1,549 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Emil Sax treats the slum dwelling not as a mere symptom of poverty but as the mechanism by which poverty, disease, and moral ruin reproduce one another, which makes housing reform, in this 1869 Vienna treatise, the precondition of every other social reform. He begins with sanitation, linking damp, dark, overcrowded rooms to cholera, typhus, and child mortality, then argues that the good dwelling is a civilizing force restoring thrift, sobriety, and family order. Ownership he prefers to rent, the single-family cottage to the barracks, and planned worker colonies, Godin's Familistère at Guise foremost, to the mere patching of urban misery. Surveying employers, private capital, self-help building societies, and the state as agents of reform, he reads England's freer building trades and public sanitary legislation as jointly responsible for its sounder housing.
Die Gesetzgebung Englands bekennt sich zu dem Principe: schlechte Wohnungen werden von Staatswegen nicht geduldet.
English translation: “The legislation of England subscribes to the principle: bad dwellings are not tolerated by the state.”
Heavy fixed capital, permanent staff, stations, and rolling stock make a railway's costs depend overwhelmingly on the volume of traffic it carries, a fact from which Sax builds, in these 1871 Vienna lectures, an entire economic science of the railway rather than the scattered policy remarks he found in the textbooks. Economically, he argues, a railway is the mechanization of land transport, governed by the principle of Wirtschaftlichkeit; the same works may be economical on a dense trunk line and wasteful on a thinly settled one, so construction must distinguish main, extensive, and local railways down to the gauge. Tariffs are prices set under monopoly and public dependence. And because their scale and effects touch the whole economy, railways belong to Gemeinwirthschaft, though which organ should build and run them remains, for Sax, a historical question.
Die vollendetste Technik kann unökonomisch sein.
English translation: “The most perfect technology can be uneconomic.”
The older political economy, revered by many as unshakeable dogma, had been exposed as partly inadequate and partly untenable, and what was needed, on Sax's 1884 diagnosis, was a new science differing in conception, scope, and method. Writing amid the Methodenstreit, he sides with Menger's defense of exact theory against the historical school's deferral of theory, yet refuses to let exactness harden into empty hypothesis. He separates technical from economic action, defines the national economy as conduct arising from the striving to secure the external conditions of existence, and insists that theoretical economics be kept distinct from practical policy, laissez-faire's cardinal error being to promote propositions of private exchange into binding political law. Individualism, in its egoistic, mutualist, and altruistic forms, is set against a collectivism embodied above all in the state.
Der Mensch wirthschaftet nicht als isolirtes Wesen; eine Einzelwirthschaft im stricten Sinne des Wortes ist eine Abstraction.
English translation: “Man does not carry on his economy as an isolated being; an individual economy in the strict sense of the word is an abstraction.”
Political economy, Sax charges, had built its entire apparatus on private exchange while leaving the economic life of the state unexplained. Setting out to found an exact theoretical science of state economy, he derives its categories—need, good, labor, value, capital, cost—from the same marginal-utility analysis that Menger and Wieser applied to individual valuation, extended now to Gemeinbedürfnisse, the collective needs experienced by real members of a community. Taxes become collectivist value phenomena governed by the same law as the isolated economy, yielding an economic case for progressive rather than proportional rates. Along the way he dismantles the exchange, consumption, and productivity theories of taxation, and the state-as-capital constructions of Dietzel, Wagner, and Stein, insisting that public enterprises, institutions, and fees rest on distinct revenue principles.
Eine vollständige Theorie der ökonomischen Erscheinungen muss daher auch die gemeinwirthschaftlichen Phänomene in systematischer Gleichbehandlung mit den privatwirthschaftlichen umfassen.
English translation: “A complete theory of economic phenomena must therefore also comprise the phenomena of the collective (public) economy in systematic parity of treatment with those of the private economy.”
Delivered to the Gehe-Stiftung in Dresden on 10 March 1888, the day after Kaiser Wilhelm's death, this lecture drew an unexpectedly large audience for strict economic theory. Sax argues that German economics, for all its achievements in history and social policy, lacks the pure theory that stands to applied practice as physics and chemistry stand to technology. That foundation, he contends, is the psychology of scarcity: economics is applied psychology, the study of the mental processes by which dependence on limited external means motivates action. Value is no objective property of goods but a subjective excitation, measurable through exchange and money as heat is measured by a thermometer. From this single law of value he claims to derive prices, capital, interest, and public finance alike, treating fees and taxes as value phenomena rather than questions of justice.
Die Werthgröße ist umgekehrt proportional dem Güterbefiße, direct proportional der Stärke der fraglichen Bedürfnisse eines Individuums.
English translation: “The magnitude of value is inversely proportional to the possession of goods, and directly proportional to the intensity of the individual's needs in question.”
Böhm-Bawerk had claimed that even a solitary Robinson, storing grain and shaping tools, would already harbor the core of interest in the swelling value of goods prepared for the future. Sax sets out to refute that positive theory point by point—the temporal gap between need and provision, the alleged systematic underestimation of the future, the productivity of roundabout production—while preserving the marginal-utility theory from which Böhm-Bawerk wrongly thought it followed. His counter-concept is Wertperspektive: future goods carry lower present value because anticipated needs are felt more faintly, a valuation shift that mirrors planned welfare but generates no surplus. Interest, he concludes, is neither natural nor technical but a private-economic exchange gain, rooted in the unequal possession of present goods and absent alike from Robinson's island and a socialist commonwealth.
Die Wirtschaft Robinson’s kennt den uns geläufigen Zinsbegriff nicht.
English translation: “Robinson's economy does not know the concept of interest familiar to us.”
Every improvement in transport, Sax argues, is at bottom the conquest of spatial distance and the saving of time—a force in economic development ranking beside money, credit, machinery, and competition, yet long neglected by economic theory. This first volume of his revised treatise builds a general theory of transport from the ground up: transport understood as cost, the quadratic expansion of a good's market as freight falls, and a set of governing laws—of intensity, integration, direction, cost, and price. Because fixed capital dominates and countless traffic acts share common costs, transport tends toward natural monopoly rather than lasting competition. From this Sax derives why railways, roads, and waterways so often fall to public or common economy, closing with the pricing, concession, and administrative questions that occupy his second section.
Im Verkehrswesen bestimmen nicht die Kosten die Preise, sondern die Preise die Kosten.
English translation: “In the transport sector it is not the costs that determine the prices, but the prices that determine the costs.”
Before the railway, high freight costs locked inland economies into local self-sufficiency, arranging production in Thünen-style zones and spacing market towns a day's wagon journey apart. This second volume of Sax's transport treatise anatomizes the older and slower media that the railway displaced and then redefined: land roads and their administration across France, Austria, and England; natural and artificial waterways, canals, and the sea as the great highway of world trade; and the news traffic of post, telegraph, and telephone. Roads become feeders to rail and, with the bicycle and motor vehicle, candidates for revival; canals prove superior only at very high freight volumes; and the telegraph earns its price wherever a twelve-minute advantage in a cotton market outweighs its cost. Throughout, the choice of financial principle follows from whether a use is individual or collective.
No railway, Sax insists, can be governed as an ordinary competitive enterprise: its vast fixed capital, its natural and legal monopoly, and its national-economic weight place it under common economy from the start. This third volume marshals the English, American, and German record to show how railway competition destroyed itself through overbuilding, capital waste, rate wars, and eventual amalgamation, and it dismantles every liberal remedy—parallel lines, competing carriers on one track, running powers, the separation of traction from forwarding—as either wasteful or illusory. The remaining questions are administrative: how to secure equal treatment and appropriate tariffs, how to plan networks by the direction law of traffic, and whether the state should build and run the lines itself or delegate them to regulated private concessions—an answer Sax makes relative to time, place, and the quality of supervision.
Die Eisenbahn stellt ein Musterbild solcher Technik dar.
English translation: “The railway represents a paradigm of such technology.”
When Oskar Engländer's Theorie des Güterverkehrs und der Frachtsätze promised to overturn transport-price theory—and criticized Sax's own Verkehrslehre in passing—Sax answered with these critical studies. He grants that lower freight costs expand a good's market and equalize prices, but denies that Engländer's mathematical formulas, resting on uniform population density and equal purchasing-power strata, can yield anything but a hypothetical sales figure detached from real markets. The heart of the dispute is Werttarifierung, value tariffing: the practice of charging higher-valued goods higher freight, which Sax defends as a genuine application of monopoly-price theory grounded in subjective value and income stratification. Against Engländer he maintains that cost sets the floor beneath every freight rate and belongs in tariff theory from the outset, and he warns that failed abstract deduction can discredit economic theory itself.
Die Rolle der Kosten im Preisbildungsprozeß ist keine ergänzende, sondern eine wesentliche.
English translation: “The role of costs in the price-formation process is not a supplementary one, but an essential one.”