2,793 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Böhm-Bawerk left no system encompassing the whole of economic theory; his greatness, Menger's obituary insists, lay in monographs that made sharply delimited problems illuminate the foundations of the discipline. From a life of legal study, three terms as Austrian finance minister, and a return to the Vienna chair, Menger draws out the scholar—the combative polemicist who gathered many opponents but not a single enemy. He traces the first inquiry into rights as pseudo-goods, then the lucid defense of subjective value and marginal utility against older cost and labor doctrines, and finally the crowning Geschichte und Theorie des Kapitalzinses. There the higher valuation of present over future goods, reinforced by the productivity of roundabout production, yields interest and its forms—a theory whose very controversy, Menger argues, confirmed its weight.
Seine Verdienste als Finanzminister würden allein genügen, ihm einen ehrenvollen Platz in der Geschichte Österreichs zu sichern.
English translation: “His merits as Minister of Finance alone would suffice to secure him an honorable place in the history of Austria.”
Austria’s new personal income tax met government forecasts yet yielded strikingly less than its Prussian counterpart. In this brief review, Carl Menger assesses Friedrich von Wieser’s attempt to explain the gap without treating aggregate receipts as self-evident measures of wealth, administrative competence or tax morale. Menger welcomes Wieser’s effort to account for differences between the taxes, but presses two concrete reservations: the burden of yield taxes operating alongside income tax, and the need to compare the systems at similar stages of implementation. His qualified endorsement offers a compact example of his standards for fiscal comparison: before drawing conclusions about taxpayers, examine the institutions and assessment periods that produced the figures.
When the state reserves an industry to itself, are its earnings simply another tax? This distinction anchors Carl Menger’s review of Otto Gerlach’s revision of the fifth edition of Wilhelm Roscher’s System der Finanzwissenschaft. Menger welcomes the edition’s greater practical usefulness but challenges Gerlach’s classification of state monopoly receipts as indirect taxes. Excluding private enterprise, he argues, secures returns for the state through a mechanism distinct from taxation—even when a monopoly also facilitates tax surcharges. His qualified defence of Roscher makes this more than an assessment of editorial improvements: the review shows why the source of public income matters, and how apparently tidy fiscal categories can obscure the economic arrangements that generate it.
Does money’s influence on freedom and personal life require a philosophy beyond economics? In this short review of Georg Simmel’s Philosophy of Money, Carl Menger challenges the boundary on which Simmel’s project rests. He argues that Simmel mistakes the limitations of historical economics for those of economic science: monetary theory already investigates psychological causes, while economic and socialist writings examine money’s effects on human relations and even imagine worlds without it. Menger credits Simmel with stimulating, sometimes new insights but denies that these amount to a systematic advance in monetary theory. The review offers a compact encounter with Menger’s expansive conception of economics—and his distinction between intellectual ingenuity and theoretical contribution.