2,793 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Finding an earlier formulation of an idea does not necessarily explain a later thinker’s achievement. In this 1894 review of Siegmund Feilbogen’s Smith und Turgot, Julius Friedrich Gans von Ludassy asks what distinguishes Smith from a predecessor whose economic doctrines often stood remarkably close to his own. He substantially endorses Feilbogen’s answer: originality lies in the coherence and explanatory power of a synthesis, not simply in priority. Yet Ludassy also questions how the comparator is chosen and how the evidence is arranged. The review connects this methodological dispute to a less narrowly individualist reading of Smith, emphasizing wages, workers’ combinations, and public purposes. It offers a compact encounter with the criteria by which economic historians judge originality—and with the political consequences of those judgements.