1,549 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Every street, sewer, and tramline a city lays out of public funds quietly enriches the private owners of the land beside it — and that unearned increment, Inama-Sternegg argues, is why the growing city must claim a public competence over its soil analogous to the state's own. Dedicated to Adolf Wagner, the study presents urban land policy as at once the central municipal social question and an old problem in new form. He works through its instruments in turn: annexation of urbanized suburbs, expropriation and 'Zonenenteignung' reaching into the adjacent hinterland, deliberate municipal purchase of land and housing, and private-law devices — repurchase rights, the revived Erbbaurecht, tenancy reform. Rejecting the land-reformers' call for outright communalization, and drawing medieval parallels from Burgrecht to the taxing of the 'tote Hand,' he keeps municipal power firmly under the rule of law.
Ein so erweitertes Expropriationsrecht ist also eine notwendige Voraussetzung für die Durchführung eines jeden weiter ausgreifenden Planes einer Straßenregulierung und Bebauung unter den Gesichtspunkten moderner Hygiene, Verkehrs- und Sozialpolitik.
English translation: “Such an expanded right of expropriation is therefore a necessary precondition for carrying out any more far-reaching plan of street regulation and development under the aspects of modern hygiene, transport, and social policy.”
Rows of official figures cast a peculiar spell over the layman, and Inama-Sternegg's essay — occasioned by the 1905 London session of the International Statistical Institute — sets out to break it. Trade statistics have improved, he grants, thanks to reformers like Sir Alfred Bateman, yet they turn dangerous the moment parliaments and newspapers read them as self-evident truth. He catalogues the obstacles to comparison: state territory diverges from customs territory; countries value goods officially or by trader declaration; freight, transit, and processing traffic are counted inconsistently, inflating the figures for entrepôts like Belgium and Holland. Values aggregate unlike goods but rest on estimates; physical quantities are firmer facts yet cannot themselves yield an overall balance. A nation's true weight in world trade, he concludes, lies in its own production, which merchandise figures must be supplemented to reveal.
Die 1000 Stück Mastochsen (oder ihr Lebendgewicht) sind unanfechtbar; ob aber die Million Mark, mit der sie etwa in den Handelsausweisen figurieren, auch nur ungefähr richtig ist, kann täglich bezweifelt werden.
English translation: “The 1,000 head of fatstock oxen (or their live weight) are unassailable; but whether the million marks with which they may figure in the trade returns is even approximately correct can be doubted every day.”
Against Karl Lamprecht's fashionable thesis that parliamentarism was decaying across Europe, Wieser answers that Austria's parliament is not senile but immature: modern constitutional forms were imported before the habits of self-government, party discipline, and civic self-mastery had time to form. Comparing England's socially rooted party system with Germany's strong constitutional monarchy, he traces the Habsburg state from its military origins through Metternich's stagnation to the nationalized crisis of the Badeni language ordinances. Bohemia is his pivot—a Czech interior framed by a German rim—where he treats the Czech revival as a legitimate cultural power yet denies it restores any old Bohemian state right. His remedy is national separation within political unity, and his diagnosis that Austria suffers only a party crisis, not a state crisis.
Wir straucheln in den Falten der weiten Gewänder einer modernen Verfassung, in denen zu gehen wir noch nicht recht gelernt haben.
English translation: “We stumble in the folds of the ample garments of a modern constitution, in which we have not yet properly learned to walk.”
Rather than assail Marx from without, this 1906 essay tests Capital against its own foundations, isolating four connected pressure points: the law of value, the analytical bracketing of competition, the derivation of a uniform profit rate, and the split between industrial and merchant capital. Lederer's wedge is Marx's own admission that labor creates value only in the right quantity and proportion relative to social need — a concession that, he argues, already pushes the labor theory toward marginal utility, demand, scarcity, and monopoly power. Following Böhm-Bawerk, and invoking Menger against explaining social facts from individual motives, he charges that Marx assumed capital's equalizing competition rather than proving it, and that merchant capital shapes prices exactly as industrial capital does. Exploitation may be a historical fact; it cannot be deduced from labor as the sole source of value.
Nicht die Arbeit an sich ist es also, welche Werte schafft, sondern nur die in bestimmter Proportion und Quantität auf die gesellschaftlichen Bedürfnisse verwendete Arbeit.
English translation: “It is thus not labor as such that creates values, but only labor applied in a definite proportion and quantity to the needs of society.”
Japan had won its rank among the great powers by force of arms — but was the far-off empire now an economic world power as well? Prompted by Suke Yoshi Ito's World Year-book and the Russo-Japanese War, Inama-Sternegg answers with careful balance. Reading Meiji trade as a modernization sequence — early import surpluses buying Western machinery, later export surpluses built on silk and disciplined production — he denies that totals alone confer world-economic rank, and dismisses fears of a closed, race-based East Asian bloc as fantasy, with China, not Japan, as the region's true center of gravity. The essay then hardens into theory: Weltwirtschaft is no evolutionary stage beyond the national economy but a field of standardized goods, routes, capital, and central markets whose prices command production — and Britain's rejection of Chamberlain's imperial preference becomes its decisive proof.
Es ist also klar: die Rolle, welche irgendein Staat in der Weltwirtschaft spielen kann, hängt ab von dem Einsatz, den er in die Gemeinschaft der durch die Weltwirtschaft verbundenen und auf einander angewiesenen Staaten einbringen kann.
English translation: “It is therefore clear: the role that any state can play in the world economy depends on the contribution it can bring into the community of states linked together and mutually dependent through the world economy.”
Prometheus, the metal ages, Aristotle's fabled automatic looms, Gutenberg's press, the steam engine — the standard trophies of progress are marshalled here only to be turned against the myth that technology drives history. Inama-Sternegg argues that every technical advance is the accompaniment of a broader cultural movement, not its cause, and that whether an invention creates an epoch or merely lets one become effective must be tested case by case. Slavery, he insists, ended with the spread of Christian civility, not with the mechanical loom; only the nineteenth century earns a genuinely technical stamp. The polemical target is Ulrich Wendt, who made technology the beginning and end of human development. Against him the essay reverses the hierarchy: it is the inquiring human mind that sets technology its problems, never the reverse.
„Es gibt kein höheres geistiges Leben ohne technische Entwicklung, aber auch keine höhere Technik ohne geistige und moralische Fortschritte."
English translation: “There is no higher intellectual life without technical development, but neither is there any higher technology without intellectual and moral progress.”
Two ancient states, Meiji Japan and Porfirian Mexico, threw themselves into modernization within a single generation — an experiment, as the essay puts it, performed on the living body of an entire people. Inama-Sternegg sets the two side by side: railways, post, telegraph, banking, foreign trade, and above all merchant shipping. Mexico's advance under Díaz is real and, emerging from fifty years of civil war, deserving of admiration; but Japan rises faster, denser, and more intensely, building its own fleet where Mexico must ship through foreign carriers. The decisive line is drawn not by infrastructure but by sovereign economic agency — active trade conducted in one's own right rather than mere appearance on the world's markets. The parallel closes over the Pacific ports that might one day bind the two.
Mexiko erscheint wohl mit seinen Produkten auf den Weltmärkten, aber nicht im aktiven Handel.
English translation: “Mexico does appear with its products on the world markets, but not in active trade. Quite different has the economic situation in Japan always been. The country is in the highest degree active and enterprising.”
Written for the centenary of John Stuart Mill's birth, this commemorative essay measures a thinker by his continuing force rather than by novelty. Menger's Mill is a systematizer, not a revolutionary: in both logic and political economy he found abstract compendia on one side and a rich monographic literature on the other, and his gift lay in gathering, ordering, and returning scholarship to practical use. The System of Logic clarified the aims and errors of empirical inquiry, though Menger faults its overreach in extending natural-scientific method to the moral sciences. The Principles modernized English economics, carried it back from Ricardian abstraction toward Adam Smith, and drew money, foreign trade, colonization, and the social question into its frame. In the end Mill appears as neither forgotten classic nor revolutionary founder, but a philosophically trained mediator whose decisive move was to bring dispersed research into clear form.
Die Lebensarbeit John Stuart Mills war in erster Linie der Methodologie und der National-Oekonomie gewidmet.
English translation: “John Stuart Mill's life work was devoted primarily to methodology and political economy.”
To answer the socialist charge of exploitation with a theorem rather than a sermon—that is the ambition Schumpeter reconstructs in John Bates Clark's theory of distribution, presented here in deliberately uncritical exposition. In Clark's static state, abstracting from population growth, accumulation and technical change, free competition awards each factor the share of product it creates: to labor, capital and land its own. The argument turns on a distinctive capital concept—a durable, mobile fund embodied in perishable capital-goods, with land folded in—and on extending the law of diminishing returns from land to capital and symmetrically to labor, so that final productivity governs wages and interest alike. Schumpeter lets the assumptions show plainly, for the promised unity of wages, interest and rent depends on treating equal factor-units as equal productive contributions.
Clark's These ist nun die, daß in diesem statischen Zustande jeder Produktionsfaktor beim Walten freier Konkurrenz jenen Anteil am Produkte erhält, den er hervorbringt, daß also der Arbeit, wie dem Kapital und dem Lande, ihr, beziehungsweise sein Produkt zufällt.
English translation: “Clark's thesis is now this: that in this static state every factor of production, under the reign of free competition, receives that share of the product which it brings forth—so that to labor, as to capital and to land, its respective product falls.”
A sugar manufacturer who stood to gain from protection yet campaigned as a consistent free trader, refused the cartel, and quietly diverted his unavoidable trust profits into a pension fund for his clerks—Rudolph Auspitz is memorialized by Schumpeter as both a public man of rare disinterest and a first-rate mathematical economist. The obituary weighs his work on taxation and the 1896 fiscal reform, then turns to the 1889 Untersuchungen über die Theorie des Preises, written with Richard Lieben. Auspitz, it argues, held marginal value theory to complete and partly correct Ricardo rather than overthrow him, and from the parallel treatment of production and consumption drew the consumer's rent, the producer's rent, and the gain of the community.
It is, generally, a characteristic point, which deserves to be noted, that during his whole political life he was not only completely free from any personal aspiration, but also from class interest.
Rejecting mathematics in economics does not protect social complexity; it only deprives theory of its most adequate logical language. Schumpeter argues that once economics reasons about value, price, exchange, labor, interest and time, it is already handling quantities, so the economist who states proportionalities and marginal changes in words is doing arithmetic while refusing the calculus his own arguments require. Mathematics, on this view, is a logical form that imports nothing foreign and can therefore introduce nothing false; it clarifies functional dependence, continuity, and maxima even where numerical data are missing. Drawing on Cournot's proof that monopoly price exceeds competitive price and Walras's system of exchange equations, he shows the method uncovering relations that verbal exposition confuses—while insisting it can never calculate a practical policy out of a formula.
Also: Arbeit, Ware, Zeit, Preis, Zins u. s. w. sind Quantitäten.
English translation: “Thus: labor, commodity, time, price, interest, etc., are quantities.”
Reviewing Paul Leroy-Beaulieu's popular guide to placing and managing a fortune, Inama-Sternegg turns a manual for cautious savers into a question about what capital owes a nation. He grants the advice its prudence — shun speculation, distrust financial adventurers, prefer safe state, railway, and municipal bonds — and credits its author as a seasoned man of affairs rather than a system-building theorist. But he warns that the security of even land and houses now depends on the competence of the manager, and that a whole class trained to live off coupons imperils French economic vitality against more enterprising English, American, and German capital. Elevated from private counsel into a national ethic, the rentier's quietism would, he predicts, avenge itself a hundredfold on France's economic strength and its very position among the powers.
Zwar, es ist eine durchaus populäre Schrift, aber sie ist damit noch lange nicht eine seichte Arbeit.
English translation: “To be sure, it is a thoroughly popular writing, but that by no means makes it a shallow work.”