2,793 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
A crowd need not be large, and a population sharing the same opinions need not be a crowd. In this 1926 article, Wilhelm Vleugels makes these distinctions the basis of a critical history of crowd theory. Against expansive uses of “Masse,” he identifies a temporary relationship sustained by physical presence and reciprocal influence through voices, expressions, and gestures. His reassessment of Le Bon credits Sighele and Tarde with insights often attributed to their more celebrated successor, while distinguishing psychological transformation from the fiction of a separate collective mind. The stakes are concrete: claims about assembled crowds cannot simply be transferred to newspaper readers, urban populations, or organized institutions. Readers can discover how apparently minor choices of terminology shape explanations of collective conduct—and license unwarranted political judgments.
A ship’s drinking-water supply poses a precise problem for value theory: if stores and remaining needs decline together, does the marginal utility of a tonne remain unchanged? Wilhelm Vleugels uses this example to scrutinize Friedrich Wieser’s rules for valuing stocks, distinguishing successful household planning from an adequate calculation of total value. His objection turns on what a withdrawal would actually cost: halfway through a voyage, surrendering a tonne sacrifices different satisfactions than it would at departure. Against the prospect of reconciling Wieser with Böhm-Bawerk, Vleugels shows why the unit measured and the period of consumption matter. The article gives readers a concrete way to distinguish equal daily benefits from the changing value of a fixed quantity removed from a dwindling supply.
An account of equilibrium prices is not yet an explanation of how prices form. This distinction anchors Wilhelm Vleugels’s 1931 defence of subjective value theory. He grants that economists can describe price interdependence without invoking value, but argues that explaining price movements requires the valuations of people buying, selling, and choosing. His distinctive strategy is to examine whether declared opponents actually abandon those valuations: Cassel’s scarcity principle and Gottl’s alternative vocabulary, he contends, retain what they appear to reject. The essay offers a concrete test for theoretical disagreement—does a new terminology change the explanation, or merely rename its working concepts? Readers can discover both the explanatory role Vleugels assigns to subjective value and his reasons for denying that numerical examples require the measurement of feelings.
No stable middle ground exists between a free economy and a fully controlled one — that is the verdict Vleugels reaches after examining the neglected theory of officially bound prices. Following Mises, he separates Ordnungstaxen, which merely track competitive prices and disturb little, from echte Taxen, genuine controls set below them, and shows how the latter set off a chain reaction. A maximum price below the market cuts supply, diverts goods elsewhere, and forces controls onto substitutes, then onto factors of production and wages, until — invoking Wieser's notion of production relatedness — the whole price structure must be bound together. Neither an enduring order nor a gentle bridge to socialism, genuine price-fixing emerges here as a primitive interventionist measure that harms the very people it means to protect.
Ebensowenig wie ein ausgebautes Taxsystem als Endzustand der Volkswirtschaft denkbar wäre, ebensowenig kommt es praktisch auch als Anfangszustand zur Überleitung in eine sozialistische Wirtschaft in Frage.
English translation: “Just as a fully developed system of price fixings is inconceivable as the terminal state of an economy, so too is it practically out of the question as an initial state for the transition into a socialist economy.”