3,801 works, 471 books, 3,267 articles, 60 other works, 3 awaiting classification, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
How can an economic theory become obsolete while its author remains a productive guide? In this 1941 appraisal of Alfred Marshall’s Principles, Joseph A. Schumpeter separates the survival of doctrines from the continuing usefulness of a way of investigating economic life. He finds Marshall’s strength in the conjunction of mathematical reasoning, close observation of English business, and tools capable of supporting statistical measurement. His admiration is exacting: partial equilibrium can mislead when extended beyond its proper setting, and Marshall concealed the mathematics essential to his achievement. Readers can discover why theoretical compromises that look defective in a general system may nevertheless enable concrete inquiry—and why Schumpeter locates Marshall’s lasting influence in research possibilities rather than authoritative conclusions.
One God in heaven, one lord on earth: the Mongol letters and edicts of 1245–1255 turned that cosmic analogy into a working juridical doctrine of world conquest. Voegelin collects and classifies the documents carried between the papal and French courts and the khans—two khan letters, two edicts, two commanders' letters—reconstructing their preambles after Pelliot and reading them as formal legal instruments rather than mere barbarian arrogance. The empire they proclaim is an imperium mundi in statu nascendi, a world-empire-in-the-making in which every ruler, upon contact, must submit and enter as vassal or be destroyed as rebel. What lifts the study above orientalist antiquarianism is Voegelin's closing move, comparing the Mongols' sacral literalism—killing and conquest proclaimed as divine judgment—to the peace rhetoric of modern communist regimes.
Das Opfer der Aggression ist der Aggressor.
English translation: “The victim of aggression is the aggressor.”
How could America’s gold accumulation support employment yet leave it with a largely useless stock of metal? In this conference discussion paper, Fritz Machlup reviews arguments advanced by Neisser and Hardy, separating the effects of acquiring gold from the benefits of possessing it. His answer turns on idle resources: exports exchanged for gold could raise income without displacing much other production, though wartime bottlenecks would change that calculation. Equally pointed is his refusal to equate correcting policy with reversing it. He condemns the 1933–34 dollar devaluation but argues that lowering the gold price during war would weaken Britain’s purchasing power. The paper offers a concrete way to distinguish financial expenditure from real economic sacrifice—and to assess monetary decisions by their present consequences rather than their apparent consistency.
If it is found that a certain move was a mistake, it is not always possible to repair it by moving back; moving back may often be just another mistake.
Housing needed for armament workers and housing stimulated by rising wartime incomes pose different policy problems. In this December 1941 article, Karl Pribram argues for supporting the first while restraining the second—not only to conserve scarce materials, but to preserve demand that could sustain employment when defense spending declines. His perspective joins the timing of durable-goods production to the risks of mortgage and building cycles. The practical difficulty is distributional: tighter credit can exclude poorer households, while limits on construction can raise tenants’ rents. By weighing mortgage restrictions against building-permit limits and accompanying tenant protection, Pribram shows why restraining a boom requires more than reducing construction totals: it requires deciding which needs to meet now and which purchases can safely wait.
Written in 1941 and reprinted here in 1997, Hayek’s wartime essay asks how Britain can act intelligently towards Germany without mistaking understanding for forgiveness. He traces a practical weakness in British policy to alternating admiration and hostility, reinforced by travel impressions rather than sustained study of German intellectual life. His distinctive concern is that German ideas already circulate within Britain and among its allies: refusing to study them does not prevent their influence, but makes it harder to judge. The essay connects this problem to concrete institutional remedies—university training for specialists and controlled scholarly access to current German publications. It offers a pointed account of why foreign knowledge requires interpreters able to notice developments beyond a government’s immediate wartime needs.
A machine may remain physically sound long after it ceases to earn its owner anything. In this reply to Professor Pigou, Hayek uses that gap to challenge a definition of capital maintenance based on replacing wear and tear while excluding obsolescence. Three investments with identical physical lifetimes but sharply different commercial prospects show why depreciation allowances must depend on expectations, not merely on durable equipment. The distinction matters for taxation as well as accounting: treating foreseeable replacement costs as disposable income would, Hayek argues, penalise industries undergoing rapid technological change. His concise reply separates provision for anticipated losses from saving after unforeseen losses, and asks when a familiar accounting convention serves—or defeats—its practical purpose of preserving future earning capacity.
Admiration does not erase disagreement in Hayek’s 1941 review of Ludwig von Mises’s Nationalökonomie. He welcomes its integration of economic theory, social cooperation, and liberal policy, yet questions its treatment of interest and the intellectual isolation that limits its engagement with contemporary economics. His strongest allegiance concerns method: Mises’s account of human action, Hayek argues, offers a more persuasive foundation for social inquiry than prevailing attempts to borrow methods from the natural sciences. This short review lets readers locate both the shared ground and the friction between two economists often grouped together. It also shows what Hayek values in a systematic treatise: not merely consistency, but the capacity to connect technical arguments with questions of social cooperation and policy.
Understanding Nazi Germany’s appeal need not mean excusing it. In this 1941 joint review, republished in 1997, Hayek welcomes two contrasting corrections to wartime perceptions: Paul Einzig’s exposure of Germany’s promised European order and C. W. Guillebaud’s account of social policies that helped secure German workers’ support. His sharper objection concerns what the reviewers’ subjects share: an apparent willingness to approve Nazi methods while condemning their purposes. Hayek asks whether comprehensive planning itself demands coercion, imposed hierarchies and leaders ruthless enough to enforce them. This brief review lets readers encounter that question in a concrete dispute over how to describe an enemy accurately—and how to judge seemingly desirable policies by the power required to carry them out.
A factory’s book value can fall without its machinery disappearing; its output can rise simply because idle equipment returns to use. These distinctions drive Ludwig Lachmann’s critique of capital measurement in this 1941 article. Examining Colin Clark’s statistics, he argues that asset valuations and capital-output ratios can mistake disappointed expectations or changing utilisation for changes in productive resources. His alternative shifts attention from an aggregate capital stock to the services resources supply within coherent production plans, using adjusted depreciation allowances to measure productive consumption. The article offers a concrete way to investigate a persistent difficulty in quantitative economics: how to make accounting figures answer an economic question without confusing changes in value with changes in productive contribution.
Austria's long transformation from the Ottomans' frontier antagonist into their guarantor, the price of holding Russia back from Constantinople, frames this account of how Vienna met the birth of the Greek kingdom. Engel-Janosi weighs Metternich's reluctance, who saw in the war of independence only a rebellion, against King Ludwig of Bavaria's dynastic investment in his son Otto, and gives Prokesch-Osten, Austria's envoy in Athens, the central role: a conservative trying to shore up an independent Greek monarchy amid the rivalry of Britain, France, Russia, and Bavaria. Through the Armansperg and Rudhart ministries, the constitutional revolution of 1843, and the duel of Maurokordatos and Kolettis, the project decays. Austrian passivity, great-power intrigue, Greek factionalism, and Otto's weakness, he concludes, made an independent conservative Greece untenable.
Staaten hat noch niemand geschaffen; sie schaffen sich selbst.
English translation: “No one has ever created states; they create themselves.”
Scientific expertise can explain general laws—but can it supply the changing, local knowledge needed to direct an economy? In this 1941 article, republished here in 1997, Friedrich August von Hayek addresses scientists and engineers drawn to centralized planning. He contrasts their ideal of deliberate construction with the coordination achieved through competitive prices, then asks what happens to intellectual freedom when one authority controls the resources needed to pursue competing purposes. His contention is that comprehensive planning concentrates power over ends, not merely economic means. The article offers a compact encounter with the connection between Hayek’s account of dispersed knowledge and his defence of liberty, while distinguishing policies that sustain competition or supplement its results from those that replace it with a single plan.
Whoever controls the means must decide which ends they are to serve.
Counting equations is not the same as proving that an economic equilibrium exists. This distinction anchors Oskar Morgenstern’s review of J. R. Hicks’s Value and Capital, which welcomes the ambition to unite static and dynamic economics while challenging the foundations of that synthesis. Morgenstern demands both mathematical proof and a clear relation between theoretical assumptions and observable behaviour. His criticism becomes especially concrete when he considers individual plans: intentions that appear compatible in isolation may destabilize a system when acted upon together, as in simultaneous bank withdrawals. The review offers a pointed account of why expectations, uncertainty, and knowledge of other people’s plans resist simple aggregation—and why, for Morgenstern, a theory of economic fluctuations must earn its connection to the fluctuations it claims to explain.