1,549 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Sidney and Beatrice Webb owed their grip on twentieth-century British politics less to votes than to the patient capture of those who would govern, teach, and write. Reviewing Beatrice Webb's memoir Our Partnership, Hayek reads it as a manual of indirect power: anonymous articles, cultivated journals, the founding of the London School of Economics, Fabianism as a training ground for elites. He grants the couple's industry and unselfishness, then turns those virtues against them, exposing a social science in which advocacy preceded evidence and the heavy artillery of fact was manufactured to drive home conclusions already reached. The essay's sting is an irony: the leisure, income, and bourgeois freedoms that made their anti-capitalist campaign possible could exist only within the civilization they meant to destroy. A compact study of how ideas govern before elections do.
'Behind the scenes' was also the keynote of their direct influence on current politics during the period covered by the volume.
The mechanics of inflation are not obscure; what defeats every cure is the refusal of the groups who count politically to pay the price of stopping it. Reading the American inflation of 1948 through the post-1918 collapses of Austria, Germany, Italy, and France, Schumpeter defines inflation as means of payment rising faster than output and divides the disease into three stages: incipient, advanced, and wild. America, he judges, has reached the advanced phase, where full employment turns new money into general price increases and bank lending breeds secondary credit inflation, the national payroll serving as its chief conductor. His program rejects price rollbacks and direct controls in favor of credit restriction, budget surpluses, and taxes that reward saving, warning with a nod to Lenin that a debauched currency corrodes the very classes on which the social order rests.
So inflation runs on by common consent.
An accounting number carries authority only through orderly recording, documentary proof, and valuation rules fitted to the purpose of the balance sheet—the governing premise of this postwar Viennese handbook, which treats bookkeeping as at once a technical system and a legal-economic discipline. Kreibig and Reisch move from elementary entries through double-entry bookkeeping as a dual representation of enterprise life—each transaction seen once from the side of assets, once from that of capital—to inventory, account frameworks, valuation, reserves, audit, and special balance sheets. They ground valuation in the subjective value theory of Menger and Böhm-Bawerk, make the Austrian uniform chart of accounts turn on separating financial from operating bookkeeping, and warn that familiar labels conceal unlike contents. Balance-sheet truth, on their account, is exact in method yet controlled, relative, and institutionally framed.
Jede Eintragung in die Handelsbücher muß durch einen Beleg begründet werden.
English translation: “Every entry in the commercial books must be substantiated by a supporting document.”
These are not the famous treatise but dense student notes from a 1949 Institute of World Affairs lecture, circulated by Arthur Smithies as the fullest exposition he knew of Schumpeter's late thought. Against Trotsky's claim that imperialism is capitalism's last stage, Schumpeter advances laborism: a society, exemplified by Britain, where labor's interests become the state's governing purpose. Higher wages, shorter hours, subsidies, and cheap money redirect the fiscal state away from capital renewal and defense toward present labor consumption. His feudal analogy is deliberately provocative, since modern redistribution does not abolish the class use of the state but inverts it. A laborist Britain, he predicts, cannot sustain great-power burdens and grows dependent on America, while a dictatorial Russia mobilizes for power politics Britain cannot match.
The working class has replaced Mme. du Barry, and we have the inverse of the feudal system.
Money has no essence independent of its economic order; it is a creature of a particular economic form, and once that order changes so does money itself. From the wartime and postwar experience of rationing, blocked balances, black markets, and administrative allocation, Kerschagl rereads the classic problems—deposits and credit creation, quantity theory, exchange rates, gold, inflation, currency reform—around a single insight: legal payment power and general purchasing power can come apart. Ration cards, coupons, price controls, and occupational privileges shift access to goods from money toward administrative entitlement, so that identical nominal incomes carry unequal real content. Planning alters money qualitatively, personalizing it until, at the limit of full socialism, it decays into a mere Rechenpfennig. Sound policy, he insists, demands clarity in the creation of money and truth in monetary accounting.
Jede Planwirtschaft — und dabei muß es sich noch keineswegs etwa um eine vollsozialisierte Wirtschaft handeln — ändert sofort grundlegend den Charakter des Geldes.
English translation: “Every planned economy — and this need not by any means be a fully socialized economy — immediately alters the character of money in a fundamental way.”
Schumpeter traces the entrepreneur through the history of economic thought, from Cantillon and Say who grasped him to Smith, Ricardo, and Marx who dissolved him into the capitalist, in order to isolate a function that ownership, management, and risk-bearing all fail to capture. The entrepreneur is whoever institutes new combinations, breaking routine rather than administering it, and his gain is neither wage nor monopoly rent but a surplus that congeals into industrial fortunes. That function may be corporate or collective as easily as individual, and banks figure not as passive intermediaries but as organs that call new industries into being. The essay's second half turns concept into a research program, pairing theory with the history of firms, finance, and technology, and refusing to equate the cultural imprint of entrepreneurial mentality with direct political rule.
I shall state frankly that I consider power to be one of the most misused words in the social sciences, though the competition is indeed great.
Six recent English books, by Baster, Franks, Harrod, Jewkes, Meade, and Robbins, give Schumpeter his occasion to ask whether economists have drawn a serious analytic harvest from Britain's postwar experiment in state management. His first move is to prise apart three questions habitually merged under planning: socialism, meaning central control of production; laborism, meaning labor's political ascendancy within a still-private economy; and the sheer readjustment of exports, saving, and solvency after the war. Nationalizing coal or transport, he insists, proves neither socialism nor its absence; the telling fact is that the wage rate has become a political datum, protected as a matter of course while profits and rents are compressed. Britain's dollar shortage he reads as the outward face of domestic maladjustment, conceding that under laborite constraints direct controls may be forced expedients rather than doctrinal choices.
Nevertheless, there is point in keeping these three topics distinct, if only in order to show how they interact to produce the English problem.
Addressed directly to the champions of economic dirigisme, this open letter concedes their ends—higher living standards, human dignity, protection of wage-earners—and attacks only their means. Rueff's wager is that a price held away from its market-clearing level must produce either disorder or coercion: queues, shortages, black markets, rationing, and finally an economic police. Free prices, he counters, are the condition of a society of free persons, and price control is not egalitarian but malthusian, since it organizes scarcity instead of redistributing wealth. The volume pairs the Épître with Le Dilemme français, which frames postwar France's choice starkly: a plan enforced with the coercion of Vichy or Hitler's Germany, or liberated prices disciplined by a balanced budget and honest social intervention.
Dès qu'un produit est taxé, les acheteurs font queue à la porte des boutiques où on le vend.
English translation: “As soon as a product is subject to a price ceiling, buyers queue at the doors of the shops that sell it.”
How does bias enter a science whose tools, time series, value theory, marginal productivity analysis, are in principle neutral? Schumpeter locates it not in open advocacy, which may be perfectly honest, but in the pre-scientific act of vision: the moment before proof when the investigator perceives which phenomena connect and matter. Models and statistics can be tested and refuted; vision cannot, and so it becomes the true gateway of ideological bias. He tries the thesis on three economists: Smith, whose natural-law slogans did little harm because his analysis stayed sober; Marx, who discovered ideology yet let his creed of class struggle and increasing misery sterilize his analysis; and Keynes, whose stagnationist vision gained technical armor and then dissolved into professional controversy. Ideology, he concludes, both retards science and supplies the vision without which it might never advance.
And so—though we proceed slowly because of our ideologies, we might not proceed at all without them.
The misery of English factory hands, the gluts of 1818 and 1826, and the depopulation of the countryside posed a puzzle Sismondi could not leave to sentiment: why did the liberal market and its machinery breed crises, unemployment, and want? This second volume presents his 1819 Nouveaux Principes as a dynamic and welfare economics set against the static equilibrium of his earlier work—and against Say's law and Ricardo, who conflated income with capital and imagined consumption almost limitless. Amonn follows Sismondi's demand that production stay proportioned to income and effective demand, his critique of Ricardian rent, his defense of small proprietorship, and his call to bind employers to their workers in sickness, age, and unemployment. Throughout, the editor marks the circular-flow insight as Sismondi's real advance while faulting the confusions that blur it.
Die statische Theorie oder Gleichgewichtstheorie stimmt nicht für die tatsächliche Entwicklung der Wirtschaft.
English translation: “The static theory, or equilibrium theory, does not accord with the actual development of the economy.”
Sealed bids for cement and steel that match to the penny are no accident but the signature of a pricing formula — and this 1949 study, rushed out after the Supreme Court's Cement Institute decision, anatomizes how that formula works and why it should go. Under basing-point pricing a delivered price is reckoned from a designated base point whether or not the goods ship from there, so 'phantom freight' and 'freight absorption' erase local cost advantages and make rival quotations converge. Machlup treats this as geographic price discrimination and, tracing case histories in steel, cement, and corn products, as a cartel embedded in freight books and classifications rather than open conspiracy. Against warnings of chaos he sets uniform f.o.b. mill pricing, under which distance again becomes visible and buyers can hunt for genuinely cheaper sources.
Almost all economic change leaves some people worse off.
What survives of the Communist Manifesto once it is read strictly as science, stripped of centenary celebration and debunking alike? Schumpeter answers by treating the 1848 pamphlet as economic sociology, separating that interpretive achievement from its thin technical economics. He ranks Marx's economic interpretation of history beside Darwin's in originality, credits him with hauling the theory of the state down from metaphysics into realistic analysis, and salutes the Manifesto's unrivalled panegyric to bourgeois enterprise as a 'constant revolutionizing of production.' Yet he dismantles the predicted polarization into two classes, the overlooked new middle class, and the doctrine of the withering state. What remains is an ideological document read as analysis, the prelude, Schumpeter says, to the whole of Marx's later work.
it is but steam that rises from the galloping horse.