2,793 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Long before the Austrians gave it a name, the mechanism had been discovered and lost under a dozen labels. This historiographical note traces the doctrine of "forced saving" — how new paper money or bank credit, entering through borrowers, temporarily shifts command over the existing flow of goods, so that rising prices and lagging incomes compel some to consume less while entrepreneurs invest more. Hayek finds the earliest clear statement in Jeremy Bentham's neglected manuscripts on "forced frugality," where monetary issue works like an indirect tax, and follows the thread through Thornton, Malthus, Mill, and Walras to Wicksell's gap between the money and natural rates of interest. Even Keynes, rejecting the label, preserves the problem when he describes investment exceeding saving. Cycle theory, the genealogy suggests, is less an Austrian novelty than a recurrent monetary insight.
Here, as in the above case of forced frugality, national wealth is increased at the expense of national comfort and national justice.
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.”
In this essay, first published in 1932 as Kapitalaufzehrung and here in English translation, Hayek opens what he called an 'economics of decline', the neglected theory of how a society consumes its own capital. His claim is stark: production costs held too high, with wages pushed above equilibrium against rigid money incomes, can make current consumption exceed current output, so that capital is quietly eaten away. The process betrays itself through a shortening of the structure of production, a shift toward quickly finished consumer goods, and a fall in the value of capital equipment before any physical decay shows; depreciation funds go unreinvested and circulating capital becomes unrecoverable. Drawing on Austrian and central European evidence, including Morgenstern's data on Vienna-listed firms, he warns that democratic anti-capitalist majorities may favour levies and public works that devour the very capital they depend on.
What we are confronting here, however, are economic problems towards whose explanation economics has as yet made little direct contribution, even if it offers us the necessary tools for doing so.
Bidding farewell to Bonn in July 1932, Schumpeter set aside politics and policy to ask where economics as a science stands and where it is going. His answer is a sequence of methodological theses: economics must become an ethically indifferent empirical discipline that says what is and what will be rather than preaching from the lectern; its logic differs in no way from the other sciences, so mathematical tools need no apology; and its future lies in uniting facts, statistics, and theory, with Trendanalyse the frontier. He calls practical interest the discipline's crown of thorns, refuses to found a Schumpeter school, and judges Walrasian equilibrium aged when set against concrete industrial reality, yet the animating ethos is discovery against authoritative impossibility.
Das Faszinierende an der Wissenschaft ist im Grunde nur der Spaß, den man hat, wenn man tut, was beste Autoritäten für unmöglich erklären; nur die Jagd nach solchen Gelegenheiten ist etwas wert.
English translation: “What is fascinating about science is at bottom only the fun one has in doing what the best authorities declare to be impossible; only the hunt for such opportunities is worth anything.”
A system of simultaneous equations can establish that prices, quantities, and marginal utilities are mutually compatible; it cannot show how any determinate price came to be. That distinction, between genetic-causal theories, which explain how prices arise, and functional theories, which merely describe correspondences once equilibrium is presupposed, drives this methodological reckoning with mathematical economics. Marching through Cournot's demand function, Jevons's and Walras's equilibrium equations, Pareto's indifference curves, and Cassel's scarcity model, Mayer argues that each mistakes a description of finished relations for an account of their formation, and that Pareto's curves rest on the mere fiction of an experiment. Writing from interwar Vienna in the long shadow of the Methodenstreit, he does not spurn formalization but demands a return to causal inquiry into subjective valuation and its temporal sequence.
Das Problem hat sich damit geändert und nicht nur die Betrachtungsweise.
English translation: “The problem itself has thereby changed, and not merely the point of view.”
Max Weber demanded that sociology understand action through its subjective meaning, but never explained what such meaning is, how it arises in lived experience, or how anyone else could grasp it. First published in 1932, this is the book that supplies the missing foundation. Drawing on Bergson and Husserl, Schütz argues that meaning is no hidden mental substance but an act of self-interpretation: an experience becomes meaningful only when reflection lifts it, already elapsed, out of the stream of inner time. From there he rebuilds the whole edifice, the projected act with its Um-zu and Weil motives, the understanding of others through signs and typifications, and a graded social world reaching from the intimate We of consociates to the anonymous contemporaries, predecessors, and successors whose meanings we can no longer revise. Scientific sociology, he concludes, constructs ideal types that must stay answerable to the actor's own meaning.
Gemeinter Sinn eines Erlebnisses ist nichts anderes als eine Selbstauslegung des Erlebnisses von einem neuen Erleben her.
English translation: “The intended meaning of a lived experience is nothing other than a self-interpretation of that experience from the standpoint of a new experience.”
As the European gold-exchange order broke apart in the early 1930s, states began seizing, centralizing, and rationing foreign means of payment—and Kerschagl sets out to explain, in strictly economic terms, why. Foreign-exchange control (Devisenbewirtschaftung) is treated here not as a currency system but as an emergency bridge forced by the convergence of trade deficits, capital flight, and reserve losses across the trade balance, the payments balance, and what he calls the Währungsbilanz. Its defining move—allocating scarce exchange—is a form of partial planning that inevitably reaches into imports, production, and consumption. Clearing arrangements, priority lists, and blocked accounts follow the same logic of restriction. Controls can buy time, he argues, but cannot themselves restore the equilibrium whose absence created them.
Der Weg zu dauernd gesunden Währungen führt über wirtschaftliche Vernunft.
English translation: “The road to permanently sound currencies leads through economic reason.”
As the Depression hardened public opinion into a verdict, capitalism has failed and only planned economy or socialism remains, Mises answers that the verdict mistakes its object. What collapsed was not liberal capitalism but decades of anti-capitalist policy: nationalization, municipal enterprise, tariffs, union privilege, unemployment relief, social insurance, inflation, militarism. Economics, he argues, discovered market laws no coercive power can override, and liberalism is simply the practical application of that discovery, not a class morality; the isolated intervention cannot reach its aim and produces effects its own authors never wanted. Even businessmen turned interventionist prove only that they too absorb their age's ideas, as success comes to hinge on connections rather than serving consumers well and cheaply. The crisis, he concludes, belongs to interventionism: not Bastiat but Marx and Schmoller failed.
Gegen Logik setzten sie Ethik, gegen Theorie Ressentiment, gegen Argumente den Hinweis auf den Willen des Staates.
English translation: “Against logic they set ethics, against theory resentment, against arguments the appeal to the will of the state.”
Half memoir and half post-mortem, this three-part volume moves from Sieghart's own rise through the Ministerratspräsidium under Koerber, Gautsch, and Beck to a structural anatomy of the empire that employed him. Writing in 1932, after Saint-Germain had already dismembered the monarchy, he insists that its unresolved national problems survived in the successor states, and that the Danube basin's true foundation was an economic community of small peoples that dualism had corroded. He portrays universal suffrage as a state-preserving clamp, defends the reformers against the militarism of Conrad von Hötzendorf, and rejects the determinist verdict—associated here with Ludwig Mises—that internal decay doomed the realm: only a world war of unprecedented scale, he argues, could destroy it.
Von allen Einrichtungen der Monarchie war der Dualismus, wie er sich herausgebildet hatte, die unseligste!
English translation: “Of all the institutions of the Monarchy, Dualism, as it had developed, was the most calamitous!”
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.