2,793 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Factories appear in Oskar Engländer’s study of southeastern Bohemian household manufacture as both a threat to livelihoods and a possible escape from poverty. This contribution, first published in 1899, makes that tension concrete through weaving and shoemaking: machinery displaces some domestic tasks while factories continue to send others into workers’ homes. Engländer tests employers’ earnings estimates against wage books and household observation, exposing the unpaid family assistance, supply costs, and delivery time hidden within nominal wages. His distinctions matter: carpet weavers face different technical competition from linen weavers, while shoemakers’ formal employment status offers little protection against irregular orders. The study shows why working at home could preserve discretion over hours without securing either economic independence or an adequate living.
Interest on productive capital still lacked a settled explanation, and this 1908 study sets out to supply one. Working from subjective value theory in the lineage of Menger and Böhm-Bawerk, yet breaking with the latter's agio theory, Engländer traces it to a structure illustrated by a fisherman and his net: the economic efficiency (Wirtschaftlichkeit) of a produced means, the divergent valuations of its maker and its user under the division of labor, and the self-interest that lets each keep part of the surplus through bargaining. He rejects positive imputation as neither practiced nor needed, denies that competition and the 'cost law' abolish profit, and treats the price difference between means and product not as the cause but as the visible sign of capital's productivity.
Denn, um es nochmals zu betonen, jeder Tausch muß für den Tauschenden von Vorteil sein, seine wirtschaftliche Lage muß hierdurch nach seiner Ansicht gebessert werden, weil er sonst den Tausch mangels eines Motives nicht eingehen würde.
English translation: “For, to emphasize it once more, every exchange must be advantageous to the one exchanging; his economic situation must, in his view, be improved thereby, because otherwise, lacking a motive, he would not enter into the exchange.”
An economist’s neutrality does not make economic actors morally indifferent. In this two-part study, Oskar Engländer asks how explanations built on self-interest can accommodate duty, solidarity, and restraint without abandoning their starting point. His answer turns on compatibility: mutually advantageous exchange need not conflict with moral convictions, though particular prices, wages, and bargaining conditions may do so. Drawing on Franz Brentano’s account of objective ethical knowledge, Engländer also challenges the passage from explaining an income to justifying its recipient’s entitlement. Readers encounter a defence of ethical reasoning that nevertheless refuses to derive economic policy from moral principles alone: judging distribution or intervention requires knowledge of incentives, consequences, and feasible alternatives. The resulting tension is precise—economics needs evaluative standards, while ethics cannot settle economic questions without economic investigation.
The last portion of bread a person buys may matter greatly even when another portion would be almost worthless. For Oskar Engländer, this gap exposes a weakness in theories that infer proportionality between prices and marginal utilities from rational choice. In this 1920 article, directed principally against Schumpeter and Liefmann, he argues that choosing the best available action does not necessarily equalize marginal returns. Drawing on Brentano’s psychology, he treats preference as ranking rather than measurable intensity and distinguishes actual sacrifices, such as labor’s discomfort, from benefits forgone. His concrete examples make the stakes of seemingly technical assumptions visible: continuity and substitutability must be established, not smuggled into the economic principle. Readers can discover why rational purchases may constrain price relations without uniquely determining them.
Because money satisfies no need directly, a buyer's maximum bid can only be the wealth left once more urgent wants are secured—never the monetary measure of a good's value. From this psychological foundation, drawn from Franz Brentano by way of Marty and Kraus, Engländer rebuilds price theory around ranked preferences, the 'price-willingness paradox' by which the bid per unit can fall faster than quantity rises, and prices that settle below a buyer's maximum. Competition among unequal buyers, he shows, fixes only upper and lower limits set by marginal and excluded strata, never a unique price; the missing determinant comes from the seller side and the cost law, in which labor stands as the terminal factor whose own price rests on the quantity actually employed.
Der Käufer hat keine Möglichkeit einer unmittelbaren Schätzung des Geldes in der Art, wie er eine unmittelbare Schätzung eines Gutes erster Ordnung nach der von diesem Gute abhängigen Bedürfnisbefriedigung vornimmt.
English translation: “The buyer has no possibility of directly appraising money in the way in which he directly appraises a first-order good according to the satisfaction of needs that depends on that good.”
If money has no intrinsic value, what determines how much of it a buyer will offer for a good? In this 1922 article, Oskar Engländer argues that monetary nominalism leaves this question unanswered. His alternative begins with purchasing priorities: a buyer’s maximum bid depends on the funds remaining after more important needs have been provided for, not on an independently valued monetary unit. This approach makes unequal purchasing power central to price formation. Less urgent wants backed by wealth can prevail over more urgent wants backed by little income. By connecting these individual spending limits with competition and scarce productive resources, Engländer offers a route between cost and marginal-utility theories—and distinguishes conditions that determine a price from those that leave room for bargaining.
A cheaper ticket need not produce another journey. In this 1923 article, Oskar Engländer makes the purposes and constraints of travel—not distance alone—the starting point for explaining passenger fares. A family visit, a holiday, a business transaction, and a daily commute generate different responses to price: spare income, available time, or access to housing may matter more than the fare itself. He then asks how transport operators can price services when they cannot directly observe passengers’ willingness to pay. Carriage classes, excursion trains, and restricted concessions become practical instruments for distinguishing demand. By separating additional traffic costs from allocated common expenses, Engländer also clarifies a persistent public-policy tension: fuller use of transport facilities may justify cheaper fares without settling who should finance the shortfall.
If all purposeful action pursues ends, what makes some action specifically economic? In this 1924 review of Karl Englis’s Czech-language book, Oskar Engländer tests the attempt to ground economics in the minimization of suffering. His objections are concrete: anticipation of a theatrical performance can be pleasurable rather than painful, while patriotism can outweigh intense hunger without diminishing it. Such examples distinguish the intensity of feeling from its power to motivate choice—and challenge the numerical treatment of needs. Engländer appreciates Englis’s constructive ingenuity and attention to alternative uses of money, but refuses to let systematic coherence substitute for psychological or empirical warrant. The review offers a compact encounter with the difficulty of deriving economic laws from a general account of human purposes.
Freight is no neutral overlay on the map; in this transport theory it dictates where goods are produced, what they cost, and how far they travel. Written by a railway director and professor at Prague, the book follows freight charges outward from a single production point across concentric market areas, deriving sales radii that shrink in inverse proportion to the rate, market areas varying with the square of distance, and Thünen-like rings of agricultural intensity around a consuming city. Part II turns to the rates themselves, contrasting the monopolist's drive for maximum net revenue with a 'public-benefit' tariff aimed at the greatest summation of primary values, and argues through Böhm-Bawerk's subtractive imputation that freight rates must rest on willingness to pay, with marginal cost as their floor.
Nicht weil die Bahn an Kosten erspart, gewährt sie den Nachlaß, sondern damit sie an Kosten erspare.
English translation: “It is not because the railway saves costs that it grants the rebate; rather, it grants the rebate in order to save costs.”
The cheapest source of raw materials need not be the nearest—and its price cannot always be explained independently of the markets it serves. This interdependence drives Oskar Engländer’s critique of Alfred Weber and his proposal for a general theory of economic location. In this article, he argues that prices, production sites, and market boundaries must be explained together, rather than locating factories by transport geometry alone. His perspective also brings agriculture and industry into one analytical frame: the choice between selling nearby milk fresh and processing distant supplies into butter exposes a shared spatial problem. Readers can discover why low wages may reflect a location’s disadvantages rather than attract industry, and how distance shapes not only where goods are produced but what consumers buy.
A theory can be logically coherent and still fail to explain economic life. In this 1928 article, Oskar Engländer turns that distinction against Böhm-Bawerk’s criticism of Marx. He argues that equalized profit rates need not contradict Marx’s account of surplus value: differences in production time can modify prices without overturning the model’s explanation of how output is divided between workers and capitalists. Yet this defense exposes a different vulnerability. Competition may equalize wages, Engländer contends, but cannot establish that they equal the cost of reproducing labor. His reconstruction offers a precise way to distinguish objections to Marx’s reasoning from objections to his premises—and to see why rejecting one criticism need not mean accepting the theory.
Where earlier theory chose between technique and valuation, the first part of Engländer's system attempts to weld the two together. The objective-technical structure derives relative prices from labor and production conditions; the subjective-social derives them from valuation and income. Grounding value in the psychic phenomena of desiring goods and avoiding evils, he builds from primary values through economic value, cost, and yield to market price, insisting there is no necessary link between a good's higher marginal utility and a higher price. Rent emerges as scarcity plus the differential advantage of fertility and location; wages and capital interest are handled as factor prices. Yet interest, he concedes, resists convincing derivation here, and its fuller treatment is postponed to the theory of money in Part II.
Nach dem Sprachgebrauch der klassischen Schule erklärt der objektiv-technische Preisaufbau wohl den natürlichen Preis, aber nicht den um den natürlichen Preis oszillierenden Marktpreis.
English translation: “According to the usage of the Classical School, the objective-technical price structure indeed explains the natural price, but not the market price oscillating around the natural price.”