2,793 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
When the Habsburg monarchy dissolved, its unified currency shattered into a spread of national monies, and every successor state raced to stamp the notes of the Austro-Hungarian Bank as its own. Kerschagl tracks that fragmentation country by country—Czechoslovakia's pioneering stamp and Rašín's forced-loan experiment, Yugoslavia's crown-dinar compromise, Poland's chaos of marks, rubles and crowns, Hungary under Béla Kun—while forged stamps spread panic across the region. At its core stands a scathing critique of Article 206 of the Treaty of Saint-Germain, whose confused provisions for liquidating the Bank he judges both unjust and technically impossible, treating Austria as sole successor and the Bank as a state institution. Left unrevised, he warns, the arrangement risks becoming a Central European economic problem in its own right.
Der Traum der Donaukonföderation war der letzte Traum der Österreichisch-ungarischen Bank.
English translation: “The dream of a Danubian confederation was the last dream of the Austro-Hungarian Bank.”
Two conceptions of money contend across this history of monetary theory: individualism, which treats money as an autarkic commodity carrying intrinsic value, and universalism, which sees it arising from the social division of labour and functioning only within an organic economic whole. Kerschagl reads Ricardo, Adam Müller, Knapp, Wieser, Gesell and Bendixen through this lens—faulting Ricardo's quantity theory for abstracting from income and property, crediting Müller as the first consistent universalist, and praising Wieser's account of the economy as a Zahlungsgemeinschaft, a payment community. Along the way he weighs Gesell's demurrage scheme, under which money would lose roughly five percent a year to discourage hoarding. The decline of absolute value theory, he concludes, leaves the socially embedded, universalist view of money the more plausible.
Das gänzlich unabhängige Geld mit Eigenwert erscheint dem Individualismus als das Ideal.
English translation: “Wholly independent money possessing intrinsic value appears to individualism as the ideal.”
Money can be legally constituted without its effects on distribution being explained. This distinction drives Richard Kerschagl’s 1921 article, which shifts the debate from metallic substance versus state authority to the relations among production, consumption, and claims on goods. His universalist perspective treats money as an instrument of economic interdependence, rather than merely a convenience for individual exchange. Yet it does not yield blanket approval of monetary reform: he can recognize the distributive intention behind Bendixen’s proposal to convert German war debt into notes while rejecting its practical viability. The article offers a way to distinguish theories of what makes money valid from theories of what money does—and to examine why neither a metallic basis nor state recognition alone settles the latter question.
Cashless payment is far older than the banknote: Roman argentarii kept transfer accounts, and Greek Egypt ran giro offices and even a grain giro linking natural, money and credit economies. Commissioned for the fiftieth anniversary of the Wiener Giro- und Cassen-Verein, this historical study traces book-money from antiquity through the medieval exchange fairs of Lyon and Besançon, the Hamburg Girobank and its Mark Banco, English goldsmith notes, the London Clearing House, and Austria-Hungary's own Saldierungsverein. Kerschagl argues throughout that clearing lets an economy function on the smallest possible stock of cash, and closes by criticising Austria's postwar fiscal measures—the Bankenumsatzsteuer among them—for favouring cash over the book transfer just when a credit economy most needed the opposite encouragement.
Von welcher Bedeutung das Clearing für die Geldschöpfung und die Möglichkeit der Erhaltung einer möglichst geringen Geldmenge ist, zeigen am besten wohl die Umsätze des Clearinghouse, die im Jahre 1920 in London allein mehr als 32 Milliarden Pfund betrugen.
English translation: “How significant clearing is for the creation of money and for the possibility of maintaining as small a money supply as possible is perhaps best shown by the turnover of the Clearing House, which in 1920 amounted to more than 32 billion pounds in London alone.”
Not the sheer surfeit of money, but the unequal income shifts it sets loose, does the deepest damage in an inflation—so runs the argument of this diagnosis of the postwar currency crisis. Kerschagl frames three problems: the changing value of money, the expansion and contraction of the money economy, and the practical resistance to inflation. He separates a currency's internal value, its domestic purchasing power, from its external value in exchange rates, tracing depreciation to state debt monetised into banknotes, collapsing confidence and a panic hunger for goods. Rašín's note-stamping, a wealth levy and staged devaluation are weighed as techniques; England's deflation attempts of 1919 to 1921 are followed in statistical detail; and the Brussels Financial Conference under Cassel supplies the closing counsel that production and thrift, not technical measures, cure a currency.
Nur die Kuh, welche wirklich Milch hat, kann welche geben.
English translation: “Only the cow that actually has milk can give any.”
Does relating the quantity of money to its value explain anything unless the economic connections between them are made explicit? In this 1922 reply to L. von Bortkiewicz, Richard Kerschagl defends his monetary theory through Othmar Spann’s distinction between universalist and individualist explanation. For Kerschagl, the issue is not whether a theory favours society or the individual, but whether it understands economic objects through their functional relationships. His unexpected example is subjective utility theory: a liter of water acquires economic significance through its circumstances, not its physical properties alone. Applied to money, this perspective makes income the mediation he finds missing in quantity theory. The short polemic offers a concrete encounter with the methodological stakes behind a dispute about monetary value.
A central bank can count its notes precisely and still misread the monetary conditions it faces. In this 1923 article, Richard Kerschagl draws on Austrian experience to ask what makes monetary statistics economically meaningful under inflation. Gold reserves valued at legal parity tell a different story from reserves valued at current exchange rates; separate lending categories can obscure the extent of government financing; a monthly exchange-rate average may describe a quotation that never occurred. His distinctive concern is not simply to collect more figures, but to distinguish the processes those figures measure—and acknowledge what they cannot establish. Readers can discover how choices of valuation, timing, and classification shape the evidence available for monetary policy, especially when depreciation unsettles familiar accounting conventions.
Kerschagl refuses to be filed under either metallism or chartalism, and builds instead a systematic theory of money as a functional concept embedded in an organic, divided-labour economy. Money value is purchasing power: an internal value measured through prices and index numbers, and an external value that is, strictly, not a value but a price. From these foundations he works outward through quantity theory—dissolved, he argues, into many income quantities—money creation tied to commodity bills, cashless payment, inflation as a pathological overissue of monetary tokens, currency stabilisation, centralized foreign-exchange management, and the postwar debates over gold at Genoa. Austria and Hungary after 1918 furnish his central case of inflation joined to a passive balance of payments. Monetary theory, he holds, is the test of any general economic doctrine.
Wir sehen somit, daß der sogenannte Kurswert eigentlich kein Wert ist, sondern ein Preis.
English translation: “We thus see that the so-called exchange-rate value is in fact not a value at all, but a price.”
A common measure of value is easy to assume and difficult to justify. In this 1923 article, Richard Kerschagl places labor-value theory and marginal utility under the same scrutiny: how does either turn qualitatively different goods, activities, and purposes into comparable magnitudes? He credits their achievements without accepting explanatory success as proof of sound foundations. His qualified alternative draws on Othmar Spann’s organic economics, treating goods as interdependent means whose value depends on their fitness for specified ends. Yet this approach faces its own test: can a qualitative ordering support precise comparison or allocate a joint result among its contributing means? The article makes visible the gap between explaining economic choices and justifying the measures used to describe them—a gap Kerschagl leaves productively unresolved.
Stripping the hypertrophy of zeros from a ruined currency, the statute of 20 December 1924 fixed 10,000 depreciated kronen as a single new Schilling. Kerschagl's annotated edition gathers the law, its motives report, his own section-by-section commentary and a sheaf of finance-ministry and National Bank circulars around it. He is at pains to stress what the reform is not: no revaluation, no depreciation—existing notes, deposits and claims keep their worth in a purely arithmetical shift of four decimal places. What it does accomplish is to fix the Schilling's gold value in law, defining the currency's upper limit while the National Bank's exchange policy guards the lower. The volume documents new gold coins, groschen, the long redemption periods protecting old-krone holders, and the daily mechanics of converting a nation's accounts.
Der Vorgang des Ueberganges zur Schillingrechnung ist eine reine Rechenoperation.
English translation: “The process of transition to Schilling accounting is a purely arithmetical operation.”
Method and subject matter mutually determine one another: define the economy as a system of means for ends, as causal regularity, or as functional relation, and you have already chosen a different object. That thesis governs this study of how pure economics can be scientific, appearing here in its third edition of 1948—delayed, its preface records, by the author's arrest, imprisonment, and dismissal from his teaching post. Kerschagl compresses the history of method from the Physiocrats through the classics, the historical school's cry of “back to reality,” and Menger's restoration of exact theory, then turns to its problems: what reality a science can claim, exactness without mathematical calculation, necessity replaced by probability and conditional validity. Methodological monism, he concludes, is a logical utopia; causal and teleological analysis both belong to a science of purposeful economic life.
Wirklichkeit ist ihrem Wesen nach das Wesentliche und nicht das Vollständige.
English translation: “Reality is, in its essence, the essential, not the complete.”
No single economic doctrine, this textbook insists, can honestly be presented as the last word; the older theories remain indispensable for understanding the present. So Kerschagl leads beginners through the whole succession—mercantilism and physiocracy, Smith and Ricardo, the German historical school and the Methodenstreit, utopian and Marxian socialism, the socialization schemes of interwar Vienna, and the Austrian marginal utility school of Menger, Wieser and Böhm-Bawerk with its problem of imputation. Money theory runs from Bodin's early quantity doctrine through the Currency and Banking controversy to chartalism and metallism, and the closing chapters take up Spann's universalism, Cassel, Liefmann, Pesch's Catholic solidarism and Keynes on the end of laissez-faire. Here in its second unchanged edition, it treats the economy as a means to higher human ends, never an end in itself.
Nur wer die Dogmen der Volkswirtschaftslehre kennt, kennt überhaupt „Volkswirtschaftslehre“.
English translation: “Only he who knows the doctrines of economics knows "economics" at all.”