1,549 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Comparative advantage, not absolute superiority, is what makes trade pay — a country gains by exporting where its disadvantage is least and importing where it is greatest, even against a rival more efficient at everything. This essay rebuilds that classical theorem on firmer ground, replacing Ricardo's labour theory of value with opportunity cost: the real cost of more of one good is the quantity of another forgone along a substitution curve. Haberler then extends the argument from two goods to many, ranking commodities along a shifting export-import margin set by wages, exchange rates and the balance of payments. He turns the framework against the case for retaliatory tariffs and against protectionist appeals to immobile capital, arguing that idle plant and written-down assets are private losses, not proof of national waste.
Unilateral free trade is thus—tactical considerations aside—thoroughly desirable and preferable to a generalized tariff regimen.
Reserved from the first part were money, capital, and interest; the second volume takes them up. Engländer opens with money 'without intrinsic value,' deriving the total sum of prices from quantity, true cash reserves, market frequency, and velocity, and rejecting any appeal to the marginal utility of fiat money. He then argues that a purely cashless economy of book transfers is theoretically possible, and that bank book-credit does not itself create capital but frees idle reserves. The capital theory works upward from a single-stage economy of capitalists and workers to multi-stage and free-stage production, bounding the interest rate between the highest 'provision number' and the lowest 'sacrifice number' while denying that the productivity of roundabout methods explains interest at all. Cycles, he concludes, are not the inevitable fate of capitalism if saving is properly timed.
Nehmen wir nun noch den Fall eines Barerlages bei einer Bank, und zwar zu bloßen Verwahrungszwecken, so ergibt sich die Möglichkeit, daß die Bank diese bei ihr erlegten Gelder weiterverleiht.
English translation: “If we now consider further the case of a cash deposit at a bank, and indeed one made merely for safekeeping purposes, the possibility arises that the bank lends out these funds deposited with it.”
Self-determination and imperial collapse multiplied Europe's sovereign states after 1918, even as trade, production, and population bound them ever more tightly together — a contradiction Rappard makes the engine of his survey of postwar cooperation. He tracks the continent's lurch from three republics to thirteen, the rise of dictatorships he links to agrarian social structure, and the slow shift from coercion to negotiation marked by the Dawes Plan, Locarno, and Germany's admission to Geneva. He measures demography, coal, cereals, and tariffs with League statistics, and judges the machinery of peace — the Kellogg Pact, arbitration treaties, the Permanent Court — with a sympathetic skepticism, faulting a renunciation of war that lacks definitions and sanctions. The unresolved question, he writes, is whether brute force or international justice will finally govern a Europe too interdependent to stand apart.
The execution of the peace treaties is a secondary, an almost accidental, and essentially a transient function of the League.
Robert Deumer's prize-winning blueprint for a state monopoly of credit takes nationalization as settled and worries only over its institutional design; Mises attacks the premise instead. Behind the plan lies the belief that private banks finance merely profitable rather than nationally necessary industries, a contrast he dissolves by converting the question of credit allocation into one of consumer sovereignty, since profit expresses the demand of consumers, not the whim of bankers. A nationalized bank, he argues, could never be run commercially: commercial management is inseparable from private ownership, profit-and-loss responsibility, and monetary calculation, so bureaucracy would follow not from bad officials but from the absence of any profitability test. Freed from redemption, such a bank would inflate on political command. Credit nationalization thus approaches full socialization, a late relic of an exhausted statism.
Man kann einen Staatsbetrieb niemals „kommerzialisieren“, auch wenn man noch so viele Äußerlichkeiten der privaten Unternehmung auf ihn überträgt.
English translation: “One can never "commercialize" a state enterprise, no matter how many external features of private enterprise one transfers to it.”
Vienna's adult-education colleges — the Volksheim, the Volksbildungsverein, and the Urania — grew, Braun argues, out of a nineteenth-century liberal faith in knowledge as emancipation, then bent to modern demands for organized, practical, specialized learning. Confining her study to Vienna, where the evidence allowed, she distinguishes the genuine Volkshochschule from vocational schools and party schools, and defends its integrity against the Marxist claim that objective teaching in the social sciences is impossible: choose lecturers by competence, not worldview, or the college becomes a party school. The essay's sharpest thread follows women into the lecture hall — dominant in foreign languages, advancing in physics, medicine, law, and economics as the university opened to them. That they met so little resistance in this poorly paid, honorary work, she concludes, exposes how often talk of female inferiority merely masks competition for wages.
Daß man dem Vordringen der Frauen in dieser sehr verantwortungsvollen und hochqualifizierten Tätigkeit so wenig Widerstand entgegensetzt, ist wiederum ein Beweis mehr dafür, daß die Schlagworte von weiblicher Inferiorität oft nur durch den Brotneid angeregt werden.
English translation: “That so little resistance is being offered to the advance of women into this highly responsible and highly qualified activity is once again further proof that the slogans about female inferiority are often prompted merely by professional envy.”
Rather than rehearse the familiar arguments for reforming the finances of Reich, Länder, and municipalities, this 1930 essay takes the opposite path and estimates what German fiscal inaction would cost. Schumpeter grants the depression is real and severe, but denies that rationalization, concentration, or foreign-capital shortages explain it; their common defect is blindness to how taxation and public spending shape recovery itself. Capitalism renews itself through profits that finance expansion and technical change, and divert those gains into politically driven consumption, and every upswing peters out before its work is done. Failed reform, on this reading, is no mere budgetary mishap but a hinge of historical causation: it drains the surplus recovery needs, deepens the slump, and pushes a strained society toward socialization or authoritarian reaction, each pleasure short-lived against Germany's industrial reality.
Denn jeder Aufschwung nährt sich zum Teil aus seinen eigenen Gewinnen und muß versanden, ehe er getan hat, was er sollte, wenn diese Gewinne ihrer Bestimmung entzogen und fortgesteuert werden.
English translation: “For every upswing feeds in part on its own profits and must peter out before it has accomplished what it should, if these profits are diverted from their purpose and taxed away.”
From his editorial desk in Zehlendorf on 15 June 1931, Thurnwald answers Dr. Ernst Harms with the courteous firmness of a journal editor holding a line. Writing for the Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie und Soziologie, he reports that the contributions to the symposium, already excessively swollen, have been definitively closed, and that Harms's submitted review of Halfdan Bryn's book falls short of the scientific standards the journal is obliged to impose. One door he leaves ajar: a manuscript on the theory of an experimental Völkerpsychologie may be considered once he can examine it in hand, and Harms is directed to the publisher C. L. Hirschfeld about his lecture on folk character and cultural progress. A brief document, it catches the gatekeeping labor behind an interwar scientific periodical.
Capital is not a pile of tools, buildings, or accumulated goods but a form of reckoning, so runs the central chapter of this 1931 lecture volume on Kapital und Kapitalzins. Refusing to begin from a definition, Schumpeter lets the phenomenon emerge from the economic process itself, reconstructing the stationary circular flow in which labor and nature enter as productive services and consumption goods emerge as the social product, all financed from prior receipts. Capital here is an accounting form corresponding to money income, distinct from produced means of production. Development changes everything: entrepreneurs carry out new combinations before the goods exist, and bank credit, the distinctively capitalist device, creates the purchasing power that commands labor and materials. From this follow the Konjunkturzyklus of clustered innovation, the self-deflation of productive credit, and interest as an agio on present money born of entrepreneurial profit.
Wir beginnen deshalb nicht mit einer Definition des Kapitals, vielmehr soll sich das Phänomen aus unserer Darlegung von selbst ergeben.
English translation: “We therefore do not begin with a definition of capital; rather, the phenomenon shall emerge of itself from our exposition.”
Is capitalism trapped in a permanent crisis, or merely in the depression phase of a normal business cycle? Schumpeter answers at once for the cycle, then devotes the essay to the qualification that makes the difference. What should have been short and mild turned catastrophic because political lesions, war legacies, protection, fiscal distortion, and deflationary therapy, pressed continuously on the economic organism. Cycles themselves arise when innovations bunch: railways or new raw-material methods become feasible, spread in swarms, expand credit, and then collide with the old, so that depression is a groping toward new equilibrium rather than simple collapse. Politically unfettered, he insists, the capitalist mechanism would scarcely produce symptoms of such severity, and the system as such needs no planning to function, while deflation policy, his chief example, manufactures the very bankruptcies and unemployment it claims to cure.
Das kapitalistische System als solches bedarf keiner Regelung oder Planung innerhalb oder außerhalb der Depression, um zu funktionieren, Erfolge zu erzielen und Zusammenbrüche zu vermeiden.
English translation: “The capitalist system as such requires no regulation or planning, whether within or outside of a depression, in order to function, achieve successes, and avoid breakdowns.”
The opening volume of a five-part survey of human society sets itself against sociology's habit of generalizing from a narrow European sample, and against the Kulturkreis theorists who treated cultural goods as museum objects passed mechanically between peoples. Thurnwald's method is the representative Lebensbild: concrete communities—Polar Eskimo, Bushmen, Andaman Islanders, Copper Eskimo, Maori—shown whole, so that institutions appear functioning inside real cultural systems rather than sorted into ideal types. Foragers are ranged by habitat across ice, steppe, forest, and water, then plant-cultivators and herders. Running through everything is a distinction he presses hard: the irreversible accumulation of technique and knowledge against the reversible, pendulum-like swings between mother-right and father-right. Institutions such as blood revenge or asylum, he warns, cut across so-called culture circles and cannot be identified mechanically with them.
Die Feldbauer sind bei den Expansionen keine „Imperialisten“, sondern eher Gründer neuer Tochtervölker und Niederlassungen, sie sind „Kolonisatoren“, aber keine „Eroberer“.
English translation: “In their expansions, agriculturalists are not "imperialists" but rather founders of new daughter peoples and settlements; they are "colonizers," but not "conquerors.”
The forty-hour week, this 1931 lecture to the German trade-union congress in Frankfurt insists, is no narrow bargaining demand but a response to a capitalism transformed by crisis. Depression at twenty-five percent unemployment differs in kind, not merely degree, from earlier downturns: postwar technical change swept through raw materials, agriculture, transport, and mining at once, cartels and tariff walls held organized prices high while starving smaller export firms of credit, and no automatic compensation reabsorbs the workers machinery displaces. Lederer rejects both autarky, which for a modern nation means poverty and dependence, and isolated currency manipulation in an interdependent world. If technical progress permanently shrinks the necessary volume of labor, work must be shared more evenly — and leisure, rather than mere rest, becomes a terrain of education, solidarity, and emancipation for the working class.
Es ist etwas anderes, ob eine Krise mit 7, 8, 10 Prozent Arbeitslosigkeit oder mit 25 Prozent Arbeitslosigkeit zu kämpfen hat.
English translation: “It is one thing whether a crisis has to contend with 7, 8, or 10 percent unemployment, and quite another with 25 percent unemployment.”
Delivered as a lecture in 1931 amid the deepening Depression, this eight-part address moves from the nature of the market through the business cycle to unemployment, price supports, taxation, and gold. The market, Mises insists, is no anarchy but a form of economic democracy in which consumers, as the final authority, direct production. Crisis appears when policy disables that mechanism: bank credit expansion drives the loan rate below the natural rate, building a boom on sand, while union wages held above market-clearing levels, sustained by unemployment relief, turn joblessness chronic. Price supports for coffee and wheat, protective tariffs, and capital-consuming taxation deepen the disorder. The single way out, he argues, is to abandon every attempt to prevent market prices from shaping production.
Die kapitalistische Marktwirtschaft ist eine Demokratie, in der jeder Groschen eine Wahlstimme gibt.
English translation: “The capitalist market economy is a democracy in which every penny casts a vote.”