1,549 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
By the end of the First World War, Hayek recalls, liberalism had all but ceased to be a living tradition for the young, kept alive only in the rhetoric of aging statesmen who no longer stirred the imagination. This short tribute to Ludwig von Mises, given here in the 1967 translation of the 1951 original, traces how economic freedom survived that eclipse through scattered teachers rather than parties: Edwin Cannan and his London pupils, Mises and the Austrian circle, Frank Knight and the Chicago school, and the German neoliberals Walter Eucken and Wilhelm Röpke. Mises holds the centre as the one thinker who rebuilt liberal doctrine most systematically. Liberalism, Hayek concludes, is less a policy preference than an inherited discipline that must be taught, translated and renewed before it can again become a living body of thought.
Gone is the day when the few remaining liberals each went his own way in solitude and derision; gone the day when they found no response among the young.
'Bad money drives out good' is an ancient saying only accidentally tied to Gresham's name, and as a bare maxim, Hayek insists, practically worthless. His concern is methodological: to show that historical explanation cannot proceed on such slogans without theory to specify the conditions under which they hold. Properly stated, the law requires two monies equivalent in value for some purposes—settling domestic debts—yet unequal for others, such as foreign payment or industrial use of the metal; only then does individual choice compose into a collective shift in circulation. Good coin need not vanish at once, and its eventual flight signals no fresh public discovery but a change in monetary balance. From the Kipper und Wipper crisis to the English recoinage of 1696, even elementary theory guards the historian against false causal tales.
What theory will tell him is that he must look for some cause which led to a fall of the internal value of both good and bad coins relative to their value in foreign commerce and in industrial uses.
When Walter Reuther pressed his 1958 wage demands on behalf of the United Automobile Workers, Hayek seized on them as a test case for a broader warning about legally privileged group power. Modern unions, he argues, owe their strength not to freedom of association but to the tolerated coercion of workers willing to accept other terms, and their wage pressure turns inflationary only once monetary authorities feel bound to supply whatever credit full employment demands at any wage. Distinguishing average output from the marginal productivity of labour, he brands the claim on productivity gains generated by capital an attempted expropriation, and reads Reuther's profit-sharing scheme as a step toward syndicalism—not public ownership, but the seizure of enterprise returns by closed groups of incumbent workers who supply none of the capital.
Inflation-born prosperity has never been and never will be lasting prosperity.
One adjective, Hayek contends, has done more to muddle political thought than any other. 'Social'—as in 'social market economy' or 'social Rechtsstaat'—lends moral prestige while quietly voiding the words it modifies of definite meaning, until almost nothing in life is not 'social' in some sense and the term becomes, for all practical purposes, empty. Presented here in a revised English translation of his 1957 German essay, the argument recovers an older sense of society as spontaneous order—language, custom, law, evolved without central design—and sets it against the modern demand that individuals and governments pursue concrete collective aims they cannot fully know. That demand, he warns, corrodes the inherited rules of conduct on which it rests, and much that parades as social proves, in the deeper sense, thoroughly anti-social.
To be “social” is not the same as being good or “righteous in the eyes of the Lord”.
The suspicion that sound economic conduct must collide with ethical obligation rests, Mahr argues, on a false definition of economy. Against the caricature of homo oeconomicus as pure profit-seeker, he recovers the subjectivist conception: economizing is not a realm of money or goods but the ordering of scarce means toward chosen ends, whatever their moral content. Altruistic, religious, cultural, and political aims become economic the moment they compete for scarce resources; a seller who favors a friend satisfies two needs at once, and unwirtschaftlich conduct means only the irrational use of means, never the refusal to maximize gain. The closing pages defend a qualified Wertfreiheit against Max Weber's shadow: economists may render moral judgments, but derivation and proof must stay free of them.
Es handelt sich eben nur um das Disponieren über die knappen Mittel zwecks maximaler Zielerreichung.
English translation: “What is involved is simply the disposition of scarce means with a view to maximal attainment of ends.”
'Collective needs' ranks among the most contested terms in the theory of public finance, and Mahr sets out to demystify it. He rejects in turn the organic fiction of a state that feels its own wants, Sax's individualist account of socially conditioned needs, and the circular definition that identifies collective needs with whatever the public authorities happen to provide. The deeper trouble lies in the word 'need' itself, a hedonistic residue he would replace with 'goals.' Only internal legal protection and external security appear intrinsically tied to the state; beyond that minimum, the scope of public activity is not deduced from any natural class of wants but set by whichever part of the population holds political power. Scarcity stays economic; the allocation of public purposes is political.
Kollektivziele sind demnach die Ziele, welche jener Teil der Bevölkerung, der die politische Macht innehat, für die staatliche Tätigkeit festgelegt hat.
English translation: “Collective goals are accordingly the goals which that part of the population which holds political power has set for state activity.”
Mahr rejects the classical specie-flow orthodoxy: gold movements are too small and mistimed to explain how international claims and liabilities rebalance. Writing from interwar Vienna in 1927, amid reparations, hyperinflation, and violent currency swings, he fuses Angell's credit-volume theory with Wieser's account of the balance of payments as the sum of individual payment balances, deriving external equilibrium from the interdependence of debtors, creditors, and domestic-only actors. Inflation is the great disruptor, swelling nominal purchasing power that spills into foreign goods and securities; against Cassel and Keynes he denies that purchasing-power parity governs the exchanges, insisting the causation often runs the other way. Speculation, he argues from the Austrian crown and the wartime mark, is no mere forecast but itself a cause—capable of igniting fresh inflation.
Andererseits ist die Erkenntnis, daß die fortgesetzte Inanspruchnahme der Notenpresse zur Deckung eines staatlichen Defizits unweigerlich zur Kurswertsenkung führt, heutzutage wohl schon Gemeingut der ganzen Welt.
English translation: “On the other hand, the insight that the continued resort to the printing press to cover a state deficit inevitably leads to a fall in the exchange rate is today probably common knowledge throughout the world.”
Just as the nineteenth century banished infinitesimals from analysis without destroying the calculus, Kaufmann proposes to eliminate the actual infinite, above all Cantor's uncountable, without dismantling classical mathematics. First published in 1930 and reissued here in 1968, this German study locates the root of foundational paradox in a single confusion: the failure to distinguish empirical from non-empirical claims about all objects and their existence. Set-theoretic totalities, on his reading, are an ontological surplus smuggled in through misread symbolism, not objects the mind discovers. He preserves the finite core of the diagonal argument while denying that it defines a totality of all decimals, invokes the Löwenheim-Skolem theorem to argue that axiomatic set theory cannot isolate a genuinely uncountable domain, and reads Hilbert's ideal elements and Brouwer's constructivism as each carrying only part of the truth.
Ein „sinnloses Zeichen“ ist eine contradictio in adjecto, denn in der Behauptung, daß visuelle oder akustische Phänomene „Zeichen“ sind, liegt diejenige eingeschlossen, daß man durch sie etwas verstehen, mit ihrer Hilfe fremde Gedanken erfassen kann.
English translation: “A "meaningless sign" is a contradictio in adjecto, for the assertion that visual or acoustic phenomena are "signs" already contains the assertion that through them one can understand something, that with their help one can grasp the thoughts of others.”
Scholarly prestige, curial trust, and diplomatic office fused in a single man when the impoverished Austrian republic sent Ludwig von Pastor, the famous historian of the popes, as its envoy to the Holy See. Engel-Janosi's study of that 1920–28 mission argues that Pastor's fame gave a weakened state a Roman voice out of all proportion to its power: Cardinal Gasparri spoke to him with a freedom rarely extended to other heads of mission, making his dispatches a privileged source for Vatican thinking. Through them the interwar Curia appears anti-Versailles, conservative, intensely political, and suspicious of the postwar order, tempted by "providential" strongmen yet unwilling to surrender ecclesial independence. The narrative runs through the Roman Question, Fascism, South Tyrol, the Anima dispute, and the still-unsettled question of Anschluss.
Der Österreicher betont die Vorsicht und die Selbständigkeit dieses Papstes, auf den niemand, selbst kaum sein Staatssekretär Einfluß auszuüben scheint.
English translation: “The Austrian emphasizes the caution and the independence of this Pope, upon whom no one, scarcely even his Secretary of State, appears to exert influence.”
Inherited words—order, law, economy, democracy—make spontaneous social orders look like purposive organizations, and this 1968 essay in political semantics sets out to break their spell through a series of paired corrections: Kosmos against Taxis, spontaneous order against made arrangement; Nomos against Thesis, the universal rule of just conduct against the organizational command; Katallaxie against Wirtschaft, the market as a discovery procedure against the household writ large; and finally Demarchie against Demokratie. Only a Kosmos, Hayek insists, can sustain an open society among strangers who share no concrete ends, so 'social' or distributive justice—the justice of an organization—loses all meaning where no one distributes the results. The tract anticipates Law, Legislation and Liberty, turning the reform of language into a servant of liberal constitutionalism.
Wir wünschen die Meinung der Mehrheit als letzte Autorität, aber wir wollen nicht dulden, daß die nackte Gewalt der Mehrheit den einzelnen regellos Gewalt antut.
English translation: “We desire the opinion of the majority as the ultimate authority, but we do not want to tolerate that the naked power of the majority does violence to the individual in a rule-less manner.”
How can strangers who share no common purpose live together in peace? Not, this short lecture answers, by organizing them around shared aims, but only when they obey the same abstract rules while pursuing different ends. Hayek traces the passage from tribal closure, bound by common purposes, to the open Great Society, whose achievement is to generate order spontaneously and merely to furnish each individual with opportunities rather than prescribe his goals; Roman law and Christianity figure as forces that turned tribal rules into universal ones. The rules such a society needs are mainly negative, delimiting coercion rather than commanding ends—and the same principle, extended outward, is for Hayek the only real foundation of international peace, which no multiplication of international bodies can supply.
Die große Errungenschaft der offenen Großgesellschaft besteht darin, daß sie spontan Ordnung hervorbringen kann, dadurch daß die Individuen abstrakten Regeln gehorchen, das heißt, daß sie eine sich selbst bildende Ordnung ist.
English translation: “The great achievement of the open Great Society consists in its being able to bring forth order spontaneously through the fact that individuals obey abstract rules—that is, that it is a self-forming order.”
Shackle opposes reason to imagination and probability to poetry, without discarding knowledge: business policy, he argues, is an originative art conducted under radical uncertainty, not the solving of a well-posed problem. He builds a scale of openness from dice and cards, which yield a complete list of outcomes, through horse-racing to new enterprise, which has no card of runners and no book of rules. Decision is commitment to a future that does not yet exist, and therefore choice among imagined possibilities rather than known facts. Where probability demands an exhaustive list of contingencies, he substitutes judgments of possibility, surprise, and ascendancy, with focus-gain and focus-loss standing for an enterprise in deliberation. Success, he concludes, needs not only the axial mind that reasons toward a solution but the radial imagination that sees outward into an expanding field of possible histories.
My first proposition is that decision is choice amongst the products of imagination.