3,673 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Every human gathering, this essay argues, acquires structure almost at once: amorphous mass exists only in the first instant before attractions, repulsions, subgroups, and leaders crystallize out of it. Thurnwald names the winnowing of leaders Siebung and separates it sharply from biological selection—masses actively choose whom to follow—then shows why institutional leadership, fixed in statutes, offices, and inheritance, must sooner or later collide with the natural kind. Sociation itself he treats as process and complementarity: persons associate because they need and complete one another, from sex and age in the family to the division of labor in a workshop. He classifies its forms as Masse, Ballung, and Kristallisation, argues that organizations gain a life of their own by depersonalizing relations, and closes on the conviction that neither individual nor mass alone explains any social form.
Das Führertum ist eine Komplementärerscheinung der Masse. Masse braucht Führertum, der Führer Masse.
English translation: “Leadership is a complementary phenomenon of the mass. The mass needs leadership, the leader needs a mass.”
A professed belief need not disclose everything its adherents know. In this brief review of R. F. Fortune’s Sorcerers of Dobu, Richard Thurnwald makes that distinction the basis of his own intervention in the debate over Trobriand beliefs about procreation. He argues that restrictions on childbirth outside marriage imply practical knowledge of physical causation, even where an accepted doctrine disavows it. His inference is more than an endorsement of Fortune: it challenges the treatment of such beliefs as remnants of primitive ignorance. Alongside this argument, Thurnwald values Fortune’s concrete accounts of property, stealing, and matrilineal kinship. The review offers a compact encounter with his preference for observed conduct over speculation—and with the interpretive leap by which he turns ethnographic particulars into a claim about socially sanctioned dogma.
Both the narrative of unbroken progress and the fashionable theory of cultural cycles come under fire here as ego-centered, value-laden, and half-mystical—the notion of peoples and states ageing through youth, maturity, and decline among them. What can actually be compared across cultures, Thurnwald argues, is only material culture and knowledge: tools, procedures, medicine, natural science, which diffuse far more readily than law, morals, or religion, as Japan's selective adoption of European technology shows. He reconstructs apparent cycles from the recurring encounter of cattle pastoralists and hoe-farmers—exchange, tribute, warfare, sacred kingship, bureaucracy, dynastic collapse—as situational patterns rather than mystical recurrence, drawing analogies from Central Africa to Egypt, Rome, and tsarist Russia. Development and cycle, he concludes, can be clarified only through value-free socio-psychological analysis of situation-types and chains of effect, never through subjective valuation.
Während rückschauend — je nach unseren Kenntnissen der technischen und Wissensgeschichte —, die verzweigten Linien des Aufspeicherungsvorgangs verfolgt werden können, ist es vorausblickend nicht möglich, die entscheidende Bewegungsrichtung herauszufinden.
English translation: “While in retrospect—depending on our knowledge of technical and intellectual history—the branching lines of the accumulation process can be traced, prospectively it is not possible to discern the decisive direction of movement.”
Karl Bücher's picture of an original closed household economy, sealed off from trade, is the adversary this third volume keeps returning to; Thurnwald rejects it as a construction unsupported by ethnography or history. Reciprocal giving, barter, ceremonial exchange, and market fairs, he shows, reach down to hunters and gatherers; the Trobriand Kula circulates armrings and necklaces as prestige rather than property, while Northwest Coast potlatch turns wealth into power through ceremonial dispersal, not hoarding. He coins Naturkapital for the self-renewing capital of seed and herds in moneyless economies, traces money from preferred exchange objects to cowries and cattle, and reads women and slaves as the earliest concentrated labor capital. Against Durkheim and Bücher he denies that economic development reduces to a growing division of labor, calling economic activity a psychically and socially conditioned process.
Was wir Wirtschaft nennen, kommt erst durch die Organisierung der Menschen eines bestimmten technischen Könnens zustande.
English translation: “What we call economy comes about only through the organization of people possessing a certain technical capability.”
The evolutionary set-pieces of ethnology are dismantled one by one in this second volume: primordial promiscuity and group marriage, read by Morgan and MacLennan out of Hawaiian kin-terms, and bride capture as an original form of marriage, which Thurnwald re-explains as staged ritual resistance rather than real abduction. Family, kinship, and the men's houses, initiations, and secret societies that overlay them are his subject. Mother-right and father-right, he insists, almost never appear in pure logical form; classificatory kinship sorts people by social obligation, not genealogical degree. Marriage orders teem with positive prescriptions, not only prohibitions, and what Europeans call incest is often better named social disgrace. Milk kinship and blood brotherhood extend the same logic, binding strangers into kin through the magical power of substance.
Es gibt ja keinen Menschen an sich, sondern nur männliche oder weibliche, junge oder alte.
English translation: “There is no such thing as a human being in the abstract, but only male or female, young or old ones.”
Profit-seeking, this comparative survey insists, is no natural law of economic life but a peculiarity of modern society. Ranging across Melanesia, Micronesia, East Africa, Sumer and archaic Babylon, Thurnwald treats economics not as mere food-getting but as a social system woven from household reciprocity, rank obligation, ritual, and the conservative force of tradition. He dismantles the tidy evolutionary sequence of hunting, pastoralism and agriculture, follows Edward Hahn in separating hoe from plough cultivation, and reads kula exchange, potlatch display, wergeld and temple redistribution as forms in which wealth circulates for prestige rather than gain. Against Max Weber he derives the Babylonian governor's estate from earlier temple administration, and against Carl Bücher he denies the self-sufficient manor. Capital first appears, he argues, in herds and standing crops.
A characteristic feature of primitive economics is the absence of any desire to make profits either from production or exchange.
A chief may retain his title while becoming a supervised tax collector; a wage earner may marry without drawing on relatives’ livestock. These shifts anchor Richard Thurnwald’s account of social transformation in Tanganyika, based on a ten-month expedition. His 1932 article explores a contradiction in colonial indirect rule: policies intended to preserve existing institutions could undermine them by requiring taxes paid in money. Connecting household obligations with employment and political authority, Thurnwald argues that change travels through relationships administrators cannot readily control. His comparative observations resist a single trajectory of African adaptation, while his judgments about consumption, gender, and education bear the assumptions of his colonial setting. Readers can examine both his analysis of unintended consequences and the limits of the perspective through which he understood them.
When one people takes over the tools, rites, and ideas of another, what is adopted rarely keeps its old function. Acculturation, Thurnwald argues here, is a dynamic socio-psychological process rather than a mechanical transfer, driven by individual learning, imitation, and leadership, and passing through distinct phases: initial suspicion, eager imitation, the fear of losing one's identity, and eventual recovery or self-assertion. He distinguishes selective, rejective, eliminative, and transformative responses, drawing on New Guinea, Africa, Japan's reopening, Europe, and Indigenous North America, and stresses that what passes between peoples depends on the receiving culture's own traditions. Wars, migrations, and political upheavals, he concludes, are only the visible climaxes of these deeper and slower adaptations in the life of cultures.
The acquisition of any civilizatory accomplishment is not limited to the act of acceptance like the moving of an object from one case in a museum to another.
Medicine can name and treat the body's diseases; the science of society, by contrast, has barely learned to diagnose the disorders of collective life. Rejecting cheap analogies from biology and mechanics and the abstractions of German philosophical sociology, Thurnwald makes personality the "atom" of social analysis, with character understood as a dynamic product of biological potential and environmental fate. From this unit he builds family, male associations, leadership, and the problem of fitting the right man to the right place through automatic or planned social sifting. American Prohibition serves as his cautionary case of law enacted without regard to social psychology, breeding illegal trade and corruption; race questions in Hawaii and Fiji become social-psychological problems, and Germany, he argues, needs social inventions to match its technical ones.
Wir werden vielfach irregeführt von dem Gedanken, daß Verordnungen, Gesetze, Vorschriften ausreichen, das Gesellungsleben zu regulieren.
English translation: “We are frequently misled by the notion that ordinances, laws, and prescriptions suffice to regulate communal life.”
Mobility need not mean aimless wandering: in Richard Thurnwald’s encyclopedia article “Nomads,” camps and grazing circuits follow food supplies, technical capacities, and customary territorial rights. This 1937 republication of the 1933 entry asks how different mobile livelihoods shape property and authority. Its sharpest contrast is between hunters’ difficulty in storing surplus and herders’ possession of wealth that can move with them. Thurnwald then traces how encounters between pastoralists and cultivators may turn differences in subsistence into political domination and social rank. Readers can discover both an account of movement as organized social life and the assumptions of a comparative ethnology that links livelihood, gender relations, and state formation through broad, sometimes contestable generalizations.
No law exists in the abstract, only particular styles of law thrown up by interlocking social conditions: so runs the thesis of this fifth volume of Thurnwald's ethno-sociology of human society. Surveying blood revenge, property, contract, suretyship, inheritance, crime, composition, outlawry, asylum, punishment, and the evidentiary machinery of oath, ordeal, and duel, he locates the psychological root of justice in reciprocity, reading vengeance, compensation, and Wergeld as balanced returns. Blood revenge among sovereign kin groups becomes the seedbed of criminal law, giving way to objective justice only when an authority stands above the parties. Contract moves from symbolic real acts through curse-bound words to consensual agreement under writing and the state. Law's whole development, he concludes, is an act of human self-domestication.
Das primitive Recht kennt keine anderen Beweismittel als Eid, Fluch und Gottesurteil.
English translation: “Primitive law knows no other means of proof than oath, curse, and ordeal.”
In Buin, shell currency could secure pigs, pigs could furnish feasts, and feasts could turn wealth into standing. Richard C. Thurnwald’s 1934 article follows these connections to ask how calculation and profit operate within relationships of kinship, dependence, and reciprocal obligation. Drawing on fieldwork in Bougainville and comparison with his earlier observations, he describes chiefs who lend valuables, households reluctant to slaughter their own pigs, and wealthy men whose exchange skills challenge hereditary rank. The tension is concrete: circulation sustains authority but also gives others the means to contest it. His account lets readers examine the transactions behind his proposed pig-based standard of value, while distinguishing those observations from his more conjectural explanations of currency’s origins and social development.