1,549 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Because public law rests on a contested theory of the state, and on a will that both makes law and is bound by it, it is, Landesberger argues in this 1889 Vienna dissertation address delivered under imperial auspices, uniquely unstable and best approached historically. He begins from Kant, for whom the state's sole task is to posit and protect law, then charts how history outgrew that legal-protection state: the French Revolution's separation of powers, the collapse of the Holy Roman Empire, and Fichte's national conception. The modern Rechtsstaat emerges as a Kulturstaat animated by a unified state will and answerable to 'society,' the dynamic stratification of a people; equality before the law figures less as an individual right than as society's freedom against class domination. The speech closes on the Habsburg motto Viribus unitis.
Der Rechtsstaat ist nicht die politische und culturelle allein, er ist auch die ethische Organisation eines Volkes!
English translation: “The Rechtsstaat is not merely the political and cultural, it is also the ethical organisation of a people!”
Weighing how to set Austria-Hungary's currency on a sound footing, Landesberger enters the monometallism-versus-bimetallism quarrel with a strategist's caution. Rather than commit doctrinally to pure gold, which he holds would force ruinous silver sales, deepen the long price depression running since the 1870s, and sharpen a global scramble for scarce gold, he urges a French-type limping standard, saturated with silver yet legally equal to gold, that keeps open the path to a future international bimetallic union. His distinction between gold agio and gold premium lets him defend the Bank of France's practice of shielding reserves through a premium rather than punitive discount hikes. A second essay recasts the 'Relation' as a legal problem: how to convert debts contracted in depreciated paper into gold justly, by averaged conversion periods instead of a single reform-date rate.
Reverse the lecture's title, Landesberger begins, the national economy and the war, not the war and the national economy, and the 1914 catastrophe appears less as military politics than as the collision of an economy with the forces bent on halting it. Britain, he argues, entered not over Belgian neutrality but because Germany's industrial ascent threatened its world position: German firms served customers better, the 'made in Germany' origin law backfired into a mark of quality, and bank-financed science outpaced English routine in chemicals, machinery, and munitions. Turning to the financial shock, he weighs moratoria, Darlehenskassen, and Reichsbank note issue, the closure of the exchanges, the blockade's threat to the food supply, and the war loans on which monetary normalization depends. Whatever windfalls war brings a lucky few, for the national economy as a whole it is no boom.
Die Kerze wird von zwei Seiten angezündet.
English translation: “The candle is being lit from both ends.”