1,549 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Economic life, this 1949 conference paper insists, unfolds in historical time and a disturbed environment, so every recorded cycle must first be met as a historical individual before any model lays claim to it. Schumpeter refuses to pit history against theory or statistics: equilibrium analysis, dynamic schemata, and time series stay indispensable, yet they run empty unless tied to actual industrial processes. He separates the cyclical mechanism from the avoidable calamities that made 1929 catastrophic in America, banking epidemics, mortgage disorder, uncontrolled speculation, and argues that such disasters were logically detachable from the underlying process. What business-cycle research most lacks, he contends, is standardized industrial and locational monographs tracking how production functions, firms, and leading personnel actually rise and fall.
Apart from the measurements it yields, a set of time series per se does not so much solve any problem as state in quantitative terms what problem there is to solve.
A devalued currency may pull the exchange market back toward balance or drive it further from it, and telling the two cases apart is the whole problem here. Haberler builds a static two-country skeleton, deriving the demand and supply of foreign currency from underlying import and export schedules and defining stability by how a deficit responds to a falling exchange rate. A negatively inclined supply curve of foreign exchange, he shows, can make depreciation worsen the very deficit it was meant to cure. Recasting the Marshall-Lerner condition as a special case of a broader exchange-market stability rule, he insists that currency-market curves must never be confused with the commodity curves beneath them, and resists the 'elasticity pessimism' of postwar dollar-scarcity debates.
But the free price mechanism could not achieve that result; it would drive the exchange rate in the wrong direction.
Written in the aftermath of a catastrophe its author dates to 1932–1945, this closing synthesis measures humanity's ascent against its recurring descent into madness. Thurnwald traces self-domestication from foragers through plant cultivators and pastoralists to the Metal Age and the archaic state, giving Überschichtung—the superimposition of specialized groups, herders over cultivators—pride of place as the engine of caste, serfdom, and slavery. Institutions of kinship, economy, law, and religion are read through cases from Maori communal redistribution and Buin shell money to the Sumerian temple economy, while universal religions appear as reforms against aristocratic cults. The verdict is somber: technical command of external nature has far outrun any comparable command of social life, whose domestication remains grievously unfinished.
Die Menschen haben die Natur in nicht unerheblichem Ausmaß zu meistern verstanden, doch nur wenig ihr Zusammenleben.
English translation: “Human beings have managed to master nature to no small extent, but their common life only very little.”
Economics had long borrowed its self-image from mechanics, treating prices and quantities as passive magnitudes tending toward equilibrium. Against that inheritance, this programmatic essay introduces the theory of games that Morgenstern developed with John von Neumann, insisting the mathematics is essential rather than decorative. Isolated maximization may suffice for a Robinson Crusoe, or for the limiting cases of monopoly and pure competition; it fails wherever each agent's best move depends on what rivals conceal, threaten, or choose. Two-person zero-sum games yield saddle points and mixed strategies, making bluff and secrecy formal elements of rational conduct; games of three or more introduce coalitions, compensations, and solution sets rather than single equilibria — the natural language of cartels, unions, and bilateral monopoly. Rationality itself, he argues, cannot be defined before the strategic situation has been analyzed.
Jeder einzelne strebt nach seinem maximalen Vorteil, und die Interessen aller oder der meisten stehen miteinander in Widerspruch.
English translation: “Each individual strives for his maximum advantage, and the interests of all, or of most, stand in conflict with one another.”
Multilingual, mountainous, and federal, Switzerland struck many postwar observers as a Europe in miniature, standing proof that peoples divided by language and creed might still be bound together. Writing in 1950, Rappard measures that hope against the institutions hastily built between 1947 and 1949—the Economic Commission for Europe, the Brussels Pact, the OEEC, the Council of Europe, and the North Atlantic Treaty—and finds them frameworks for cooperation among sovereign states rather than the federation Churchill had gestured toward at Zurich in 1946. Swiss neutrality, he explains, forbids military alliance and counsels reserve; a united Western Europe without Britain he doubts, judging an Atlantic federation of free peoples, after Lionel Curtis and Clarence Streit, the likelier safeguard against Soviet power.
Ce n'est pas d'institutions dont l'Europe a besoin. C'est de liberté.
English translation: “It is not institutions that Europe needs. It is freedom.”
Cap the price of milk below what the market sets, and marginal producers cut back; to restore supply the government must then control the price of feed, of the factors behind the feed, and onward until it directs all production, at which point, Mises argues, capitalism has quietly become socialism. This 1950 New York address presses that logic against every middle-of-the-road program. Interventionism is no golden mean but a separate third system, and an unstable one; price controls, minimum wages that breed unemployment, credit expansion that ends in slump, foreign-exchange control, and confiscatory progressive taxation each push toward comprehensive planning. He points to Hitler's Zwangswirtschaft and Attlee's Britain as the destinations, and insists the drift is not inevitable, that only a positive case for the free market, not mere anti-socialism, can halt it.
The middle-of-the-road policy is not an economic system that can last. It is a method for the realization of socialism by installments.
Rebuilding a scholarly discipline after a world war is partly a matter of statutes, dues, and committee votes — and this report captures economics doing exactly that. Writing for the American Economic Association, Haberler argues for joining the newly forming International Economic Association, whose design meets the conditions Princeton had set: a modest structure resting on existing national bodies, financed but not governed by UNESCO, and cheap to support at $200 in annual dues. He recounts the April 1949 Paris meeting, the draft statutes reviewed paragraph by paragraph, and the interim slate of officers awaiting the Council's confirmation. Behind the procedural surface lies a real transition: economics reconstituting itself as an organized international profession through deliberately limited cooperation.
In accordance with the Interim Arrangements provided in the Draft Statutes, the Interim Committee nominated Professor Schumpeter as President, M. Rueff as Vice President, and Ronald Walker (Australia) as Treasurer of the I.E.A.
A patient with cortical injury may still pronounce the word 'knife' yet be unable to use it as a category, naming it instead by situation as a 'pencil-sharpener' or 'apple-peeler.' From Kurt Goldstein's clinical theory of aphasia, and its distinction between concrete and abstract or categorial comportment, Schütz draws a phenomenology of the lifeworld. Against atomistic localization, he reads speech disorder as a disturbance of the whole person's relation to the world, and stages a convergence of Bergson, Cassirer, Merleau-Ponty, and Gurwitsch before grounding the matter, with Husserl, in pre-predicative experience. His own move recasts Goldstein's 'attitudes' as differing systems of relevance and typification: as attention to life diminishes, the specious present contracts toward the immediately given, horizons close, and names cease to carry open symbolic generality. Breakdowns of speech thereby disclose the typifications by which people ordinarily inhabit a common reality.
Aphasie, Agnosie und Apraxie sind eng verwandt, und bei allen dreien ist die sogenannte kategoriale Einstellung beeinträchtigt.
English translation: “Aphasia, agnosia, and apraxia are closely related, and in all three the so-called categorial attitude is impaired.”
When we project an action, we do not picture it unfolding phase by phase; we imagine the deed as already accomplished and reconstruct backward the means that will have produced it—anticipation in the future perfect, modo futuri exacti. On this temporal insight Schütz builds an anatomy of everyday deliberation, distinguishing action from completed act, the future-directed in-order-to motive from the retrospectively disclosed because-motive, and mere fancying from a project disciplined by what the actor takes to be feasible. Choice becomes possible only when doubt turns open possibilities into competing problematic ones, weighted against each other; here he threads Husserl, Bergson's durée, and Leibniz's antecedent and final volitions. But weight derives from higher systems of plans reaching to the life-plan itself, so perfectly rational choice in daily life proves impossible—a limit that both bounds and licenses the objectifying models of social science.
I can choose only between projects which stand to choice.
Only the foreign, Richard Thurnwald insists, first opens a path to knowledge of ourselves — and from that premise unfolds a vast comparative anthropology of the human mind, tracing its awakening, growth, and errancy from the earliest Naturvölker through the archaic civilizations of Egypt, Peru, and Babylon. Against the older evolutionism that ranked cultures on a single ladder toward European reason, Thurnwald reconstructs a paleopsychology of participation, in which surrounding reality is lived personally rather than confronted as impersonal object. He works through Mittelpunktgefühl, mana, totemism, projection, sacrifice, and the slow emergence of high gods, arguing that error is no accident but built into the very symbolic powers — naming, analogy, projection — that make understanding possible. Rationalization of life, he warns, will never be complete.
Die Welt ist für sie ein erweitertes Selbst.
English translation: “For them the world is an extended self.”
The failures of American foreign lending in the 1920s had been blamed on the depression and the transfer problem of the 1930s, on conditions arising after the loans were made. Ilse Mintz relocates the fault to the moment of issue. Building a default index from the share of each year's foreign-government dollar bonds that later defaulted, she shows that loans floated early in the decade performed far better than those floated late, as lending shifted from sound areas toward Latin America and eastern Europe, and from cautious houses toward reckless ones. Risk premiums, meanwhile, fell just as quality collapsed. The mechanism she names is not dollar scarcity but investor delusion during a speculative expansion, and she ties it to business-cycle theories of over-optimism in Burns, Mitchell, Haberler, and Schumpeter.
The 1920’s were the defaultless era in foreign lending.
In May 1895 Kálnoky could describe Austria-Hungary's foreign relations as orderly while an American envoy judged the monarchy's future exceptionally bleak—and Engel-Janosi shows the two verdicts need not contradict each other. Reconstructing the foreign minister's resignation as a constitutional rather than merely personal crisis, he traces its trigger to the Agliardi affair, in which the papal nuncio's politically charged Hungarian visitation let Premier Bánffy turn a conditional diplomatic protest into a public fait accompli. Behind the rupture lay a structural defect of the 1867 Ausgleich: a common foreign ministry obliged to act for the Dual Monarchy without any command able to restrain Vienna and Budapest at once. Agliardi's later recall partly vindicated Kálnoky, but his fall came as European politics dissolved into a wider world crisis, Russia's gaze turning eastward after Japan's defeat of China.
Zwei Leistungen bestimmen die geschichtliche Rolle des Grafen Kálnoky: seine Politik des Abschlusses und der zweimaligen Erneuerung des Dreibundvertrages und seine Politik gegenüber Rußland, in der die Balkanfrage das Zentralproblem darstellte.
English translation: “Two achievements determine the historical role of Count Kálnoky: his policy of concluding and twice renewing the Triple Alliance treaty, and his policy toward Russia, in which the Balkan question was the central problem.”