1,549 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Amid the Methodenstreit, with the German historical school pressing its case against abstract theory, Schüller — in a study dedicated to Carl Menger — mounts a point-by-point defense of the classical economists his contemporaries claimed to have surpassed. Brentano's charge that Smith, Say, Ricardo, and Malthus abstracted from culture, class, and locality, that they reduced human motive to naked egoism, that they preached a merely negative laissez-faire: each, Schüller shows by going back to the texts, is a misreading. He rereads the butcher-brewer-baker passage and the invisible hand in their qualifying context, and argues that the historicists, mistaking analytical abstraction for a denial of particulars, lack the theoretical power for genuine analysis and even muddle what the classics had already secured.
Es gilt die Klassiker — Smith, Say, Ricardo, Malthus — gerade in jenen Punkten, in denen sie Gegenstand der heftigsten, und, wie sich herausstellen wird, ganz unberechtigten Angriffe seitens der historischen Schule geworden sind, selbst wieder zum Worte kommen zu lassen.
English translation: “It is important to let the classical economists—Smith, Say, Ricardo, Malthus—speak for themselves once again, precisely on those points on which they have been subjected to the most vehement, and, as will become apparent, wholly unjustified attacks from the historical school.”
Neither doctrinaire free trade nor blanket protection survives Schüller's scrutiny, which rests a rational tariff policy on a fact both camps overlook: within a single country the same good is produced at widely unequal costs, in layers reaching from the most favorable conditions to the marginal ones that fix the price. From this — and from the marginal-utility line that runs through Menger, Wieser, and Zuckerkandl — he derives when imports enrich a nation and when they merely displace home production and depress wages and rents. He weighs foreign 'superiority' against real export capacity, defends measured grain tariffs against Brentano's objections, takes apart Germany's and Russia's excessive duties, and treats commercial treaties as the arena where an import harmful in isolation may be admitted for compensating export concessions. The work carries a dedication to Carl Menger.
Der größte Irrtum jedoch besteht darin, daß die Exportfähigkeit als gleichbedeutend mit der Überlegenheit aufgefaßt wird, während es für die Exportfähigkeit ebenso sehr auf die in der Regel ganz übersehenen Konsumverhältnisse als auf die Produktion ankommt.
English translation: “The greatest error, however, consists in the fact that export capacity is regarded as synonymous with superiority, whereas export capacity depends just as much on consumption conditions—which are usually entirely overlooked—as on production.”
Behind the wartime slogan of 'Mitteleuropa' lay a technical problem of customs schedules, and it is that problem Gratz and Schüller reconstruct: the secret German–Austro-Hungarian negotiations, from 1915 to their burial in the collapse of October 1918, to fuse the two empires into a single closed economic area. Part of the Carnegie Endowment's economic history of the war, the study tracks the bargaining over preferential tariffs, the last Austro-Hungarian Ausgleich, and the Salzburg framework of gradually reduced Zwischenzölle, then widens into the peace settlements at Brest-Litovsk and Bucharest—Ukrainian grain, Romanian oil, the Danube question, the Polish tangle. Throughout, grand design is forced through protectionist compromise: economic union imagined as a bloc to rival the world's larger markets, yet checked at every turn by incompatible agrarian and industrial interests.
Meine Monarchie braucht unbedingt an ihren Grenzen ein freundlich gesinntes Rumänien.
English translation: “My Monarchy absolutely needs a friendly-minded Romania on its borders.”
Because the study of foreign trade sets every part of economic theory in motion, Schüller refuses to reason from abstract 'branches of production' and turns instead to real firms making the same good at different costs, so that imports strike down the high-cost producer while the low-cost one survives. On that footing he rebuilds the free-trade case, reading the comparative-cost doctrine of Ricardo and Mill as tacitly resting on a subjective theory of price, and gauging tariffs by the spread of domestic costs and the degree of foreign superiority. The later chapters turn to postwar currency disorder and the revival of mercantilist reflexes, to cartel dumping and the Brussels Sugar Convention, to the transfer problem of reparations and interstate debt, and to the hard prospects of customs unions among sovereign states.
Von entscheidender Bedeutung ist, daß die Erreichung entsprechender Erleichterungen für die Ausfuhr vorteilhafter ist als die Behinderung der Einfuhr.
English translation: “It is of decisive importance that achieving corresponding facilitations for exports is more advantageous than obstructing imports.”
Empires fall to armies and diplomacy; this study insists that Austria-Hungary fell to exhaustion—'die Tragödie der Erschöpfung,' the cumulative wasting of food, transport, raw materials, manpower, and finance under a long war and blockade. Also written for the Carnegie Endowment's war history, it treats the Habsburg lands as a single economic organism, self-sufficient in bread as a whole yet fatally uneven between its halves, and follows collapse group by group: grain deficits and famine in Vienna, the depletion of copper and iron, the near-elimination of civilian industry, war finance through the Austro-Hungarian Bank, and the inflation that hollowed out the middle class. The apparent vitality of the war economy, the authors argue, only masked the steady consumption of the country's reserves. The wrenching Stürgkh–Tisza correspondence over wartime food closes the volume as its documentary core.
Es war keine echte, sondern eine fiktive Blüte, dem Fieberzustand zu vergleichen, der auf einem der Auszehrung verfallenen Körper die Wangen rötet.
English translation: “It was no genuine but a fictitious flowering, comparable to the feverish state that flushes the cheeks of a body wasting away in consumption.”