4,249 works (including 483 books, 3,406 articles and 357 historical documents), 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable.
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.