1,549 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Change one assumption—that India needs three units of capital to yield one of output, not the 2.2 the Pant and Little memoranda supposed—and the arithmetic of the Third Five Year Plan turns forbidding. Working through three numerical models for 1960 to 1966, Rosenstein-Rodan shows how heavily national income, taxation, borrowing and required savings all hinge on this single ratio. Model b, demanding a 38 percent marginal savings rate on meagre foreign aid, he dismisses as a reductio ad absurdum; a plausible rate lies nearer 23 percent. His preferred model c couples the realistic 3:1 ratio with substantially higher aid—some 3,000 crores—as the only path to 4.8 percent annual growth without crushing austerity. A quiet lesson in how development plans live or die by their coefficients.
The assumption of a capital-output ratio 2·2:1 seems, however, to be dangerously optimistic.
Along the middle Kerám, a tributary of the Sepik in inland New Guinea, Thurnwald found a marriage system that European categories of adultery and promiscuity could not describe — and made it the pivot for rethinking “primitive” kinship. Drawn from a 1912–15 expedition and reprinted here from its 1916 appearance, the study reads settlement, descent, ritual, sexuality, and exchange as a single configuration governed by reciprocity, the retaliation of like for like. Exogamic gentes exchange sisters through paired sibs and the institution of the mundü, or sib-friend, while the “goblin-child” separates biological fatherhood from ritual and socially acknowledged care. The elaborate kinship tables, Thurnwald argues against Morgan, Rivers, and Kroeber, are not confused genealogy but a classificatory technology assigning duties, avoidances, land claims, and widow care within a dense social field.
The significance of terms of relationship is found in the social status they accord to the person concerned among his tribesmen.
In 1956 nuclear power seemed a natural answer for coal-poor, grid-rich economies like Europe and Japan; three years later, Rosenstein-Rodan argues, that case had quietly collapsed as coal and oil cheapened and technical progress favoured conventional thermal plants instead. Turning to underdeveloped countries, he marshals four structural objections—reactors demand large generating units, dependable grids, very high base-load factors, and punishing capital intensity—and insists India apply a shadow interest rate near 10 percent. Recomputed on realistic load factors, coal-fired power comes out 50 to 60 percent cheaper than nuclear. The essay dismantles H. J. Bhabha's proposed million-kilowatt programme and the optimism surrounding third-generation thorium reactors, counselling India to wait rather than sink scarce capital into uneconomic early plants it could ill afford.
When a man is hungry he may pay a high price for a meal, but he should not proceed to buy a restaurant.
Affluence has not made people happier: that unsettling premise drives this 1964 study of modern industrial society. Full employment, rising productivity, and mass consumption are genuine achievements, yet Mahr sees them breeding new pathologies, a wage-price spiral as governments bound to full employment accommodate every union demand, consumer egoism and status display in Veblen's sense, monotonous work, empty leisure, falling birth rates, and swelling cities. The social market economy of Müller-Armack and Erhard is defended as the best available order, but framework alone cannot suffice. His remedy is twofold: decentralized industry paired with garden-home settlements that restore meaningful activity outside the factory, and a moral renewal led by a nonpartisan elite schooled in Christian ethics and noble simplicity against the artificially inflated needs of prosperity.
Demzufolge sind die Regierungen einzugreifen gezwungen, wenn in irgendwelchen Bereichen der Volkswirtschaft ein Rückgang der Beschäftigung einsetzt.
English translation: “Governments are consequently compelled to intervene whenever a decline in employment sets in in any sector of the economy.”
No one can narrate the whole of human history exhaustively; every attempt must select, symbolize, and philosophically order. From that premise Engel-Janosi builds a genealogy of the modern effort to write universal history, tracing the underlying Grundeinstellungen that shape it—providence, secular progress, cyclical decline, national mission, cultural morphology, mythic meaning. Polybius first grasps world-historical interconnection, Augustine gives it a providential architecture, and the Enlightenment shifts its center from salvation to civilization. Ranke narrows practice to the Roman-Germanic world, Hegel excludes the peoples not chosen as vehicles of spirit, and Marx secularizes providence through modes of production. Spengler forces historians to stop equating Western development with world history, and Toynbee ends by turning history back toward myth. The essay validates no final system, only the enduring problem of the whole.
Wie immer man die geistige Leistung dieses Zeitalters beurteilen mag, eines ist gewiß: es sah und wollte Geschichtsschreibung im Sinne von Universalgeschichte.
English translation: “However one may judge the intellectual achievement of this age, one thing is certain: it saw and willed historiography in the sense of universal history.”
Every standard objection to development aid gets its hearing here first — that recipient states expropriate foreign property, drift toward socialism, squander funds through corruption, and repay generosity with nationalist ingratitude — before Kerschagl answers them one by one. Aid can check communist expansion as the Marshall Plan once did, even if friends cannot be bought; a new humanitas demands it; and corruption is met not by withholding help but by devising controls that spare the delicate matter of sovereignty. He contrasts Western dollar loans, repayable in hard currency, with Eastern credits settled in goods, calls for a coordinating umbrella over the IFC, IDA, and Export-Import Bank, and argues — invoking Nehru's claim that knowledge matters as much as bread — that material aid is worthless without education.
Diese Hilfe müsse aber so rasch wie möglich geleistet werden; denn es sei besser, einen Brand in seinen Anfängen zu löschen als bereits niedergebrannte Ruinen nutzlos unter Einsatz einer wirtschaftlichen oder politischen Feuerwehr zu retten.
English translation: “But this aid, it is said, must be rendered as quickly as possible; for it is better to extinguish a fire at its beginnings than uselessly to try to salvage already burned-out ruins by deploying an economic or political fire brigade.”
Rather than beginning in practical need, science begins in wonder and in the recognition of patterns, and some patterns, Hayek argues, can be explained but never precisely predicted. He defines complexity by the minimum number of variables required to instantiate a pattern, and places biological, mental, and social phenomena firmly on the far side of that threshold. A simple theory of an inherently complex order is likely false unless padded with a ceteris paribus clause that destroys its simplicity; statistics, treating elements as unconnected, cannot rescue it. Darwinian natural selection becomes his model of legitimate pattern prediction, falsifiable because it excludes certain sequences, yet unable to forecast actual forms. Economics and linguistics, built on systems of equations that yield no numerical prices, share the same standing and the same humility.
Staunen und unbefriedigte Wünsche haben den Menschen zu wissenschaftlicher Forschung angetrieben.
English translation: “Wonder and unsatisfied desires have driven man to scientific inquiry.”
That eternal being realizes itself in time is the lecture's lapidary thesis, and Voegelin at once refuses to let it become a closed philosophy of history observed from outside. The knower here is an actor within the very process he interprets, so the subject-object model breaks down. He organizes the inquiry around four relations between philosophy and history and locates its metaphysical center in the soul, understood not as a substance but as the sensorium of transcendence. Plato's Symposium and Gorgias supply the governing symbols, Eros, the metaxy, the judgment myth, and the key term fließende Präsenz, the flowing presence of eternity within experiential time. From this vantage he criticizes the ideological systems and imperial world-theologies that objectify being into pseudo-objects, and closes on an Augustinian note: history is an exodus from Babylon, wherever love for eternal being awakens.
Auch heute noch sind wir mit den Reichen geplagt, die ihre Welt auf dem Weg der Expansion suchen, anstatt in das metaxy der fließenden Präsenz vorzustoßen.
English translation: “Even today we are still plagued with empires that seek their world by the path of expansion, instead of pressing forward into the metaxy of the flowing presence.”
As the Goldwater campaign was being branded a 'radical right,' Sennholz set out to reverse the label, arguing that true extremism means allegiance to collectivism rather than distance from the reigning liberal consensus. His Extreme Right is Jeffersonian—committed to private property and limited government—and appears radical only because the political center has drifted left. He then prosecutes three men of the Kennedy circle: Walt Rostow, whose stages of economic growth he reads as disguised Marxian materialism; Arthur Schlesinger Jr., convicted of importing class conflict into American politics; and McGeorge Bundy, whose call for a presidentially defined 'national purpose' he likens to Führer and Gefolgschaft. Closing with Hayek's Road to Serfdom, this 1964 American Opinion essay recasts the political axis as liberty versus collectivism.
The materialism of Marx and Rostow denies man's freedom of choice. Instead it makes everything a superstructure of man's material basis, especially of his state of technology.
Delivered for Henry Hazlitt's seventieth birthday in November 1964, this short tribute expands a birthday homage into a statement of the classical-liberal vocation. Mises honors Hazlitt not as a friend alone but as the writer who, across books, essays, a novel, and a weekly Newsweek column, refused to concede that freedom is an obsolete prejudice—an assumption Mises had lately heard voiced aloud when a listener demanded to know why liberty was worth aiming at. Into the homage he folds his own doctrine: the material lot of the masses can be raised by one method only, the accumulation of capital faster than population grows. Hazlitt is cast as the economic conscience of the nation, heir to Cannan and Bastiat, and the address ends by turning from his generation's defeats to the hope that a rising cohort of liberty's defenders will yet succeed.
But our meeting is not simply a private affair because you do not belong only to us, you belong to the nation and to the world.
A demonic invention that preserves appearances while destroying realities—so Rueff, reaching for Goethe's Faust, casts inflation, the hidden and unjust tax that rewards debtors and quick-adjusting incomes while ruining savers and fixed claims. Ranging from Poincaré's stabilization to West Germany's 1948 monetary reform, the lectures indict the gold-exchange standard born at Genoa in 1922, which let reserve-currency countries run perpetual deficits and, by duplicating credit, organized the boom that broke in 1929 and the Great Depression that followed. Against national accounting and the modern faith in 'conscious organization,' Rueff defends the gold standard as an enlightened monarch that disciplines through incentives rather than commands, insisting that sound money is the precondition of European unity and of liberty itself.
L'Europe se fera par la monnaie, ou ne se fera pas.
English translation: “Europe will be made through money, or it will not be made at all.”
Mounting fear that the gold-exchange standard might buckle under an overhang of dollar claims frames this pedagogical survey of the leading blueprints for remaking the world's monetary order. Machlup sorts the proposals into five families—extending the gold-exchange standard, mutual central-bank assistance, centralized reserve creation, raising the price of gold, and freely flexible exchange rates—and weighs each against the charges of balance-of-payments strain, inadequate reserve growth, and fragility. He walks through the Keynes Clearing Union with its bancor, Triffin's plan to convert the IMF into a world central bank, and Maxwell Stamp's certificates for development aid, using balance-sheet T-accounts to separate genuine reserve creation from mere credit transfer. He declines to crown any single plan, offering analysis rather than verdict.
Gold and exchange reserves are needed only if exchange rates are not permitted to move to the level that would equilibrate the market at the moment.