation—support a crucial distinction: preserving existing owners is not the same as securing agricultural production. The authors also test proposed remedies against their human costs. Smallholdings may survive through unpaid family labor; estate economies may depend on low wages and restrictive employment arrangements. Readers encounter agricultural rescue as a conflict among profitability, property, and livelihoods, rather than a simple choice between efficient large estates and independent peasant farms.