4,249 works (including 483 books, 3,406 articles and 357 historical documents), 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable.
Can prices be explained without understanding what goods mean to the people who choose among them? In this signed 1928 supplement to Böhm-Bawerk’s encyclopedia article on value, Franz Xaver Weiss defends subjective valuation without requiring measurable satisfaction, pleasure-seeking motives, or agreement on desirable ends. His central distinction is between ranking purposes and measuring utility: people can choose which needs to meet without assigning numerical values to their satisfaction. From this standpoint, he treats production costs and mathematical price interdependence not as refutations of utility theory but as phenomena it must explain. The supplement offers a focused encounter with the boundary between equilibrium equations and explanations of action—and with Weiss’s contention that critics who discard the language of value often retain its explanatory substance.
What kind of “understanding” does utility-value theory require? In this brief discussion contribution, Franz Xaver Weiss answers Colm’s charge that he has misunderstood Sombart by distinguishing understanding of subject matter from understanding of psychic life. Weiss gives priority to the latter without excluding the former, linking it to his claim that utility-value theory can explain price in an exchange economy as an expression of social value. The exchange offers a precise methodological clarification rather than a developed theory of price: its interest lies in seeing Weiss defend the connection between understanding individual experience and interpreting prices socially.
Demand and supply explain prices—but what explains their effects on individual valuations? In this compact encyclopedia entry, Franz Xaver Weiss places that question at the centre of Carl Menger’s contribution to economics. His portrait connects marginal utility with an effort to understand individual conduct, while presenting Menger’s defence of theory as compatible with, rather than a substitute for, historical research. Weiss also identifies a practical obstacle to Menger’s reception: his principal books went out of print, leaving successors to transmit much of his thought. Republished here in its 1937 version, the entry offers a concise account of what Weiss regarded as Menger’s distinctive explanatory approach and why readers often encounter it through other economists.
Why should interest persist in an economy without innovation or growth? In this signed encyclopedia supplement, Franz Xaver Weiß defends the temporal core of Böhm-Bawerk’s theory while correcting its appeal to the technical superiority of longer production processes. Machinery, railways, and durable housing promise future services, but building them commits resources that could satisfy present needs. For Weiß, that sacrifice—not productivity alone—helps explain interest. His criticism of Schumpeter makes the disagreement concrete: familiar, unbuilt investments can sustain demand for capital without entrepreneurial innovation. The same perspective informs his account of bank credit, which can redirect resources but cannot indefinitely remove their scarcity. Readers can follow how a dispute over capital’s productivity becomes a question about the competing claims of present consumption and future provision.