2,793 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
A circle without its center becomes an affectionate joke about intellectual fellowship in Felix Kaufmann’s three-stanza song. Radii wander with nowhere to go, while π laments a wound measured to the thousandth decimal place. The mathematical conceit lets the Mises circle express attachment to its absent center without abandoning its taste for precision—or taking its own grief entirely seriously. Presented in Arlene Oost-Zinner’s 2010 English translation with the musical score, this small work offers a glimpse of shared scholarly language turned into sociable wit: calculation supplies the terms of sorrow, and the hoped-for return promises collective jubilation.
A seminar’s survival becomes a personal worry in Felix Kaufmann’s farewell song for Mises: Geneva cannot accommodate everyone, and Vienna’s departing scholars leave more than empty chairs behind. Presented in Arlene Oost-Zinner’s 2010 English translation and folk-song arrangement, the four stanzas mingle affectionate tribute with nervous humour. Drumming fingers and a recurring Latin lament sit alongside opposition to import taxes—a pointed reminder that friendship and economic conviction bound this circle together. The song offers a compact, intimate view of scholarly allegiance under the pressure of separation: its speaker honours the teacher’s new appointment while wondering what will become of the shared life he leaves behind.
Marginal utility becomes a farewell-party joke in Felix Kaufmann’s song for Stonier and Sweezy, presented here in Arlene Oost-Zinner’s 2010 English translation. Sweezy plans to convert Harvard to the ideas he has encountered in Vienna, only to stumble over the difficulty of deciding what things are worth; Stonier voices his suspicions but promises to return for more argument. Kaufmann affectionately teases both intellectual conversion and resistance, setting theoretical vocabulary to a folk melody. The pleasure of this small occasional work lies in its tone: disagreement, uncertainty, and ambitious claims become reasons for laughter and a shared toast rather than obstacles to friendship.
When does an economic theory explain conduct, and when does it merely redescribe the assumptions built into it? Felix Kaufmann’s 1933 essay makes this distinction the test of methodological claims. His central case is subjective value theory: ordering a consumer’s preferences is not yet explaining how those preferences arose. He treats marginal utility as a guide to investigating economic plans, whose usefulness must be demonstrated rather than secured by deduction alone. At the same time, he distinguishes economics’ subject—social exchange—from its explanatory instrument, the individual plan. Readers can discover why accepting preference analysis need not mean defining all purposive action as economic, and how conceptual precision exposes claims of empirical certainty that definitions and formal reasoning cannot support.
Data may feed inquiry, but can they produce theory? Felix Kaufmann turns this methodological dispute into a three-stanza song, here in Arlene Oost-Zinner’s 2010 English translation with an accompanying score. His satire respects the labor of collecting evidence while rejecting its claim to generate theory unaided; an obscure appeal to “natural value” fares no better. Yet the joke also reaches Professor Mises’ seminar, where evening argument promises certainty until dinner asserts a more bodily demand. The song’s distinctive pleasure lies in this double edge: theoretical conviction and affectionate mockery share the same table, allowing readers to encounter methodological loyalties in the lighter register of seminar sociability.
Hard problems melt like chocolate creams, and hungry seminar participants replenish themselves through “Import tariffs”: Felix Kaufmann’s song affectionately brings intellectual ambition down to the dinner table. In Arlene Oost-Zinner’s 2010 English translation, this portrait of the Mises Circle makes debate and conviviality parts of the same pleasure. Yet its confidence briefly falters: why keep questioning when life flows on regardless? The answer—a resolve to take a stand—gives the returning refrain a seriousness its exuberant praise of truth might initially conceal. This small work offers a distinctive glimpse of scholarly fellowship expressed through jokes, shared appetites, and the feeling of being at home in argument.
An economist’s books have no buyers: in Felix Kaufmann’s comic song, even the defence of marginal utility suffers from insufficient demand. A Vienna-trained scholar greets his school’s supposed demise with theatrical despair, turning Menger’s work into a devotional object and his pen into a dagger—until economic polemics summon him back to battle. Set to Schumann’s music with an acknowledged debt to Heine, the song makes scholarly allegiance look at once ridiculous and resilient. Its humour lies in the uneasy overlap between devotion to a theory and concern for one’s own professional survival. Arlene Oost-Zinner’s 2010 English translation and arrangement preserve this small drama of intellectual loyalty, in which economic terminology itself joins the heroic posturing.
An invitation to refute a doctrine becomes comic when the speaker declares in advance that no critic can succeed. Felix Kaufmann’s two-stanza song turns economic conviction into a performance of certainty: marginal utility supplies the recurring answer, while Vienna claims privileged access to liberalism’s reasons. The sharper joke concerns values, which the speaker holds at a distance before insisting that thought cannot proceed without them. In Arlene Oost-Zinner’s 2010 English translation, with music by Gustav Pick, readers encounter a compact satire of theoretical allegiance and methodological self-contradiction. Although the title names Mises and Mayer, the lyrics leave their respective positions unassigned; the interest lies in the confident voice and the tensions it cannot quite conceal.
A scientist writes through the night until a methodologist compares his prose to beer foam and dismisses his a priori assumptions. In Felix Kaufmann’s satirical song, scholarly correction becomes mock-tragic catastrophe: the manuscript turns to ashes, taking its author’s sense of purpose with it. Yet the scientist’s increasingly elaborate “knots” of thought leave his own intellectual pretensions exposed. Presented in Arlene Oost-Zinner’s 2010 English translation, with music by Friedrich Silcher and an acknowledged debt to Heinrich Heine, this miniature stages a pointed tension between critical scrutiny and the confidence inquiry requires. Its comedy lies in the disproportion between a methodological rebuke and the ruin it brings.