4,249 works (including 483 books, 3,406 articles and 357 historical documents), 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable.
A bank can finance industrial growth while leaving depositors and investors poorly equipped to judge its condition. This tension shapes Eugen von Philippovich’s 1916 review essay on studies by Schmalenbach, Flersheim, and Adolf Weber. His critical perspective links the mechanics of company valuation and securities placement to questions of banking power and public interest. Official exchange admission does not guarantee a sound investment; a balance-sheet reserve is not necessarily available cash. In weighing English deposit banking against Germany’s combined banking model, Philippovich resists easy claims of institutional superiority and attends instead to disclosure, credit relationships, and risk. The essay offers readers concrete ways to distinguish financial arrangements that mobilize capital from safeguards that genuinely protect those who supply it.
Wartime scarcity gives Eugen von Philippovich a concrete test for economic method in this 1917 review of the introductory volume of Karl Diehl’s Theoretische Nationalökonomie. Does the dependence of individuals on a legally organized economy make individual needs and incentives an inadequate starting point for theory? Philippovich accepts the importance of institutions but argues that wartime provisioning and price movements also reveal the force of scarcity and private interest. His defense of abstraction is selective, not a blanket endorsement of theoretical schools. Alongside this methodological dispute runs a teaching problem: a textbook rich in scholarly controversy may reward experienced economists while leaving beginners without a clear orientation. The review shows precisely where Philippovich’s appreciation of Diehl’s scholarship parts company with his assessment of its explanatory and instructional value.