1,549 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
From a single household's valuations through exchange, money, capital, prices and interest to population, currency, credit and the cartelized modern economy, this systematic handbook follows the whole arc of provision for life. Here in the German rendering of Engliš's 1925 Czech lectures, the Brno economist and Czechoslovak finance minister grounds every category in purpose and means, deliberately omitting statistics so the doctrine will not date. He parts sharply from the Austrians: marginal utility, he argues, measures the value of a loss and cannot explain why a particular good is bought. Malthus, Gresham's law, bimetallism and the wartime paper inflations of central Europe all find their place within a framework that treats price above all as a regulator holding production and consumption in balance.
Ohne Zweck gibt es keine Nützlichkeit.
English translation: “Without a purpose there is no utility.”
Between the causal explanation of what exists and the normative account of what ought to be, Engliš carves out a third, autonomous form of reason: teleology, the logic of whatever is willed. On that foundation the second volume of his teleological system, given here in the German of the 1932 Czech original, constructs the state economy as a purposive order governed not by any individual's satisfaction but by an objective 'human and national ideal.' Needs, utility, cost and yield reappear as formal categories, and from them he derives a theory of taxation in which burdens fall first on the highest incomes, producing a steep progression that levels from above, checked only by the need to preserve productive incentive. A sustained critique of Hans Ritschl's rival doctrine closes the book, faulting it for lacking any central ordering purpose.
Proportionalität oder Progressivität sind keine Steuergrundsätze, sondern bestimmte Konstruktionen von Steuersätzen, die sich erst aus den Steuergrundsätzen ergeben müssen.
English translation: “Proportionality or progressivity are not principles of taxation, but particular constructions of tax rates, which must first be derived from the principles of taxation.”
Written as the world crisis drove Russia, Italy, Roosevelt's America and Nazi Germany toward state direction of production, these expanded 1935 newspaper essays, here in German translation, ask precisely what 'planned economy' means and where regulation ends and collectivism begins. Engliš distinguishes three rational orders, individualist, cooperative and solidarist, and defines regulated economy as intervention from above that displaces competitive prices while leaving private enterprise and its calculation intact. The decisive threshold is what he calls the critical point: once the state assumes economic responsibility for outcomes, guaranteeing work or absorbing losses, entrepreneurship dissolves and the slide into collectivization begins. Weighing regulation against democratic institutions and Czechoslovakia's dependence on exports, the argument shares its ground with the interwar planning and calculation debates of Mises and Hayek.
Welche Änderungen des Ordnungsprinzipes der Unternehmerproduktion zur regulierten Wirtschaft gehören, ist unsere Kardinalfrage, wir suchen also das Wesen der regulierten Wirtschaft.
English translation: “Which alterations of the ordering principle of entrepreneurial production belong to the regulated economy is our cardinal question; we are therefore seeking the essence of the regulated economy.”
Why has logic remained perpetually contested? Because, argues this late essay, written in 1957 when its author was seventy-seven, it has confused correctness with truth, judgments with sentences, and genuine judgments with norms and postulates. Logic, Engliš counters, is the science of the order of thought, and thought divides into three irreducible orders: the ontological, which explains what simply exists through cause and effect; the teleological, which explains what is willed through means and ends; and the normological, which explains what ought to be. Mathematics becomes a logic of quantity that asserts nothing about reality, while the paradoxes of the logisticians dissolve once one sees that not every grammatical sentence is a judgment. Economics and law, he holds, first exposed the two non-causal orders that traditional logic had missed.
Nur die Erfahrung ist wahr oder unwahr; deshalb können nur die empirischen Wissenschaften beurteilen, was wahr ist.
English translation: “Only experience is true or untrue; therefore only the empirical sciences can judge what is true.”
Man, unlike the instinct-bound animal, provides for life through willed and creative action, and so, this treatise contends, economics must take a teleological rather than a merely causal form. First published under German occupation in 1940, pointedly without the ideological genuflections the Reich required, and presented here in Ivo Moravcik's English translation of the Czech Národní hospodářství, it builds outward from the principle of economising through households and enterprises, the three markets of goods, capital and labour, money and international exchange, to a searching comparison of individualist, cooperative and solidarist systems. Pure solidarism, Engliš holds, degenerates when self-interested men give little and take much; nations therefore settle for a partial solidarism that corrects capitalism through taxation, social policy and, at its outer limit, the controlled economy.
The practical man acts purposively, and we therefore comprehend his actions in terms of the relationship of finality (teleologically).