1,549 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
How could two thinkers arrive at nearly identical ideas while only one founded a science? Feilbogen builds his whole inquiry on that contrast between Adam Smith and Turgot, Smith's most advanced predecessor, arguing that the practical individualism usually blamed on Smith was in fact stated more radically by the Frenchman—that so-called Smithianism is a moderated Turgotism. Against reducing the Wealth of Nations to laissez-faire, he insists its organizing principle is labor, not freedom or egoism, and that Smith's liberty is social and conditional rather than an absolute natural right. Drawing on Menger, Roscher, and Hasbach and applying Mill's method of difference to intellectual history, he locates Smith's true superiority in the transformation of the physiocratic revenu net into the net product of labor.
Die Arbeit rühmen heisst das Volk rühmen; die Arbeit belauschen heisst das Volksleben belauschen.
English translation: “To praise labor is to praise the people; to listen in on labor is to listen in on the life of the people.”
A decade after the Methodenstreit, Feilbogen registers a shift: abstract theory, so often declared dead by the historical school, is undergoing a renaissance in the value and price work of Gossen, Jevons, Menger, Walras, and Clark. This sketch situates the historical school itself historically, as a necessary phase whose anti-theoretical reflexes are now spent, and argues for the mutual control of induction and deduction rather than the victory of either. It weighs the growing use of mathematics while warning against false precision in measuring pleasure and value, defends marginal utility against Lexis, and faults Jevons for neglecting entrepreneurial profit—an omission, Feilbogen suggests, that left theoretical openings for socialist doctrines of surplus value and crisis.
Auf die Thatsache der Werthschätzung allein kann nur eine Statik, nie eine Dynamik der Volkswirthschaft gegründet werden.
English translation: “Upon the fact of valuation alone only a statics, never a dynamics, of the national economy can be founded.”
Paris was said to offer little to the social sciences; Feilbogen replies by mapping a landscape crowded with rival schools. He tracks liberal individualism across three generations—Passy, Molinari, Levasseur, and then the systematic Leroy-Beaulieu—and the socialism that Guesde and Lafargue imported from German Marxism before it fractured into reformism and revolutionary syndicalism. Georges Sorel draws the sharpest scrutiny as the theorist of violence and the general strike, whose cult of myth the author judges barbarizing and historically naive. Between the extremes stand the mediating currents—academic economics, the Le Play school, Catholic social thought, Durkheim's sociology, and above all Léon Bourgeois's solidarism, which grounds each individual's debt to society in a quasi-contract while preserving liberty and property.
Ein Mythos ist ein Volksmotiv. Er braucht nicht klar, er braucht nicht wahr zu sein, wenn er nur begeistert.
English translation: “A myth is a popular motive force. It need not be clear, it need not be true, so long as it inspires.”
Solidarity begins as a term of Roman law—liability in solidum, where co-debtors are bound one for all and all for one—and Feilbogen follows its migration through Say, Bastiat, Spencer, and Comte into the social philosophy of Léon Bourgeois. Written for Wilhelm Jerusalem's sixtieth-birthday Festschrift, this essay reconstructs Bourgeois's attempt to found moral obligation without religious sanction: the advantaged individual owes a social debt for the language, tools, and inherited civilization he receives, an obligation recast not as Rousseau's literal contract but as a quasi-contract among co-heirs. Feilbogen stages the French Academy's rebuttal—d'Eichthal, Leroy-Beaulieu, Tarde, Boutroux—that the debt is legally indeterminate and might license the plundering of the capable, then replies by bounding the claim to genuine helplessness and surplus capacity.
Der individualistische Sozialist und der sozialistische Individualist fühlen, daß nur noch eine Wand »dünn wie Papier« sie trennt.
English translation: “The individualist socialist and the socialist individualist feel that only a wall "thin as paper" still separates them.”