1,549 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Behind The General Theory, Rothbard argues, stands a man best understood through egotism, a sense of elite destiny, and open contempt for bourgeois morality, thrift, and the long run. This polemical portrait follows Keynes from the patronage of Cambridge economics and the secret society of the Apostles into Bloomsbury's avant-garde revolt against Victorian values, then reads his economics as an extension of that temperament: anti-principle, opportunistic, and hungry for policy power. Rothbard charges him with misrepresenting classical economics and Pigou, dismissing Mises's monetary work he could barely read in German, and dressing old mercantilist and inflationist fallacies in impenetrable new jargon. He ends by calling Keynes a charismatic, power-driven statist rather than the scientific revolutionary his admirers proclaim.
We were, that is to say, in the strict sense of the term, immoralists.
Crusade, Reformation, Revolution: Europe's three great movements of ideas, Somary contends in this 1952 political testament, each produced results opposite to their creators' aims, and each ultimately swelled the power of the state. He denies that peoples are truly sovereign, watches modern war put a uniform on thought, food, and death alike, and charts the replacement of the measured Rechtsstaat by the boundless Machtstaat. State monopoly over money creation, he argues—abetted by Knapp's nominalism—hands governments an instrument of silent expropriation, while Jacobin primacy of politics and the doctrine of national self-determination corrode law and liberty. Against Bolshevism, which he judges to rest on power and nothing else, he sets Switzerland's organic democracy, and codifies his pessimism in twenty 'social laws of inverse proportion' explaining how tyranny thrives beneath the forms of popular sovereignty.
Je stärker die Gewalt konzentriert ist, desto geringer ist die Verantwortung.
English translation: “The more strongly power is concentrated, the smaller is responsibility.”
Imperial Vienna after the collapse of the Habsburg monarchy — Kelsen's Pure Theory of Law, Mises's seminar, the Geistkreis, Freud's circle — forms the opening scene of these recollections, dictated from 1973 interviews and read less as memoir than as intellectual anamnesis. Voegelin narrates his passage through neo-Kantian legal theory, a brief youthful Marxism, and Max Weber's value-free science toward a lifelong effort to recover political science from ideology. Dismissal after the 1938 Anschluss and a narrow escape from the Gestapo turn the story into diagnosis: National Socialism as a deformation of reason and language that constructs "second realities" and forbids questioning. The collapse of his projected History of Political Ideas drives the decisive turn — from detachable ideas to the experiences from which symbols arise.
Ideologies are not science, and ideals are no substitute for ethics.
Liberty against Power, social power against state power, that antithesis drives this sweeping narrative history of colonial America, running from the first seventeenth-century settlements through the Revolution and the Articles of Confederation. Rothbard rejects class conflict as the engine of events, reserving it for cases where groups seize government privilege, and applies a Lockean test of legitimate ownership by labor and first use against feudal grants, quitrents, and mercantilist monopoly. Puritan theocracy, Bacon's Rebellion, the persecution of Quakers, the Dominion of New England, and the market forces that dissolved wage-and-price controls all become episodes in one drama. Detailed narrative, long abandoned by textbook surveys, is restored here as the very substance of history.
The cleansing acid of profit was to dissolve incipient feudalism and land monopoly.
Ordinary businessmen may choose free markets or state privilege, but bankers, on Rothbard's account, are structurally driven toward statism, and that inclination threads through a century of American foreign policy. This compressed revisionist essay follows the rivalry and collusion of Morgan and Rockefeller interests from Jay Cooke's Civil War debt monopoly through the 1890s turn to imperial expansion, Wilson's entry into World War I, the founding of the Federal Reserve, and the Cold War machinery of the Council on Foreign Relations and Trilateral Commission. Naming cabinets, coups, and interlocking directorates from the Spanish-American War to Iran, Guatemala, and Chile, Rothbard argues that a permanent government of finance rules regardless of which party wins office.
The great turning point of American foreign policy came in the early 1890s, during the second Cleveland administration.
Reporting on his first semester of seminar exercises at the University of Graz, the young Schumpeter records a paradox familiar to every institution-builder: healthy demand starved of resources. Some fifty participants attended and twenty took on written work, yet the seminar lacked adequate books and even a consultation room. The document's interest lies in its pedagogy. Active practice in economic reasoning, he argues, does far more than passive lecturing to make a student penetrate the subject, useful as an official and guarded against what he calls the radicalism of ignorance. A smaller Proseminar took up economic theory through the selected readings of Diehl and Mombert. Genuine mastery, he concludes, is won through exercise in thinking rather than the compressed exposition of doctrine.
Wirkliches Verständnis und dauernder Gewinn kann nur durch eine solche Einübung erzielt werden; sie beginnen auch in Deutschland üblich zu werden; und der Wunsch der Studierenden danach ist ein bedeutendes Symptom der Bedürfnisse nach gründlicher Ausbildung im ökonomischen Denken.
English translation: “Real understanding and lasting benefit can be achieved only through such practice; it is beginning to become customary in Germany as well; and the students' desire for it is a significant symptom of the need for thorough training in economic thinking.”
Eighty-eight men enrolled; barely thirty came regularly, most of them beginners still struggling to learn the subject. From these modest figures Schumpeter builds, in his 1912/13 Graz report, an argument about the material conditions of a science. Each week a student lectured for forty minutes and the group debated topics from bank credit and cartels to tariffs, railway nationalization, and urban migration. He judges the results satisfactory — but the word is relative, calibrated to the scarcity of student time, the absence of any external incentive, and a seminar founded only months earlier. The second half becomes a blunt critique of infrastructure: without books, journals, work rooms, or an assistant, deeper independent research is impossible, and the most promising students must be sent to better-equipped universities such as Prague.
Der Seminarbetrieb litt in der bedauerlichsten Weise an dem fast völligen Mangel aller Behelfe, an dem auch der beste Wille der Teilnehmer oft scheitern musste.
English translation: “The running of the seminar suffered in the most regrettable way from the almost complete lack of all resources, against which even the best will of the participants had often to founder.”
Dated July 1914, on the very eve of catastrophe, this Graz seminar report reads in retrospect as a document of fragile academic modernization. Sixty-one students and practitioners enrolled to treat subjects as various as marriage frequency and wheat prices, Oppenheimer and Stammler, French syndicalism, and American banking reform. Schumpeter judges the output satisfactory only because at least half the intended papers foundered, not on any failure of talent, but on the sheer lack of material — journals, books, bibliographies, an assistant, which he treats not as conveniences but as the preconditions of research. The stakes he names are national: Austria owes its outsized standing in political economy to the achievements of a few outstanding men, and that standing will be lost if the country proves unable to build further on their founding ideas.
Ohne solche Mittel ist unsere Universität ja förmlich vom wissenschaftlichen Leben abgeschnitten.
English translation: “Without such means our university is virtually cut off from scholarly life.”
War now dictates the calendar: seminar exercises took place only in the winter semester, and the whole operation fell far short of peacetime. Schumpeter's shortest Graz report registers the costs of 1914/15 precisely — the slowly forming core of participants drawn from practice thinned out, and planned reforms such as specialist groups and a separate proseminar division were left unrealized. Thirty-two enrolled men and a few guests nonetheless sustained the weekly rhythm of reading, presentation, and debate across a strikingly broad field: socialism, the cost of living in Western Europe, public finance, Australian labor regulation, rural flight, entail, Taylorism, currency, and Herder as sociologist. Institutional ambition is checked, yet the seminar still enacts a recognizably modern program of economic inquiry shaped by theory and contemporary problems.
Der Betrieb blieb natürlich weit hinter dem normaler Zeiten zurück, namentlich waren die Teilnehmer weniger geneigt als sonst, größere, sie auf längere Zeit in Anspruch nehmende Arbeiten zu übernehmen.
English translation: “The operation naturally fell far short of that of normal times; in particular, the participants were less inclined than usual to undertake larger pieces of work that would occupy them over a longer period.”
Seventeen members, a war pressing on every schedule, and yet more papers offered than the weekly meetings could hold — such is the wartime seminar Schumpeter describes for 1915/16. The report doubles as a manifesto for institutional differentiation. Only when the planned institute at the Meerschloss opens, he argues, will genuinely professional training, real competition with foreign universities, and service to state economic policy become possible; hence his appeal for a fresh allocation of a thousand Kronen. The semester's coordinated theme was the effect of grain tariffs on the national economy, parceled into linked reports on history, classical theory, incidence, and land prices, supplemented by papers on Vico, Schopenhauer, and the wartime economic process. Beneath the administrative surface stands Schumpeter the institution-builder, already turning toward social classes and economic democracy.
Schon die vor drei Jahren gewährte Subvention von 500 Kronen für Bücheranschaffungen hat auf den ganzen Betrieb belebend gewirkt und den dringendsten momentanen Bedürfnissen abgeholfen.
English translation: “Already the subsidy of 500 Kronen granted three years ago for the acquisition of books has had an invigorating effect on the whole operation and has met the most pressing immediate needs.”
Midway through the First World War, a questionnaire from the Verband »Para pacem« asked whether one should already resist the practices — slander of national character, refusals of trade, scholarship, and travel — that threatened to outlast the fighting. Schumpeter's emphatic yes turns the survey into a compact argument against cultural nationalism. Hatred, he warns, is not merely a by-product of war but a force seeking to survive it, and the proper function of intellectuals is to set themselves against the hatred of their own people rather than amplify it. Reconciliation, he adds, is also national self-interest. The struggle must begin at home, with the admission that one's own side has sinned quite enough — never with the denunciation of enemy peoples.
Keine Nation auf dieser Erde kann ein würdiges Dasein führen ohne alle die andern.
English translation: “No nation on this earth can lead a worthy existence without all the others.”
Max Weber demanded that sociology understand action through its subjective meaning, but never explained what such meaning is, how it arises in lived experience, or how anyone else could grasp it. First published in 1932, this is the book that supplies the missing foundation. Drawing on Bergson and Husserl, Schütz argues that meaning is no hidden mental substance but an act of self-interpretation: an experience becomes meaningful only when reflection lifts it, already elapsed, out of the stream of inner time. From there he rebuilds the whole edifice, the projected act with its Um-zu and Weil motives, the understanding of others through signs and typifications, and a graded social world reaching from the intimate We of consociates to the anonymous contemporaries, predecessors, and successors whose meanings we can no longer revise. Scientific sociology, he concludes, constructs ideal types that must stay answerable to the actor's own meaning.
Gemeinter Sinn eines Erlebnisses ist nichts anderes als eine Selbstauslegung des Erlebnisses von einem neuen Erleben her.
English translation: “The intended meaning of a lived experience is nothing other than a self-interpretation of that experience from the standpoint of a new experience.”