1,549 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Neither a Ricardian exception nor an artifact of private landownership, ground rent in this 1889 study becomes the value that a scarce natural factor draws from its marginal product. Schullern-Schrattenhofen builds the argument on the marginal-utility value theory of Menger and Böhm-Bawerk, treating land not as an eternal surface but as a temporally limited productive service, and carefully separating 'raw' from 'pure' land-use, a distinction that turns decisive in mines, where extraction consumes the resource itself. Fertility, location, population growth, and diminishing returns all move rent by changing either product value or the degree of dependence on the natural factor. Against Henry George, he insists that abolishing private property would redistribute rent, not dissolve it, and presents his whole account as a reform of Ricardo grounded in human need.
Keiner dieser Sätze enthält das Wort „Privateigentum“, oder deutet auch nur im entferntesten darauf hin.
English translation: “None of these propositions contains the word "private property," nor does any of them even remotely allude to it.”
No single formula can explain how prices form: that conviction drives Zuckerkandl's sweeping doctrinal history of value and price. It marches from medieval just-price jurisprudence through Davanzati, Galiani, and Turgot to the English classicals and finally to Menger, whose account of value as conscious dependence on concrete goods, and Wieser's Grenznutzen, he adopts as the decisive advance. He is relentless with the mechanical theories: Locke's quantity-and-vent doctrine, Ricardo's and Marx's labor theories, and the cost-of-production law that collapses, he shows, into the tautology that price equals wages plus profit. On that critical ground he builds his own subjective theory of price, grounded in marginal valuation and the meeting of buyer and seller schedules on organized markets.
So kommt die moderne englische Nationalökonomie zu ihrem Preisgesetz: der normale Preis tendiert nach den Produktionskosten, d. h. er sucht sich dem Arbeitslohn plus Gewinn gleichzusetzen.
English translation: “Thus modern English political economy arrives at its law of price: the normal price tends toward the costs of production, that is, it seeks to equate itself with wages plus profit.”
The Methodenstreit, the bitter quarrel over whether economics should proceed by historical description or by exact, isolating analysis, supplies the occasion for this review-essay on Schmoller's memorial volume to Wilhelm Roscher. Böhm-Bawerk reframes the dispute: the real question is not whether the historical method is legitimate, which no one denies, but whether Menger's isolating method deserves equal standing beside it. Deduction, he notes, serves physics and astronomy without scandal; the classical economists erred not from want of facts but from having distilled them wrongly. He then turns the historians' own practice against them, since they cannot discuss price, cost, or interest without smuggling in inherited abstractions, and closes with a plea for tolerance: let economists write less about method and work more with every method.
Meine Absicht ist vielmehr, den Streit zu versöhnen als ihn weiter zu verschärfen.
English translation: “My intention is rather to reconcile the dispute than to sharpen it further.”
A textbook must offer beginners settled truths, yet by 1890 political economy no longer possessed an uncontested doctrinal core, and it is through this pedagogical bind that Böhm-Bawerk reviews S. M. Macvane's Working Principles of Political Economy. He credits its clarity and independence while faulting its conservatism: Macvane retains cost as the ultimate regulator of value, rejects Jevons's route from utility to exchange value, and rests wages on a fund of contemporary savings scarcely distinct from the classical wages-fund doctrine. Against this, Böhm-Bawerk argues that the annual mass of consumable goods is not fixed in advance but shaped by saving, demand, and the division of production between consumption and capital goods. The review becomes a workshop in which Austrian capital theory emerges as a bridge between marginal productivity and distribution, labor priced by its Grenzprodukt.
Where shall we find nowadays a stock of undoubted, clear, and simple truths?
Scarcity may explain why capital goods have value, but not why they yield a surplus beyond their own cost, and it is this wedge that Böhm-Bawerk drives into Professor Giddings's theory of interest. Writing in a short correspondence, he grants a narrow element of truth, that finite human laboring powers keep the supply of capital limited, then denies that the painfulness of overtime labor can be the root of interest. He rejects Giddings's cost-based account, since roundabout methods are adopted because they are cheaper per unit rather than dearer, and a circumstance that merely increases outlay cannot be the cause of gain. Behind the objection lies a careful separation of conditions from causes, and of scarcity-value from surplus-value, exposing the equivocations between labor cost, productive power, and the time-structure of production that let the puzzle of interest seem already solved.
"Limited supply" of capital is certainly a condition of the existence of interest; but interest is a long way from being explained by it.
Böhm-Bawerk presents the Austrian School not as a methodological faction but as a movement to rebuild positive economics from its foundations, its true field being theory in the strict sense rather than the quarrels of the Methodenstreit. He grants the historical school that classical doctrine is incomplete while refusing to trade abstraction for induction and statistics. Marginal utility becomes the reconstructive principle: a good's value follows the least important satisfaction that would be lost without it, dramatized by the farmer whose burning sack of grain forces a reallocation to the least important use, and this idea unlocks exchange, price, cost, and distribution in turn. The essay's Copernican claim reverses the classical order, making costs the values of productive goods rather than the ultimate regulators of value, and recasts the problem of imputation as the very grammar of distribution.
Was sie anstreben, ist eine Art Renaissance der ökonomischen Theorie.
English translation: “What they aim at is a kind of renaissance of economic theory.”
German public opinion, Menger charges, had convinced itself that Adam Smith and the classical economists were capitalist, atomistic apostles of laissez-faire and enemies of the worker — a portrait he calls a falsification of history assembled by List, Lassalle, and the social-policy school. Using the neglected centenary of Smith's death, the first part recovers Smith, Ricardo, Malthus, and Say as friends of the poor who favored high wages, coalition rights, limits on child labor, and worker-protective intervention, all distinct from Manchester liberalism. The second part locates the real difference from modern German social policy not in moral aim but in historical emphasis, and faults reformers who denounce capital while forgetting that wages and employment depend on accumulation, thrift, and enterprise. He rejects Manchester and statist dogmatism alike.
Es ist nicht wahr, dass die neuere social-politische Schule Deutschlands in sachlichem Gegensatz zu der classischen National-Oekonomie steht.
English translation: “It is not true that the newer socio-political school of Germany stands in substantive opposition to classical political economy.”
Revived by national unification, the social question, and a decisive turn from French toward German and Austrian scholarship, Italian political economy had by the 1890s produced a theoretical literature that Schullern-Schrattenhofen sets out to make legible to German readers. He traces the fault line running through it, between economists who defend generally valid, absolute economic laws and those who dissolve them into historical categories, while insisting that induction and deduction proceed hand in hand. Organized after Luigi Cossa's system, the survey moves through the factors of production, the theory of value and price, money and credit, and income distribution, weighing Pantaleoni's marginal utility, Nazzani's cost-of-production value, Ferrara's reproduction-cost doctrine, and Loria's Ricardian historical cost against one another. A map of a national science coming rapidly into its own.
Heute ist die Volkswirtschaftslehre Italiens neuerdings auf eine Stufe emporgestiegen, welche sie allgemeiner Beachtung würdig macht.
English translation: “Today Italian political economy has recently risen to a level that makes it worthy of general attention.”
For all the attention lavished on industry and its workers, trade and the merchant had gone strangely unstudied—an imbalance Mataja corrects by turning to the department store as the sharpest symptom of a commercial revolution. Expanded from an 1891 Dresden lecture, the study surveys the new giants—the Bon Marché, the Louvre, and Printemps in Paris, Wanamaker and A. T. Stewart in America—and reconstructs the Bon Marché's costs down to horse maintenance and catalog postage. He asks whether these establishments mark genuine progress over dispersed small shops, concluding that their strength lies in fixed public prices, rapid turnover, and transparency rather than in always being cheaper. Setting them within a broader drift toward large-scale concentration, he defends them against punitive-tax campaigns while weighing their cost to shopkeepers and clerks.
Wer den Absatz in der Hand hat, hat auch den Lebensnerv der Industrie in der Hand.
English translation: “Whoever holds sales in his hand also holds the lifeblood of industry in his hand.”
As the University of Vienna prepared to unveil a bust of its late professor, Menger turned the commemoration into a reckoning. Lorenz von Stein had set himself, he grants, more comprehensive aims than any writer in the political sciences — ranging across socialism, social theory, finance, administration, law, and history — and it was Stein who first taught educated Germany to read French socialism as a world-historical movement rather than utopian eccentricity, and who gave society a scientific meaning coordinate with the state. Yet the tribute doubles as critique. Stein derived economic particulars from grand organic concepts instead of analyzing elementary causes; he was, in Menger's compact verdict, a systematiser but no theorist, a master of thought who won disciples but founded no school.
Kaum geringer als die Vorzüge sind die Mängel seiner wissenschaftlichen Individualität.
English translation: “Scarcely less than the merits are the defects of his scholarly personality.”
Austrian economics does not copy nature but idealizes it as a geographer's map does, sharpening vision amid the complexities of reality — with this defense against the German historical school's suspicion of abstraction, Wieser opens a compact survey of the young school's doctrine for English readers. Across six movements he lays out its architecture: value drawn wholly from utility, yet only marginal utility; the imputation of joint products to their determining factors, as a magistrate imputes a legal charge; capital, interest, and land value resolved through discounting; and price governed by marginal equivalence, where need meets unequal purchasing power. That last turn is critical — prices register power as much as need, so production follows wants backed by money. He closes by carrying value theory into progressive taxation.
There is no new principle to be discovered, none save utility.
By 1890 no field of German public life — taxation, schooling, local government, the relation of Church to State — could be conceived apart from the social question. Opening with Caprivi's reform bills, this essay presents the Verein für Sozialpolitik as both symptom and instrument of Germany's passage from Manchester liberalism to organized reform. Philippovich sharply distinguishes social reform, which raises the lower strata while preserving individual freedom and private property, from the social revolution preached by Social Democracy. He traces the younger historical school of Schmoller, Brentano, and Wagner, its rejection of abstract natural law for an ethical political economy, and the 1872 Eisenach meeting that cast the State as a moral force above class selfishness. His closing insistence is that insurance schemes leave untouched the kernel of the labor question: the labor contract itself.
The State must be the regulator and moderator of the contending industrial classes, “the greatest moral institution for the education of human kind.”