4,366 works (including 487 books, 3,476 articles and 400 historical documents), 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable.
Can separating law from social purposes make those purposes more open to democratic challenge? In this English-language review essay, Erich Voegelin presents Hans Kelsen’s Allgemeine Staatslehre to American readers as both a theory of legal norms and a resource for constitutional criticism. His distinctive emphasis falls on the political consequences of technical precision: if law specifies authorized acts and jurisdictions rather than sanctifying existing interests, those interests must be defended on their merits. The Austrian Constitution supplies a practical test, while American judicial restrictions on labor legislation sharpen the stakes. Readers can discover why Voegelin sees Kelsen’s identification of state and legal order not merely as an abstract reduction, but as a challenge to governmental powers claimed to stand beyond law.
What makes a legal command binding, rather than merely a proposition whose content jurists can establish? In this 1931 essay, Erich Voegelin turns to Kant’s account of the “ought” to separate the experience of obligation from its rationalist explanation. His focus is the divided human will: capable of recognizing a moral demand without necessarily obeying it. Voegelin preserves this tension while challenging Kant’s abstraction from embodied, historically situated persons. The resulting distinction between feeling bound and knowing what is right opens a further problem: personal obligation cannot by itself explain rights against others or the authority of legal commands. Readers can discover here a precise point of departure for legal theory—one that requires inquiry into community and relations of rule rather than deduction from a universal moral formula.
What connects buying a loaf of bread with founding a steel trust? In this journal article, Erich Voegelin treats both as investments that reshape the temporal pattern of human satisfaction. His target is economic theory that isolates goods and needs from the historically given situation in which people choose, consume, and provide for the future. Time, he argues, is not an empty container for economic events: it arises within the changing rhythms of enjoyment, satiety, and renewed need. This perspective makes familiar problems of value, capital, and interest look different—not least the assumption that a physically identical good remains economically identical at different dates. Readers can discover how a concrete account of consumption becomes a challenge to static valuation and to the restriction of economic initiative to entrepreneurs.