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.
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.”
A population can become more mobile while its legal categories remain fixed. In this 1891 article on the Austrian census of 31 December 1890, Karl-Theodor von Inama-Sternegg and Heinrich Rauchberg trace the widening gap between where people live and where they hold municipal home rights, arguing that domicile legislation fails to accommodate movement. Writing from within the statistical administration, they also distinguish demographic change from changes produced by boundaries, questionnaires and counting rules. Their early synthesis lets readers examine improving literacy alongside persistent regional and gender inequalities, and see why reported everyday language cannot simply be equated with linguistic identity. The tables offer more than population totals: they expose the practical difficulties of making a mobile, multilingual population legible through administrative categories.
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.”
Friedrich Ratzel's Anthropo-Geographie had claimed that where no census reaches, geography must supply the statistical image of humanity. Taking up that challenge, Inama-Sternegg concedes the point without surrendering his discipline: the object of statistics is the human community, grasped through the quantitative determination of mass phenomena, a method that eventually depends on others where it cannot reach. Geography earns its role by reading population from the cultural landscape, from houses, villages, roads, cleared forests, and cultivated land, rather than by replacing enumeration. The essay's governing contrast concerns density: for the statistician a bare ratio of inhabitants to area, for the geographer a territorial condition shaped by relief, climate, water, and settlement history. Neither becomes a complete science of population alone; each gains precision, he insists, only by recognizing the other's method and its limits.
Für den Statistiker ist die Dichtigkeit der Bevölkerung die Beziehung zwischen der Flächenausdehnung eines Gebietes und der Zahl seiner Bewohner.
English translation: “For the statistician, population density is the relation between the areal extent of a territory and the number of its inhabitants.”
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.”
A factory committee could save a weaver from an unjust penalty by discovering faulty machinery—and also police workers’ private conduct. This double edge of representation animates Eugen Schwiedland’s 1891 article, published under the numbered subtitle “I. Les Comités ouvriers.” Drawing on German and Austrian factory experience, he assesses Austrian legislative proposals rather than an established system. He supports compulsory representation as a practical response to restricted freedom of association, yet questions the administrative powers that could curtail its independence. His central contention is that conciliation requires organized workers and employers, not merely a tribunal. The article offers a concrete way to examine the difficulty within this reform project: how could institutions foster collective bargaining when the state restricted their autonomy and left compliance with arbitral awards unsecured?
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.”
To explain emigration as normal is not to celebrate it—or to prescribe it as a cure for overpopulation. In this 1891 reply to Richmond Mayo Smith, Eugen von Philippovich defends that distinction while asking what governments can do about movements they cannot readily stop. His European perspective joins economic disparities to the practical means by which distant opportunities become imaginable: cheaper passages, family correspondence, and American newspapers reaching Black Forest cottages. Migration responds to hardship at home and employment abroad, but information travels unevenly and expectations can mislead. The article’s distinctive turn is from economic explanation to public responsibility: accountable information offices and cooperation between states should help prospective emigrants judge their chances without private agents’ incentive to encourage departure.
Marginal utility may explain how people economize, but can it also explain how legal institutions develop? In this brief review of Emilio Cossa’s Le forme naturali dell’Economia Sociale, Siegmund Feilbogen welcomes an account that connects population pressure with increasingly economical conduct, rather than assuming a uniform propensity to economize. His approval sharpens the reservation that follows: where political or religious forces intervene, marginal utility cannot retain the status of a first cause. William the Conqueror’s redistribution of English land supplies one concrete test. The review offers a compact encounter with a sympathetic critic of economic explanation, attentive both to its reach beyond prices and to the historical forces that limit its causal claims.
What makes methodological discussion useful in teaching economics? In this brief 1891 review, Siegmund Feilbogen assesses the first installment of the second edition of F. W. Neurath’s textbook through its promise of conceptual clarity. He singles out the precise definition of induction, the examination of inner intuition as a source of knowledge, and the exposure of a common fallacy in applying the law of large numbers. His praise remains provisional: one installment suggests a substantially new work but cannot establish the character of the whole. The review offers a compact view of Feilbogen’s pedagogical priorities—accessible explanation and methodological distinctions that can support lectures and stimulate further inquiry.
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.