1,549 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
The Rio Agreement on Special Drawing Rights succeeded, on Machlup's reading, precisely because it refused to call a spade a spade: by avoiding contested words — credit, loan, reserve, repayment — it let France read SDRs as a repayable credit facility while Britain and America read them as new reserve assets. Reconstructing the negotiations among the IMF and the Group of Ten, he explains SDRs as a closed giro system among monetary authorities, money created by allocation rather than lending, whose acceptability rests on mutual willingness rather than collateral. He endorses the design while insisting on its limits: added liquidity works only indirectly, easing the pressure that pushes governments toward import restrictions and deflation, and it leaves the dollar overhang, gold speculation, and rigid exchange rates unresolved.
Money needs takers, not backers; the takers accept it, not because of any backing, but only because they count on others accepting it from them.
When Treasury Secretary Henry Fowler laid out his 1968 tax-reform agenda—exempt the poor, tax high incomes shielded by preferences, revisit estate and gift duties, curb tourists' spending abroad—Sennholz read compassion as compulsion. His counter-move is to redefine "the rich" not as idle hoarders but as businessmen and investors whose saving builds the factories and stores that employ the poor; to tax their capital, he argues, is to consume the very fund on which rising wages depend. He defends municipal-bond exemption as a constitutional shield for state borrowing, treats a proposed seventy-seven-percent estate levy as either demagoguery or socialism, and reads the curb on foreign travel as a police measure. Invoking Marshall's warning that the power to tax is the power to destroy, he joins economic, constitutional, and civil-libertarian objections to Great Society redistribution.
Taxing Peter to pay Paul has become a respectable way of life with countless pressure groups and their vociferous spokesmen in Congress.
Reform is easy to want in rhetoric and costly to endure in fact—and that gap, Sennholz argues, is why electoral hope so reliably disappoints. Saving the dollar from inflation, he insists, cannot be a mere central-bank adjustment; it is a political willingness to let earlier errors be liquidated. Halting credit expansion would expose years of malinvestment, raise interest rates, depress stocks and bonds, and bring recession—the price of a sound currency. Drawing on Gustave Le Bon, he frames monetary reform as a moral problem before a technical one: laws only express popular ideas, and the public that cheers reform balks at its consequences. Because stabilization also strips unions of the inflationary cover for rigid wages, genuine reform would mean abolishing the National Labor Relations Board and restoring a market in labor—something he doubts any administration would endure.
Monetary stabilization means price stabilization, which is a fatal enemy of labor unions.
Robbins refuses the grand definitions: development, for these expanded 1966 Chichele Lectures, means neither national grandeur nor moral progress but change in real income per head and the productive capacity behind it. He traces how that question passed through economic thought—posed energetically by mercantilist pamphleteers yet rarely theorized, made central by the Physiocrats though wrongly confined to agriculture, given classical structure by Smith's division of labour and capital accumulation. The causal conditions of growth follow: population, saving, the growth of usable knowledge, monetary institutions, and a Smithian natural liberty that is legal order rather than anarchy. The marginal revolution, he argues, narrowed economics toward allocation, while Marshall and Schumpeter kept a developmental imagination alive. A final lecture weighs whether growth should be desired, setting it beside liberty, education, and amenity.
Postwar West Germany posed a puzzle: aggregate output and employment climbed almost without interruption, yet the economy plainly alternated between vigor and sluggishness. Mintz resolves it by abandoning the classical cycle, which demands absolute declines, for the growth cycle, alternating periods of above- and below-average growth that she neutrally terms speedups and slowdowns. Applying two dating methods to twenty-one indicators, deviation cycles measured against a moving-average trend and step cycles built from growth rates, and consolidating the individual turns through diffusion indexes, she fixes a monthly chronology of three and a half cycles between 1951 and 1967. Classical analysis, she shows, would register no German recession at all before 1966-67. The turning points, she insists, are genuine economic phenomena, not figments of statistical procedure.
Periods regarded as downswings by business and policy makers in Europe and Japan have not usually been characterized by declines in aggregate output, income or employment.
Recession, downturn, slowdown, sidewise movement—the euphemisms come first, and Rothbard treats them as more than style: they shield the reigning assumption that capitalism is inherently unstable and needs expert management. Against the Keynesian physician, this pamphlet builds the Austrian case that booms and busts originate not in the free market but in monetary intervention. Any adequate depression theory, he argues, must explain three things at once—the sudden cluster of entrepreneurial errors, their recurrence, and the outsized volatility of capital-goods industries. The Mises-Hayek answer is the interest rate: central-bank-fed credit expansion pushes it below the level set by time preference and real saving, luring entrepreneurs into unsustainable roundabout projects. The cure is deliberately anti-Keynesian—stop the inflation, refuse bailouts, and let liquidation return production to consumer preferences.
It is the preceding inflation that makes the depression phase necessary.
A word that means one thing in Vienna and nearly its opposite in Washington cannot anchor a coherent politics — and liberalism, Machlup argues, has drifted until an American liberal would count as an anti-liberal in Europe. Originating as a Hayek lecture, the essay traces that drift from Lockean individualism through the reinterpretation of freedom as effective power, and dissects two governing confusions: being free to act versus being free from want, and what one may do versus what one can do. Against the slogan that freedom is indivisible he sets a catalogue of some two dozen distinct liberties — economic, political, intellectual, moral — that routinely collide. The genuine liberal, he concludes, ranks freedoms and restricts one only to secure another, and refuses to let welfare be relabeled as liberty.
Food is not liberty, and liberty is not food. Medical care is not liberty, and liberty is not medical care.
Once general-equilibrium theory made real markets look deficient, measuring them against a fictitious world of perfect competition, simultaneous equations, and Pareto-optimality, the old alliance between economic theory and the market collapsed. Lachmann's reconstruction, written for a Hayek volume, defends capitalism not as a static allocation mechanism but as a process of plans, expectations, disappointments, and capital revaluations under uncertainty. Methodological individualism, he argues, is the demand that no explanation of social phenomena satisfy us until it leads back to a human plan; Hayek's compositive method works forward from plans to their compatibility, while Verstehen works backward. Indifference curves smuggle in given tastes and evade how plans are actually made and revised. The Stock Exchange, pricing divergent expectations over existing assets, becomes the institution in which this vision is most visible.
In fact it is hardly an exaggeration to say that without a Stock Exchange there can be no market economy.
The pound was sliding, French reserves draining, and the Group of Ten meeting in emergency session—yet Sennholz reads the 1968-69 turmoil not as a passing squall but as the postwar gold-exchange system nearing collapse. Monetary crisis, his thesis runs, is the international face of domestic inflationism: once de Gaulle decreed wage increases after the strikes of 1968, France had to inflate to make them payable, and rising prices then drove gold and capital abroad. Gold, for Sennholz, is no symbolic reserve but the disciplinary mechanism that exposes monetary mismanagement. He groups Britain, America, and France as inflationary debtors whose liabilities outrun their bullion, and predicts that devaluation or suspension of gold payments will bring runaway inflation and split the Free World into a dollar bloc and a hard-currency gold camp.
After all, gold is the only international money and, like all other economic goods, tends to flow towards areas where it commands greater purchasing power.
Revolution is not the barricade—that reduction is exactly what Rothbard means to overturn. Taking up Karl Hess's description of libertarianism as revolutionary, he redefines revolution as a long, many-sided process of theorists, writers, organizers, activists, patrons, and institutions, in which street confrontation is only an episodic expression. His historical frame is the classical-liberal tradition of the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries, recast as "classical radical": the force that broke monarchy, feudal privilege, mercantilism, theocracy, and war, and opened modern liberty and prosperity. From La Boétie and the Levellers through Paine, Cobden, the abolitionists, Bastiat, and Molinari, he traces a continuous radical lineage—and then denies socialism the title, calling it a New Toryism that pursues liberty through statist means. The old revolution's unfinished promise, he concludes, is ours to complete.
Only libertarianism is truly radical.
A creed may hate the State and still remain alien to liberty—that boundary line drives this New Left-era intervention. Rothbard reverses the anarcho-communist story in which the State creates and guards property; for him the State is property's chief invader, and private property, free markets, profit-and-loss accounting, and material abundance stand or fall together. He grants anarcho-communism only its claimed voluntarism, then undercuts it with the Spanish anarchists' wartime confiscations and penalties for using money. The philosophical core is a defense of individuality against egalitarian communalism; the economic core is Mises's calculation argument, that once money and prices are abolished a complex economy loses the signals telling it where scarce labor and capital are most valued. Against "post-scarcity" fantasy Rothbard insists scarcity endures, closing with Ortega y Gasset on the fragility of civilization.
Civilization is not “just here,” it is not self-supporting. It is artificial.
Rappard defines the small state not by population, territory, wealth, or neutrality but by a single constitutional fact: exclusion from the League of Nations Council's permanent seats. That negative definition — Max Huber's 'Nichtgrosstaaten' — lets him read the League as both a rupture with old diplomacy and its continuation, since the nineteenth-century Concert of Europe had already married nominal equality to rule by the principal Powers. Article 4 of the Covenant, he argues, did not merely manage this hierarchy but legalized it, turning long-standing political inequality into open constitutional fact. Tracing the Paris negotiations, where Cecil defended Great-Power control and Wilson supplied democratic language, he shows why intermediate and aspiring states — Spain, Poland, Argentina, Brazil — made resentment inevitable, and why the weak came to prize law as both moral preference and practical necessity.
It is not unnatural, although it may give rise to cynical comment: the nations whose only material bond is a common lack of might are spiritually linked together by a common love of right.