1,549 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Philosophy, on this telling, is dying — its founding question of absolute happiness proved self-contradictory, and its living remainder passes to the science of relative welfare. Across this first, foundational volume Gans-Ludassy builds a 'system of economistic methodology,' arguing that only once epistemology, causality, induction and deduction have been settled can economic theory and policy be rebuilt. Writing amid the Methodenstreit, he refuses to subordinate economics to ethics, psychology or physics, dissects the fiction of the economic man, and traces the discipline's schools from Smith and Ricardo through the historical school to Menger's exact realism, which he judges incomplete. His own proposal, 'rational empiricism,' would fuse experience and logic, grounding every economic phenomenon in purposive action and the master concept of economic energy.
Die Philosophie der Zukunft ist Oekonomik.
English translation: “The philosophy of the future is economics.”
In a cramped Viennese cellar where piece-cutters sew eighteen hours a day and pawn their tools to survive, the old song still promises that the craftsman's trade has a golden foundation. The four acts turn that proverb bitterly ironic: the honest tailor Peter Wimmer rises to master only to risk becoming an exploiter himself, while the opportunist Tichtl climbs by discarding the mother of his child and preying on Wimmer's daughter Leni. When a murder is pinned on Tichtl, Wimmer is tempted to let a hated enemy hang for it. Twice forbidden the Vienna stage by the Statthalterei on grounds a review called plainly political, the Volksstück drew comparison with Hauptmann's Die Weber for its portrait of small craftsmen crushed by large capital.
I Stukschneider — dös is der noblichste Mensch von der Welt, a Heiliger, sag’ i Ihnen. Denn er lebt nur für Andere und für sich selber stirbt er.
English translation: “A piece-cutter — that's the noblest fellow in the world, a saint, I tell you. For he lives only for others, and for himself he dies.”
An imaginary land called Utopien is the stage for the rise and ruin of a revolutionary who abolishes private property, inheritance, marriage and the family in the name of a 'Sun State.' Jean Marot, a stable hand turned self-taught intellectual, seizes power under the slogan 'bread and work' and forces the king to proclaim collective ownership and state-reared children, only to watch his order breed shortages, informers, and a new kind of crime in which theft merely imitates official expropriation. The chancellor Reinhart's counterrevolution, an adulterous entanglement with Queen Regine, and a mob that turns on its liberator drive Jean to the scaffold. Gans-Ludassy dramatizes, years before the socialist calculation debate, why a collectivism imposed on egoists devours itself.
Der Staat ist mit Vernunft erfunden für Vernünftige. Auf Stimmungen des Herzens und auf Empfindsamkeiten des Gemüt's kann er nicht Rücksicht nehmen! Laßt mich gehen!
English translation: “The state is devised by reason for the reasonable. It cannot take account of moods of the heart and sensitivities of the temperament! Let me go!”