1,549 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Ranged across a season's new books—methodology, Marx and Christianity, money, capital, Australian policy, the history of note-issuing banks—these review-notices double as a manifesto for how economics should be done. Schumpeter judges each work by whether it solves problems rather than parading method or ideology: every theory, he holds, must be known by its fruits, and declaring allegiance to theory is not itself theoretical work. He defends marginal utility against the charge of being capitalist in tendency, praises Davenport's Value and Distribution for its unadorned analysis and its treatment of capital as an unspecialized loan-fund, and admires Fisher's Rate of Interest for binding theory to statistics—while denying that time-preference alone can explain interest, since interest must also depend on the growing stream of future goods. Ruhland's moralized system, which reduces capital to greed, he sharply rejects.
Es gilt Probleme zu lösen, nicht Methoden zu diskutieren.
English translation: “The task is to solve problems, not to discuss methods.”
Nature becomes power through technique, and technique becomes consequential only through the purposes that select it, such is the moving relation this compact essay sets out. Schwiedland defines Technik as purposive, rule-guided practice, distinct from science yet inseparable from it: science discovers laws, technique invents and shapes, and technical devices often run ahead of theory and compel it to catch up. In economic life the decisive test is not technical elegance but profit; the entrepreneur, not the engineer, decides whether an innovation pays under constraints of capital, labour, and demand. Technical possibility, he argues, is broader than economic possibility. Enlarged capacity in turn opens new markets, steam, railways, dyes, electrolysis, aviation, while free competition turns every profitable advance into pressure on all producers, making Wirtschaftlichkeit the ruling principle of modern life.
Stets ist indes die Technik Mittel zum Zweck: sei dieser eigene Selbstbefriedigung oder die Erreichung äußerer Ziele.
English translation: “Technique is always, however, a means to an end: whether that end be one's own self-gratification or the attainment of external goals.”
Why should capital yield a recurring income to its owner even when no labor is performed? This 1911 encyclopedia article makes that puzzle—not the mere contractual payment on a loan—the central problem of interest theory, reframing the ancient moral quarrel over usury as a modern question about capital as such. Böhm-Bawerk sorts pure capital interest from rent, risk premia, and management wages, surveys six rival doctrines from productivity to socialist exploitation, and faults each. His own answer locates interest in the premium men place on present goods over future goods of the same kind and number, a premium rooted in uncertainty, the underrating of remote wants, and the technical superiority of longer production. The rate itself, he argues, tracks accumulated real capital against demand—not the mere abundance of money.
Die zwischen beiden bestehende Wertdifferenz muß ausgeglichen werden durch ein gewisses Aufgeld, das auf die minderwertigen künftigen Güter geleistet wird, und dieses Aufgeld ist der Zins.
English translation: “The difference in value existing between the two must be balanced by a certain premium paid upon the less valuable future goods, and this premium is interest.”
Classical economics, on Pribram's account, was born less from any policy of laissez-faire than from a slow reconfiguration of ontology itself. Tracing the passage from medieval universal collectivism to the individualism of Hume and Smith, he binds social theory to theories of knowledge: universalism treats genera and corporate bodies—church, estate, guild—as real entities prior to persons, while nominalism dissolves them into individuals, interests, and conventions. The just price, the ban on usury, the suspicion of trade all follow from an order that judges each act against a pre-given whole. Only when coordination could be explained through the unintended consequences of individual motives—Mandeville's private vices, Smith's invisible hand—did Nationalökonomie cease to be a handmaid of statecraft and become an autonomous science of collective phenomena.
Unter dem Zeichen des Streites zwischen dem Nützlichen und dem Gerechten steht daher der Kampf zwischen der individualistischen und der kollektivistischen Weltanschauung.
English translation: “Under the banner of the dispute between the useful and the just stands, therefore, the struggle between the individualistic and the collectivistic worldview.”
Reisch trains his 1912 offprint on a narrow but consequential dispute: whether the Austrian state, now a vast industrial entrepreneur through its railways, mines, post, and monopolies, may keep accounts no private firm would tolerate. The quarrel between cameralistic and commercial bookkeeping, he argues, is not one of formal preference but of economic adequacy — cameralistics merely compares budget estimate to outturn and calls any overshoot a success, while commercial accounting measures whether wealth has been preserved or consumed. Fixing on the state railways' refusal to depreciate rolling stock, he shows how omitted depreciation manufactures fictional surpluses, inflates the buyout burden at nationalization, and lets the state consume its own capital unawares. His remedy: genuine asset accounting and enterprise balance sheets, with parliamentary budget rights left intact.
Die Insuffizienz des Vermögens gibt gewiß nicht das Recht, auf eine Verrechnung des Vermögens überhaupt zu verzichten!
English translation: “The insufficiency of assets certainly does not confer the right to dispense with the accounting of assets altogether!”
The Methodenstreit was supposedly settled by a truce granting that induction and deduction are both necessary — yet the settlement, Böhm-Bawerk observes, is honored officially while deductive theory is treated in practice as an unwelcome guest. Writing for a sociological review, he sets out to give the compromise experiential force. His illustrations run from Franz Exner's radium research, where invisible α- and β-particles are known only by inference, to the law of diminishing returns to land, which he shows can be established more securely by indirect empirical reasoning than by tangled farm statistics. Deduction, he insists, is not aprioristic speculation but controlled abstraction, warp to induction's weft. The closing warning is aimed at a young sociology: suppress theory and its unavoidable work falls to untrained dilettantes — to Fouriers and Bellamys rather than Ricardos.
Es gibt nämlich gewisse Wahrheiten, für die die allgemeine Meinung zweimal erobert werden muß; einmal offiziell, und ein zweites Mal tatsächlich.
English translation: “For there are certain truths for which general opinion must be won twice: once officially, and a second time in actual fact.”
In Buin, on Bougainville, Thurnwald gathered the sociological materials of 1906 and 1909 that fill this third volume on people, state, and economy — presenting them as documentary reporting that leans on the islanders' own accounts to hold theory and observer bias at bay. Genealogical tables, 1,672 persons across thirty-seven of them, become instruments for reconstructing kinship, mortality, and a fertility decline he ties to venereal disease and colonial contact. Shell money, he shows, serves not commerce but bridewealth, alliance, and compensation, the bride-price matching what is paid for a slain life, while exogamy reads as peace-making between once-hostile groups. The chief, wealthy but no judge, rules as a primus inter pares, and every punishment is cast in the form of revenge.
Das Individuum ist oft wichtiger, als die Institution.
English translation: “The individual is often more important than the institution.”
Rural depopulation, in this 1912 Vienna lecture, is neither moral decay nor the inevitable price of progress but a structural failure of property distribution. Schwiedland joins attraction and expulsion: where large estates or dwarf holdings dominate, the ambitious young see no credible path from wage labour to ownership, and so they leave. He reframes the rural labour question as a land question, surveys the lesser remedies — cooperatives, credit institutions, rural schools, better housing — and subordinates them all to Besiedlung, inner colonization on the Prussian Rentengut model, where a holding is acquired through long-term rent rather than crushing capital debt. The purpose is not to furnish hands to landlords but to anchor capable labourers as owning citizens, giving them a visible prospect of ascent.
Für diesen Abzug kamen also nicht bloß die Reize der Städte, sondern auch die verhältnismäßige Erschwerung der Existenz auf dem Lande in Betracht: die Stadt zieht die Leute seelisch an, während zugleich das Land sie wirtschaftlich abstößt.
English translation: “For this exodus, then, not merely the attractions of the cities came into consideration, but also the comparative aggravation of existence in the countryside: the city attracts people psychologically, while at the same time the countryside repels them economically.”
No column of price statistics can settle a question that only economic theory can decide, Mises insists at the outset of this study of general dearness. He separates true inflation—a fall in the objective exchange value of money—from the particular price rises that tariffs, import bans, or resource scarcity produce. Higher money wages, he argues, do not raise real wages: unions win only transitional gains as employers concede, expecting to recover the cost in product prices, so recurring wage pushes feed a persistent tendency toward depreciation. Against Othmar Spann and the cost theorists he holds that general dearness is at root a monetary phenomenon, and warns that expanding uncovered notes and fiduciary media cannot permanently lower interest without courting crisis and inflation.
Sehen wir von der Tatsache des Geldgebrauchs ab, so ergibt sich klar, daß ein Gut nicht teurer werden kann, ohne daß alle anderen Güter billiger werden.
English translation: “If we set aside the fact of the use of money, it becomes clear that one good cannot become more expensive without all other goods becoming cheaper.”
Liberalism promised that free competition would dissolve society into isolated, harmoniously trading individuals; the reality, this 1913 survey argues, was the reverse. Capitalism shattered the old corporate bonds only to force workers, employers, salaried employees, officials, farmers, the Mittelstand, and consumers to regroup as organized classes, each pursuing the same aim — to organize the market by excluding competition within its own ranks. Lederer maps these associations across German society and extracts a durable concept: ideology as an interest group's double language, egoistic toward its own members, altruistic toward the state and the public. Unions draw depth from socialism, Christianity, or nationalism; employer bodies unite as counter-organizations; consumer cooperatives turn buying itself into class consciousness. Public life, he concludes, is increasingly governed by organized economic power rather than by liberal individual exchange.
Unter Ideologie ist hier und im folgenden das Gedankensystem verstanden, welches die Klassen und ihre Organisationen zur Begründung ihrer Interessen nach außen und innen aufgebaut haben.
English translation: “By ideology, here and in what follows, is understood the system of thought which the classes and their organizations have constructed in order to justify their interests both outwardly and inwardly.”
The businessman takes it as self-evident that credit and available money govern the rate of interest; orthodox theory insists interest springs only from the scarcity of real capital. Schumpeter cuts between them. Defining the monetary constitution broadly, to include coinage, bank credit, central-bank policy, collateral, and crisis lending, he asks where money can actually move interest and locates it in one case: credit issued without prior saving. Such bank-created purchasing power works as a forced saving, letting entrepreneurs bid resources away from routine uses, so that interest becomes bound to the credit-financed process of development rather than to a timeless yield of capital. Banks emerge as gatekeepers authorizing which ventures command resources. He partly rehabilitates Locke, Law, and Montesquieu against Hume and Smith, while likening a lowered interest rate to morphine, relief without cure.
Gibt es eine Beziehung zwischen Kapitalzins und Geldverfassung oder, anders, kann der Kapitalzins durch die Geldverfassung beeinflußt werden?
English translation: “Is there a relationship between the rate of interest on capital and the monetary constitution—or, put differently, can the rate of interest on capital be influenced by the monetary constitution?”
Composed in the immediate wake of Böhm-Bawerk's death, this commemorative essay converts personal reverence into a claim about intellectual scale: that the Austrian finance minister and theorist was not merely a capital theorist but a founder of exact economic analysis. Schumpeter reads the major works, from Rechte und Verhältnisse through the Geschichte und Kritik der Kapitalzinstheorien and the Positive Theorie des Kapitals to the Marx critique, as a single architecture built from Menger toward a general theory of the economic process. At its center stands capital as roundabout production and the agio theory of interest, grounded in the higher valuation of present over future goods for three reasons: differing provision, the perspectival underestimation of future wants, and the productivity of longer production. Interest, he insists, is a purely economic category that would persist even in a socialist commonwealth.
Sein Werk gehört nicht einer Generation oder einem Volk, sondern der Menschheit.
English translation: “His work belongs not to a single generation or a single people, but to humanity.”