2,793 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Daniel Defoe foretold what Robert Owen would later attempt to complete: this essay pairs the mercantilist pamphleteer with the cooperative experimenter across more than a century of English social thought. Defoe the writer and projector favored state intervention, wage and price regulation, workhouses, and insurance; Owen the experimenter staked his fortune on New Lanark, New Harmony, labour-exchange banks, and semi-autarkic commonwealths, seeking to abolish the money economy itself. Kerschagl reads both as forerunners of the concern with full employment later crowned by Keynes, then widens the frame to a third figure, John Law, arguing that differing social origins — petty trade, banking, early industry — shaped each man's remedies. Defoe survives in memory chiefly as the author of Robinson Crusoe; Owen's so-called utopias, the essay contends, have become realities.
Aus einer objektiven und echten Geschichte der sozialen Ideen sind aber beide Männer gleichermaßen nicht wegzudenken.
English translation: “From any objective and genuine history of social ideas, however, neither of the two men can be omitted.”
A central bank can be charged with protecting purchasing power while lacking authority over the wages, taxes, and public spending that help determine it. This mismatch drives Richard Kerschagl’s 1967 article. He treats interest rates and reserve requirements not as reliable levers but as instruments whose effects depend on business financing, confidence, and government policy: higher rates may even increase production costs. His proposed remedy is strikingly political—cabinet participation with veto rights over economic decisions and decisive influence on wage-price policy. Giving currency stability priority over full employment, Kerschagl nevertheless resists turning central banking into comprehensive economic planning. The article exposes the tension within that position: how much power over the wider economy can a guardian of monetary stability acquire without compromising the market order it seeks to preserve?
Neither in its causes nor in its effects is inflation a purely monetary affair, this wide-ranging treatise maintains: it springs from the plain fact that too many people want everything at once. Kerschagl treats it as a fraud against savers, pensioners, and creditors and as the greatest economic revolution imaginable — expropriating money-holders, rewarding debtors including the state, and dissolving the accounting on which capitalist calculation rests. Across coin debasement in Rome, John Law's Banque Royale, the assignats, and the German, English, French, and American inflations of the twentieth century, he weighs quantity theory against Schumpeter and Keynes, dismisses gold as no reliable safeguard, and denies that full employment can ever be bought with fiduciary credit. Stable money, he concludes, is the precondition of democracy, welfare, and freedom alike.
Gold ist kein Heilmittel, auch nicht gegen Inflation.
English translation: “Gold is no remedy, not even against inflation.”
Did the alchemists ever truly make gold? Kerschagl's concise history answers no — not a single controlled specimen survives — while insisting that the quest was never mainly about gold at all: most adepts were physicians and apothecaries chasing elixirs, panaceas, and remedies. From Mesopotamian metallurgy and Alexandrian experiment through Arab transmission, Paracelsus's turn from speculation toward empirical medicine, and the frauds of Cagliostro, Casanova, and the gold-makers at Rudolf II's Prague court, the book separates genuine discovery — mercury, phosphorus, porcelain, mineral acids — from delusion and swindle. It closes with Franz Joseph's skeptical assay trials and the twentieth century's nuclear transmutation of mercury into gold, scientifically real yet economically pointless. Alchemy's failed quest, the verdict runs, nonetheless vastly enlarged human knowledge.
Nur ein kleiner Teil der Arbeit der Alchimisten war in Wirklichkeit der Suche nach dem künstlichen Gold gewidmet.
English translation: “Only a small part of the alchemists' work was in reality devoted to the search for artificial gold.”
Full employment conjured from uncovered credit repeats, on Kerschagl's reading, John Law's old error: trying to replace scarce capital with purchasing power. This 1953 essay argues that printing money before consumable goods exist does not abolish scarcity but forces present consumers to finance future production through lower real consumption or higher prices—there are, he warns, no miracle cures. Keynes is placed within that line of reformers, and Dobretsberger's scheme to finance hydropower by note issue serves as the test case: domestically buildable, perhaps, but the new purchasing power would arrive long before the electricity. Against the illusion Kerschagl sets a real-factor remedy of deliberate austerity—new capital formed only through saving and work, weak accumulation traced to three inflations, and employment secured not by protected inefficiency but by rising productivity across all sectors.
Erhöhte Arbeitsleistung je Arbeiter zerstört nicht Arbeitsplätze, sondern schafft neue.
English translation: “Increased output per worker does not destroy jobs; it creates new ones.”