3,673 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Philippovich treats modern economic policy not as occasional intervention but as the very medium through which markets operate: transport, trade, banking, insurance, and poor relief all shape the formation and distribution of income, so the boundary between economic and social policy is porous from the start. The transport books argue that railway technology becomes economic power only once organized — duplicated lines waste capital, competition tends toward fusion and monopoly, and the railway is thus a public-monopolistic institution even in private hands, its rates poised between own-cost and value-of-service. Trade, banks, and the bourse extend the theme of organized concentration and ineradicable speculation. The final book grounds an independent income policy in labor exchanges, unemployment relief, and compulsory social insurance, converting aid from charity into enforceable right.
In diesen Vereinheitlichungsbestrebungen zeigt sich deutlich, daß das Lebensprinzip aller Verkehrsanstalten die Zentralisation ist.
English translation: “In these efforts at unification it becomes plainly evident that the vital principle of all transport enterprises is centralization.”
How did German economics come to treat industrial poverty and social reform as problems within its own remit? In this 1908 Festschrift contribution, Eugen Philippovich von Philippsberg traces an indirect route: socialist criticism challenged the established order, but legal philosophy and historical and ethical inquiry helped economists reconsider their discipline’s boundaries. His account centres on the tension between property as a condition of personal independence and property as a source of social obligation. Associations, cooperatives and public intervention emerge as competing responses, not components of a single reform doctrine. Readers can discover how economics acquired a broader concern with human development without, in Philippovich’s view, surrendering its insights into scarcity—and why accepting the need for social policy did not settle who should act or how.
Across six lectures delivered in Berlin and Vienna in 1909, Philippovich reads nineteenth-century economic politics as a conflict of social ideals rather than a mere succession of party interests: economic demands become intelligible only when traced to rival conceptions of state, society, and personality. He follows the century's dominant idea — the freedom of individuals in pursuit of their economic interests — through the emancipation of land, Gewerbefreiheit, and Freihandel, then shows how it bred capitalism and an 'actual' compulsion for the propertyless. Against it he ranges the counter-movements: conservative organic theory from Adam Müller to Stahl, Marxian socialism, Sozialpolitik as mediation, and agrarianism under world-market pressure. The closing lecture reads modern policy not as surviving laissez-faire but as its fusion with the organic view of society — a regulated freedom charged with fitting capitalism's powers into a durable order.
Die vollkommene Entwicklung der Persönlichkeit!
English translation: “The complete development of the personality!”
Written in the Mitteleuropa moment of 1915, this pamphlet contends that a German–Austro-Hungarian economic and customs union is no patriotic fantasy but a practicable project blocked repeatedly by politics rather than economics. Philippovich reconstructs Austrian trade policy from Maria Theresa's prohibitions through Bruck's staged Zollverein plans of the 1850s, reading their failure against Prussia as a lost opening rather than proof of impossibility. War, he argues, has dissolved the most-favored-nation constraints of the Frankfurt treaty and restored each state's freedom of action. His central move separates a large common economic space from the immediate abolition of internal protection: Austrian industry, weaker in capital and freight, needs transitional duties, a common external tariff, and harmonized commercial law. Scale is his governing category — a Central European area from the Adriatic to the North Sea, resilient against British-led isolation.
Nationale wirtschaftliche Autarkie wurde das Schlagwort.
English translation: “National economic autarky became the watchword.”
Little more than a signature survives here: an oblong-octavo album leaf inscribed by Eugen von Philippovich at Vienna on 6 April 1915, its value wholly bibliographical rather than textual. The catalogue record moves from author identification to physical description to provenance — a red round stamp of the J. K. Riess manuscript collection, an inventory number, and the punch-marks of an old binding. No argument, no doctrine: only attribution and the material history of collection and handling. As a wartime trace of one of Austria's leading national economists, the leaf documents how a fragment of hand becomes a collectible object, authenticated by stamps and stitching-holes rather than by anything its author chose to say.
Nur die Unterschrift.
English translation: “The signature only.—With the red round stamp of the "J. K. Riess Manuscript Collection", inventory no. "1086", and traces of holes from old binding.”