3,673 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
To read Wieser's late sociology of power as a betrayal of his economics, Schams argues, is to misunderstand the unity of a single life's work. His memorial, written soon after Wieser's death in July 1926, places him beside Menger and Böhm-Bawerk in a division of labor: Menger fought methodologically for theory, Böhm-Bawerk defended it polemically, and Wieser built its substantive system. It was Wieser who gave marginal utility its lasting name, Grenznutzen, and who in Der natürliche Wert carried value into productive goods through the theory of imputation. The dialectic of leaders and led in Das Gesetz der Macht, Schams insists, completes that economics rather than abandoning it — the sociology supplying the grounding for social action the theory had always presupposed, and making Wieser a monument to a vanished Austrian culture.
Der wirtschaftliche Wert ist Grenzwert.
English translation: “Economic value is marginal value.”
Where Sombart sees economics deformed by borrowed natural-scientific method, Schams sees the diagnosis aimed at the wrong target. Prompted by Die drei Nationalökonomien and its carving of the discipline into judging, ordering, and understanding economics, this essay charges that Sombart expels physical "laws" only to smuggle the old wage-fund, rent, monopoly-price, and supply-and-demand laws back in under the stamp of Sinngesetze, without ever showing why the earlier economics was cognitively empty. Exactness, Schams counters, is not measurement or quantity but the fit between a mode of concept-formation and its problem; the true fault lies in importing physical structures — equilibrium, statics and dynamics, material constants — into a domain that has none. Allied with Sombart against scientism, he defends instead a mathematical, relationist theory grounded in meaning and purged of natural-science residue.
Die Mathematik wirkt keine Wunder.
English translation: “Mathematics works no miracles.”
If buyers’ valuations depend on incomes earned at existing prices, can those valuations explain how prices arise? In this 1949 article, Ewald Schams confronts the circularity objection to Austrian price theory without abandoning its account of subjective motivation. His distinctive move is to place price formation within the circulation of goods, money and income: capital advances finance purchases, sales validate incomes, and receipts replenish capital. On this view, reciprocal dependence is not necessarily a defect in reasoning; it may belong to the economic process being explained. Readers can discover why Schams distinguishes the causal explanation of a particular exchange from the simultaneous relations sustaining a price system—and how isolating one price from that system can manufacture the very logical difficulty theory seeks to resolve.