2,793 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
How much detail makes an industrial handbook useful? In this short review, signed “M.,” Carl Menger assesses the Austrian Ministry of Agriculture’s mining and metallurgy volume, edited by A. Schauenstein for the 1873 Vienna World Exhibition. He welcomes its combination of specialist contributions and a common descriptive framework, linking geological deposits and extraction methods with costs, employment, and markets without cataloguing every individual works. His approval has a clear limit: judging the accuracy of each branch’s account belongs to the relevant experts. The review offers a compact glimpse of Menger as a reader of industrial documentation, attentive to the distinction between comprehensive coverage and exhaustive detail, and to the usefulness of technical knowledge beyond professional circles.
Describing how materials become consumable goods is not yet explaining production economically. This distinction anchors Carl Menger’s short 1873 review, signed “M.,” of Emanuel Herrmann’s Principien der Wirthschaft. Menger welcomes Herrmann’s attempt to give industrial production the sustained attention political economy has devoted to exchange. Yet he finds that technical detail and analogies with nature too often displace economic analysis. His response also tests the value of originality: independence becomes a limitation when an author scarcely engages existing scholarship. The review offers a compact view of Menger’s critical standards, showing how he can endorse an expansion of economic inquiry while questioning the methods used to pursue it.
More gold need not make money work better—but can it still make people wealthier? In this 1873 review of J. C. Cairnes’s Essays in Political Economy, Carl Menger distinguishes gold’s monetary function from its uses in jewellery, utensils, and ornament. Depreciation may offset an increase in the monetary stock without cancelling the benefit of wider access to a desirable material, even when vanity shapes demand. Yet Menger’s disagreement does not prevent him from praising Cairnes’s explanation of silver flowing toward India and East Asia: expanding monetary exchange, rather than hoarding alone, helps account for its absorption. The review offers a compact encounter with Menger’s attention to concrete uses—and with his ability to separate a disputed premise from a persuasive explanation.