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.
Capital is not a pile of tools, buildings, or accumulated goods but a form of reckoning, so runs the central chapter of this 1931 lecture volume on Kapital und Kapitalzins. Refusing to begin from a definition, Schumpeter lets the phenomenon emerge from the economic process itself, reconstructing the stationary circular flow in which labor and nature enter as productive services and consumption goods emerge as the social product, all financed from prior receipts. Capital here is an accounting form corresponding to money income, distinct from produced means of production. Development changes everything: entrepreneurs carry out new combinations before the goods exist, and bank credit, the distinctively capitalist device, creates the purchasing power that commands labor and materials. From this follow the Konjunkturzyklus of clustered innovation, the self-deflation of productive credit, and interest as an agio on present money born of entrepreneurial profit.
Wir beginnen deshalb nicht mit einer Definition des Kapitals, vielmehr soll sich das Phänomen aus unserer Darlegung von selbst ergeben.
English translation: “We therefore do not begin with a definition of capital; rather, the phenomenon shall emerge of itself from our exposition.”
Is capitalism trapped in a permanent crisis, or merely in the depression phase of a normal business cycle? Schumpeter answers at once for the cycle, then devotes the essay to the qualification that makes the difference. What should have been short and mild turned catastrophic because political lesions, war legacies, protection, fiscal distortion, and deflationary therapy, pressed continuously on the economic organism. Cycles themselves arise when innovations bunch: railways or new raw-material methods become feasible, spread in swarms, expand credit, and then collide with the old, so that depression is a groping toward new equilibrium rather than simple collapse. Politically unfettered, he insists, the capitalist mechanism would scarcely produce symptoms of such severity, and the system as such needs no planning to function, while deflation policy, his chief example, manufactures the very bankruptcies and unemployment it claims to cure.
Das kapitalistische System als solches bedarf keiner Regelung oder Planung innerhalb oder außerhalb der Depression, um zu funktionieren, Erfolge zu erzielen und Zusammenbrüche zu vermeiden.
English translation: “The capitalist system as such requires no regulation or planning, whether within or outside of a depression, in order to function, achieve successes, and avoid breakdowns.”
Restrictions on foreign borrowing can make a country’s finances more precarious rather than safer. In this 1931 Festschrift contribution, Wilhelm Röpke examines how German controls on long-term borrowing encouraged dependence on short-term debt—a concrete test of intervention’s unintended effects. His defense of international capital mobility is not an assumption that national and global interests always coincide: capital flight and defective credit institutions can disrupt productive investment and justify corrective policies. The crucial distinction is between suppressing the quantity of capital crossing borders and improving the forms and channels through which it moves. Readers can discover a liberal argument that judges controls by their practical consequences, while asking when foreign investment’s future returns compensate a country for resources surrendered in the present.
Three schools of subjective value theory—or three ways of expressing one principle? In this 1931 contribution to Probleme der Wertlehre, Oskar Morgenstern compares Austrian, Lausanne, and Anglo-American approaches by asking what each contributes to explaining prices. His reconciliation is not neutral: he favors Austrian analysis for its treatment of planning, substitution, and adjustment, while finding substantial agreement beneath differences in terminology and mathematical presentation. Concrete problems give the comparison its force: how recurring needs shape present choices, why a good’s utility depends on the rest of one’s possessions, and how production costs express sacrificed alternatives. Readers can discover both the common ground Morgenstern identifies and the unresolved tension between describing equilibrium and explaining how an economy moves toward it.
The opening volume of a five-part survey of human society sets itself against sociology's habit of generalizing from a narrow European sample, and against the Kulturkreis theorists who treated cultural goods as museum objects passed mechanically between peoples. Thurnwald's method is the representative Lebensbild: concrete communities—Polar Eskimo, Bushmen, Andaman Islanders, Copper Eskimo, Maori—shown whole, so that institutions appear functioning inside real cultural systems rather than sorted into ideal types. Foragers are ranged by habitat across ice, steppe, forest, and water, then plant-cultivators and herders. Running through everything is a distinction he presses hard: the irreversible accumulation of technique and knowledge against the reversible, pendulum-like swings between mother-right and father-right. Institutions such as blood revenge or asylum, he warns, cut across so-called culture circles and cannot be identified mechanically with them.
Die Feldbauer sind bei den Expansionen keine „Imperialisten“, sondern eher Gründer neuer Tochtervölker und Niederlassungen, sie sind „Kolonisatoren“, aber keine „Eroberer“.
English translation: “In their expansions, agriculturalists are not "imperialists" but rather founders of new daughter peoples and settlements; they are "colonizers," but not "conquerors.”
Stable prices can be a sign of economic distress rather than resilience. In this two-installment article, Oskar Morgenstern argues that recovery depends on changing relationships among prices, not simply on a rising or falling general index. His concrete concern is the manufacturer caught between declining selling prices and inputs kept expensive by cartels and tariffs. German iron-cartel rebates add another difficulty: secret discounts leave firms unable to judge their competitors’ costs. Austrian iron, coal and food prices show how unevenly adjustment proceeds. Morgenstern connects these cases with accounting practices and buyers’ expectations, distinguishing obstacles to price reductions from monopoly income that could absorb them. The article offers a precise account of why apparent price stability may conceal shrinking production—and why Morgenstern favours removing protective tariffs over imposing administrative price cuts.
The forty-hour week, this 1931 lecture to the German trade-union congress in Frankfurt insists, is no narrow bargaining demand but a response to a capitalism transformed by crisis. Depression at twenty-five percent unemployment differs in kind, not merely degree, from earlier downturns: postwar technical change swept through raw materials, agriculture, transport, and mining at once, cartels and tariff walls held organized prices high while starving smaller export firms of credit, and no automatic compensation reabsorbs the workers machinery displaces. Lederer rejects both autarky, which for a modern nation means poverty and dependence, and isolated currency manipulation in an interdependent world. If technical progress permanently shrinks the necessary volume of labor, work must be shared more evenly — and leisure, rather than mere rest, becomes a terrain of education, solidarity, and emancipation for the working class.
Es ist etwas anderes, ob eine Krise mit 7, 8, 10 Prozent Arbeitslosigkeit oder mit 25 Prozent Arbeitslosigkeit zu kämpfen hat.
English translation: “It is one thing whether a crisis has to contend with 7, 8, or 10 percent unemployment, and quite another with 25 percent unemployment.”
Delivered as a lecture in 1931 amid the deepening Depression, this eight-part address moves from the nature of the market through the business cycle to unemployment, price supports, taxation, and gold. The market, Mises insists, is no anarchy but a form of economic democracy in which consumers, as the final authority, direct production. Crisis appears when policy disables that mechanism: bank credit expansion drives the loan rate below the natural rate, building a boom on sand, while union wages held above market-clearing levels, sustained by unemployment relief, turn joblessness chronic. Price supports for coffee and wheat, protective tariffs, and capital-consuming taxation deepen the disorder. The single way out, he argues, is to abandon every attempt to prevent market prices from shaping production.
Die kapitalistische Marktwirtschaft ist eine Demokratie, in der jeder Groschen eine Wahlstimme gibt.
English translation: “The capitalist market economy is a democracy in which every penny casts a vote.”
Werner Sombart's Der moderne Kapitalismus had synthesized universal economic history and monumental theory; here that theoretical scaffolding is dismantled piece by piece from the standpoint of Robert Liefmann's 'sozialindividualistische' economics. Groß confines himself strictly to Sombart the theorist, attacking in turn the notion of money-seeking as an acquisitive drive, the treatment of Wirtschaftssysteme as historical agents, and the confusion of technique with economy. Against Sombart's grand categories—spirit, institution, productivity, capitalist organism—he sets a theory of individual planning: money becomes an abstract unit of account that keeps plans revisable, and market order emerges from the mutual adaptation of individual plans rather than from any institutional idea. Capitalism, on this reading, is not a productive force but heightened commerce governed by rentability, the quantitative counterpart of a psychically abstract economic principle.
Kapital nennen wir das zum Gelderwerbsmittel gemachte Geld.
English translation: “We call capital the money that has been made into a means of acquiring money.”
A protected apartment can become costly to leave: a growing household cannot find more space, or an unemployed worker cannot move to take a job without losing a cheap tenancy. In this conference speech, presented in its 2022 English translation, Friedrich August von Hayek uses Vienna to examine the tension between security for existing tenants and access for newcomers. He argues that rent controls freeze an accidental distribution of housing, while obscuring which sizes, locations, and qualities of dwelling are actually needed. Housing’s durability makes these effects easy to overlook: buildings remain standing even as incentives to maintain and replace them weaken. His case against controls nevertheless rejects abrupt repeal. Readers can discover both his account of housing prices as coordinating signals and his attempt to reconcile market adjustment with protection against sudden displacement.
Free trade and housing reform meet in Wilhelm Röpke’s brief encyclopedia portrait of Julius Faucher, a publicist of the German Manchester school. Röpke connects Faucher’s work organizing free traders and assisting Cobden with his campaign to improve urban housing—a campaign grounded in Faucher’s diagnosis of land profiteering and tenement development. The biographical details serve a pointed historical judgment: Röpke treats Faucher’s commitment to housing reform as evidence against the charge that German Manchester liberals ignored industrialism’s social problems. This compact entry offers a concrete instance of economic liberalism joined to social concern, while leaving the mechanisms and proposed remedies of Faucher’s housing policy largely unexplored.
Every human gathering, this essay argues, acquires structure almost at once: amorphous mass exists only in the first instant before attractions, repulsions, subgroups, and leaders crystallize out of it. Thurnwald names the winnowing of leaders Siebung and separates it sharply from biological selection—masses actively choose whom to follow—then shows why institutional leadership, fixed in statutes, offices, and inheritance, must sooner or later collide with the natural kind. Sociation itself he treats as process and complementarity: persons associate because they need and complete one another, from sex and age in the family to the division of labor in a workshop. He classifies its forms as Masse, Ballung, and Kristallisation, argues that organizations gain a life of their own by depersonalizing relations, and closes on the conviction that neither individual nor mass alone explains any social form.
Das Führertum ist eine Komplementärerscheinung der Masse. Masse braucht Führertum, der Führer Masse.
English translation: “Leadership is a complementary phenomenon of the mass. The mass needs leadership, the leader needs a mass.”