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.
What holds together essays on subjects as varied as workers’ rights, trade treaties, and public finance? In this brief 1910 notice of the first volume of Adolf von Wenckstern’s Staatswissenschaftliche Probleme der Gegenwart, Joseph A. Schumpeter lets Wenckstern’s preface supply the answer: moderation in judgment and a search for common ground between divergent views. Schumpeter identifies the essays’ origins in lectures, addresses, and journal articles, but offers no verdict on their success. The notice provides a compact introduction to Wenckstern’s declared intellectual stance, while keeping that self-description distinct from critical endorsement.
Should savers’ wishes govern how banks invest entrusted money? In this brief 1910 review of Alfred Lansburgh’s three essays on banking policy, Joseph A. Schumpeter distinguishes concrete safeguards from the principle used to justify them. Lansburgh’s proposals include minimum holdings of government bonds, fuller balance-sheet disclosures and a supervisory office. Schumpeter expects some proposals to be adopted, but questions the seemingly persuasive demand that owners’ intentions determine investment. His concern is that this demand could become a slogan carrying intervention beyond Lansburgh’s own wishes. The review offers a compact instance of Schumpeter’s critical judgement: practical reforms and their governing rationale require separate scrutiny.
Does limited access to land and capital make their owners monopolists? In this 1910 review of Otto Conrad’s Lohn und Rente, Schumpeter challenges the economic explanation supporting Conrad’s condemnation of unearned income and proposals for reform. His objection turns on two distinctions: scarcity is not monopoly power, and a cost-saving innovation does not by itself explain a permanent return to capital. Schumpeter follows the competitive adjustments that Conrad’s account leaves unresolved—greater demand for capital, expanded production, and changing costs. The review offers a compact encounter with his exacting approach to distribution theory: an ethical objection to an income cannot substitute for an explanation of how it persists.
Vor allem ist beschränkte Konkurrenz und Monopol nicht dasselbe.
English translation: “Above all, restricted competition and monopoly are not the same thing.”
Money value is where personal valuation, market calculation, national income and historical institution meet — and this extended report refuses to treat it as a merely technical currency question. Wieser separates personal value, grounded in marginal utility, from the national-economic 'Geltung' a good holds through its price, then argues that money as money has exchange value only. The general price level is a composite determined from the side of goods and the side of money alike, so quantity theory errs in reading it as money's work alone; the faithful index of money value is the relation between money income and real income. Changes flow from paper issue, newly coined metal, and above all from monetization, as rents, taxes and state services enter monetary accounting. A closing report extends the theory to exchange rates and warns that index numbers cannot isolate money value from commodity values.
Das Aufblühen der Geldwirtschaft vermindert den Geldwert, ihr Verfall erhöht ihn wieder.
English translation: “The flourishing of the money economy diminishes the value of money; its decay raises the value of money once again.”
A patent, a labor service, and a customer relationship can all command a price—but what makes them objects of the same economic inquiry? In this 1910 article, Alfred Amonn argues that usefulness, scarcity, and material substance cannot adequately define the “good” required by price theory. His distinctive move is to shift attention from things and their properties to socially recognized powers of disposal: exchange transfers control, not simply physical objects. Rights, uncertain commercial advantages, and paid abstentions make the difference especially clear. Through his criticism of Menger, Böhm-Bawerk, and others, readers can discover why a seemingly preliminary dispute over terminology changes the object of economics itself—and why Amonn insists that its foundational concepts must follow its explanatory problems rather than ordinary language.
A secure public appointment does not guarantee a secure livelihood—or freedom to defend it. In this 1910 article, Emil Lederer examines how rising prices draw public employees into collective action against a state that is both employer and sovereign. Comparing Germany and Austria, with a shorter treatment of Hungary, he distinguishes officials exercising governmental authority from the expanding ranks of postal, railway, technical, and clerical employees. His distinctive concern is the political force of materially defensive demands: employees seeking to preserve bourgeois living standards can find themselves demanding fuller citizenship and freedom of association. The Austrian service-law proposal makes the tension concrete, setting predictable advancement and procedural safeguards against restrictions on public life. Lederer shows why legal protection can coexist with dependence, and why shared economic grievances need not overcome occupational hierarchy.
Protecting Indigenous workers and securing plantation profits are not opposing aims in Richard Thurnwald’s 1910 article: he makes the former a condition of the latter. Drawing on Pacific fieldwork and colonial statistics, he examines how expanding cultivation strains the communities supplying its labor. His distinction between Indigenous daily activity and imposed plantation schedules challenges the simple accusation of laziness, even as he accepts employers’ demands for disciplined work. Recruitment figures and demographic observations lead him toward medical supervision, better nutrition, and restrictions on recruitment—not Indigenous control over labor. Preserved here as a contemporary offprint, the article offers a concrete encounter with the conjunction of ethnographic attention and colonial management: observations of exhaustion, disease, and population loss become arguments for sustaining an explicitly racialized economic hierarchy.
Across six lectures delivered in Berlin and Vienna in 1909, Philippovich reads nineteenth-century economic politics as a conflict of social ideals rather than a mere succession of party interests: economic demands become intelligible only when traced to rival conceptions of state, society, and personality. He follows the century's dominant idea — the freedom of individuals in pursuit of their economic interests — through the emancipation of land, Gewerbefreiheit, and Freihandel, then shows how it bred capitalism and an 'actual' compulsion for the propertyless. Against it he ranges the counter-movements: conservative organic theory from Adam Müller to Stahl, Marxian socialism, Sozialpolitik as mediation, and agrarianism under world-market pressure. The closing lecture reads modern policy not as surviving laissez-faire but as its fusion with the organic view of society — a regulated freedom charged with fitting capitalism's powers into a durable order.
Die vollkommene Entwicklung der Persönlichkeit!
English translation: “The complete development of the personality!”
A union can survive an economic crisis without gaining the power to improve its members’ lives. This distinction anchors Emil Lederer’s chronicle of German and Austrian trade unionism in 1909, which follows unsettled disputes into early 1910. Reading membership figures and financial accounts alongside industrial negotiations, he shows how unemployment and sickness benefits sustained organizations whose bargaining prospects were narrowing. Employer-controlled employment exchanges made access to work itself a contested instrument of power; in Austria, national divisions further weakened common economic action. Lederer’s perspective brings welfare provision and industrial conflict into the same frame: institutions associated with class struggle could stabilize workers’ lives while remaining unable to secure durable advances. The report offers concrete ways to distinguish numerical growth, organizational endurance, and effective bargaining strength.
A state can declare what settles a debt without determining what that payment will buy. This distinction anchors Franz Xaver Weiss’s 1910 article on monetary value, which rejects both metallic substance and sovereign command as sufficient explanations of purchasing power. Drawing on subjective value theory and Menger’s account of marketability, Weiss argues that money’s usefulness in exchange can sustain its value even without convertibility into metal. His defence of paper money thus accompanies, rather than softens, his criticism of Knapp’s state theory. Equally revealing is his restraint about measurement: price indices can track purchasing power without identifying the causes of its changes. Readers encounter a marginalist account that separates money’s economic usefulness, its legal standing, and the numerical conventions through which its value is compared.
Can a theory of competitive equilibrium explain the profits generated by economic change? In this 1910 article, Joseph A. Schumpeter assesses recent American economics with John B. Clark as his principal interlocutor. He admires the analytical reach of marginal productivity while pressing its unresolved questions: a productive contribution does not by itself explain interest, and changing equilibrium conditions do not explain who introduces new methods or commercial combinations. His survey becomes a critical inquiry into the boundaries of static theory, drawing attention to entrepreneurship, credit, and the monetary character of business capital. Readers can discover both what Schumpeter learned from American theorists and where he resisted them—especially when an explanation of factor incomes threatened to become a moral justification of their owners’ rewards.
Educated people like to think themselves immune to advertising; the opening move here is to deny it, since publicity works beneath conscious scrutiny through repetition, imagery, and mere familiarity. Beginning from the premise that distribution completes what production only starts, this wide-ranging study treats advertising as a social power and anatomizes its media and economics—costs and prices, agencies and copywriters, the branded-goods system and retail substitution, mail-order houses, and the department store as a psychology of the female shopper. Mataja asks whether advertising is genuinely productive, refusing both blanket condemnation and the boosters' optimism, and closes on the state: unfair-competition law, the disfigurement of townscapes by posters, and the vexed question of an advertisement tax.
Die Reklame schafft einen Zustand, der einem Markte vergleichbar ist, auf dem die Waren zur Schau und Auswahl bereitgestellt werden, nur wirkt sie viel ausgedehnter, weil unabhängig von bestimmten Zeitpunkten und vom Erscheinen der Interessenten.
English translation: “Advertising creates a condition comparable to a market on which goods are set out for viewing and selection, only it operates far more extensively, since it is independent of particular points in time and of the appearance of interested parties.”