3,015 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
The salaried employee, caught between the working class and management, is the figure through which Bayer traces a wider mutation in economy and society. Three shifts organize the essay: in macroeconomic aims, now converging on dynamic stabilization; in the functions of the enterprise; and in the roles of those who carry it. He coins Blankobedürfnisse, blank general needs whose concrete content advertising and mass production increasingly supply, to explain the swelling tertiary sector and its white-collar ranks. Concentration, objectification, and long-run corporate planning together yield not a return to free competition but an organized market economy, and an institutionalized firm whose enduring tasks bind everyone in it. The old entrepreneur gives way to the manager, whose growing social power makes managerial ethics and countervailing forces urgent against the ever-present danger of Grenzmoral.
Die Entscheidung für die Freiheit aber bedeutet die Aufgabe geistiger Trägheit; sie verlangt Mut und Selbstverantwortung.
English translation: “The decision in favor of freedom, however, means giving up intellectual inertia; it demands courage and self-responsibility.”
Two economic orders frame this account of how wages are actually set. In an approximately free market, where employers hold positions of equal strength, wage formation follows the general laws of price, structure stays purely functional, and productivity gains reach workers as falling prices, real wages rising with no nominal increase at all. Under the organized market economy of concentration and monopoly, wage structure bends instead to market power and profitability, so real gains now require nominal raises and price pass-through varies between free competition, pure monopoly, and monopolistic competition. Bilateral monopoly, Bayer shows, leaves the wage level indeterminate. His verdict is that automatic wage formation must yield to conscious wage design, and that design can succeed only within a broader economic policy directed against entrenched market power.
Die letzte Verantwortung nimmt uns niemand ab. Gerade darin kommt die Würde des Menschen im wirtschaftlich gesellschaftlichen Geschehen zum Ausdruck; gerade darin liegt eine Chance der Menschlichkeit.
English translation: “No one relieves us of ultimate responsibility. It is precisely in this that the dignity of man in economic and social life finds expression; precisely in this lies a chance for humanity.”
Neither the blurry category of Mittelstand nor sheer firm size captures Bayer's object: the person-shaped enterprise, formed and carried by an entrepreneur rather than run as a self-perpetuating institution. Continuing his project on the firm as economic stabilizer, this volume asks whether such medium firms still hold a stabilizing function, and why, if they do, their position keeps eroding. He credits them with pioneering, agility, specialization, individualization, and supplier roles, then separates the difficulties that policy could remove, chiefly discriminatory turnover taxes and a cartel law that treats their cooperation as suspect, from the endogenous tensions they must bridge themselves. Invoking subsidiarity and drawing on some three hundred visited firms, he argues that federative working groups, research-institute links, and reformed finance let medium firms complement the large institutionalized enterprise rather than dissolve into it.
Im September 1960 waren mehr als ein Drittel aller in der Industrie Beschäftigten (Betriebe mit zehn und mehr Arbeitnehmern) in der mittleren Industrie tätig
English translation: “In September 1960, more than one-third of all persons employed in industry (in establishments with ten or more employees) were engaged in medium-sized industry.¹⁶”
Family ownership can preserve a business while undermining its capacity to act: heirs may inherit equal authority without equal ability, and protecting capital may become an excuse to postpone investment. In this 1963 article, Hans Bayer examines how legal arrangements can sustain medium-sized, entrepreneur-led firms without freezing their development. His focus is not the supposedly ideal legal form but the design of agreements governing succession, authority, and cooperation. Contrasting two jute factories, he shows how divided leadership can obstruct adaptation where unified direction enables it. Bayer’s preference for decisive personal responsibility is tempered by his case for outside expertise and advisory boards. The article offers a concrete way to distinguish continuity of ownership from continuity of entrepreneurial capacity—and to see where contracts can help secure both.