2,793 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Modern dictatorship is not rule by a clique, a bureaucracy, or a defensive capitalist class; it arises, Lederer argues, when a society loses the classes, parties, associations, and publics through which individuals become politically articulate. What remains is an amorphous mass, available for emotional mobilization, crystallized around a leader and held together by propaganda that mimics argument while severing it from truth. Tracing d'Annunzio at Fiume, Italian Fascism, and the SA's conquest of the German street, he presents fascism as the destruction of society itself rather than its capture. His warning against the classless society defends not hierarchy but stratification, the plural conflict on which freedom depends. Written in American exile and read here in Angela Kornberger's German rendering of the 1940 English original, State of the Masses, it stands among the first emigre theories of totalitarianism.
Der totalitäre Staat ist der Staat der Massen.
English translation: “The totalitarian state is the state of the masses.”
In the years before Sedan, three courts negotiated in secret over an alliance that never came, and over Rome, the one prize Italy would risk everything to seize. This tightly documented study reconstructs the Franco-Austro-Italian talks of 1869-70, in which Beust maneuvered to restore Austria's German standing, Napoleon III bargained from illness and decline, and Victor Emmanuel's envoys tied every commitment to the evacuation of the Papal States. Engel-Janosi shows Italy willing to stake Trentino, Nizza, and the Isonzo frontier on that single question, while French troops still guarded Pius IX and Antonelli's Vatican refused all compromise. When war and the fall of the Empire dissolved the last ambiguous promises, Italian troops entered Rome in September 1870, and Europe, he notes, remained strikingly unmoved by so momentous a rupture.
Die römische Frage aufzuwerfen hatten weder Paris noch Wien ein Interesse.
English translation: “Neither Paris nor Vienna had any interest in raising the Roman question.”
Man, unlike the instinct-bound animal, provides for life through willed and creative action, and so, this treatise contends, economics must take a teleological rather than a merely causal form. First published under German occupation in 1940, pointedly without the ideological genuflections the Reich required, and presented here in Ivo Moravcik's English translation of the Czech Národní hospodářství, it builds outward from the principle of economising through households and enterprises, the three markets of goods, capital and labour, money and international exchange, to a searching comparison of individualist, cooperative and solidarist systems. Pure solidarism, Engliš holds, degenerates when self-interested men give little and take much; nations therefore settle for a partial solidarism that corrects capitalism through taxation, social policy and, at its outer limit, the controlled economy.
The practical man acts purposively, and we therefore comprehend his actions in terms of the relationship of finality (teleologically).
Social scientists study a world that its inhabitants already interpret: tools, gestures and institutions carry meanings before they become objects of research. In this essay, represented by the German manuscript version with an attached January 1939 draft, Alfred Schütz asks how scientific explanation can transform those meanings without losing its footing in everyday experience. He draws on Husserl’s phenomenology while distinguishing the social sciences’ concern with relations among people from the transcendental problem of how another self is constituted. His engagement with Max Weber makes the methodological stakes concrete: the economic actor and legal subject are useful constructions, not people encountered in life. Readers can trace why ideal types are necessary—and why, for Schütz, mistaking them for reality undermines the understanding they enable.
Market socialism arrived as a concession: Lange, Taylor, and Dickinson would keep state ownership yet let a central board set producer-good prices, instruct managers to equate marginal cost with price, and revise figures by trial and error as shortages and surpluses appeared. Hayek treats the maneuver as a mistaking of a static equilibrium model for a living process. Real economic life is ceaseless change—local scarcities, new methods, altered demand, particular machines and contracts—and by the time reports reach the authority and fresh prices issue, the relevant conditions have moved. His socialist manager, forbidden to undercut, speculate, or bid resources away, becomes a rule-following functionary who innovates only by persuading his superiors in advance, while central control of investment quietly restores the planning it claimed to escape.
If this will not lead to the worst forms of bureaucracy, I do not know what will.
Grant the planners their most ingenious model, and the calculation problem still bites—such is Hayek's verdict on competitive socialism in this German essay. Two earlier chapters of the debate may be closed, he allows: calculation in kind, and the fantasy of solving equilibrium's equations. The third, advanced by Oskar Lange, Fred Taylor, and H. D. Dickinson, keeps consumer choice and marginal-cost rules for managers while handing the pricing of producer goods to a central board that adjusts by trial and error. Hayek's objection turns on speed and knowledge: administered prices lag the daily flux of local conditions, made-to-order capital goods resist listing, and without free entry no cheaper method can underbid an incumbent. What survives is only quasi-competition—and, once investment is centrally directed, a standing threat to freedom.
Mit anderen Worten, wenn man wirklich alle diese Gleichungen wissen könnte, so wäre das einzige Mittel, das den menschlichen Kräften zu ihrer Lösung zur Verfügung stünde, die praktische Lösung zu beobachten, die der Markt vornimmt.
English translation: “In other words, even if one really could know all these equations, the only means available to human powers for their solution would be to observe the practical solution that the market carries out.”
American tariff policy cannot be read off a welfare diagram, this 1940 address insists: protection in the United States preceded the republic itself and grew inseparable from the young nation's drive to make its independence economically real, in a world still organized by empire and war. Schumpeter treats the tariff as a historical institution rather than a technical deviation from free trade, and presents America as an unusually strong case for the Hamilton–List infant-industry argument — a continental market and natural wealth muting protection's usual distortions while it hastened industries likely to arise anyway. He concedes the standing objections, and the high-cost dependents such as wool and sugar, yet concludes that in a mercantilist, conflict-prone world protection's value as a shield for an established industrial order remains as strong as ever.
Protection—or non-intercourse acts and so on—then was simply the economic complement of political independence or of the will to buttress that independence.
Why are peaceable peoples so thoroughly organized for war? Rappard, invited by A. Lawrence Lowell to lecture as a second war broke out, sets that paradox against the wreckage of the first peace. He follows the Wilsonian ideal of organized peace from the Fourteen Points into the Covenant's three great instruments—arbitration, collective security under Articles 10 and 16, and disarmament—and charts their erosion across the Geneva Protocol, Locarno, the Kellogg-Briand Pact, and the Disarmament Conference that Germany abandoned in 1933. The League could judge, he argues, but not police; the Aaland Islands were peacefully settled while Abyssinia was left to conquest. Behind each failure stands American abstention and, in Pascal's phrase, a justice never armed with force. His one remaining hope is federation.
Would Marshall's message fade like Mill's or Smith's? This semi-centennial appraisal, read here in G. Bombach's German translation, answers with a deliberate doubleness: Marshall's specific tools, methods, and results are no longer ours — obsolete much as older physics was superseded — yet his influence endures because he built research instruments rather than a closed system. Schumpeter reconstructs the originality behind the Principles: partial equilibrium chosen over Walrasian generality, and the apparatus of elasticity, quasi-rent, consumer surplus, internal and external economies, and the representative firm. He argues that Marshall understated his own debt to mathematics, traces his paternity of imperfect-competition theory through Sraffa and Joan Robinson, and credits him with designing an economics open enough to be revised — and measured — by the discipline that followed.
Seine Vorstellung vom Wirtschaftsablauf, seine Methoden und seine Ergebnisse sind nicht mehr die unsrigen.
English translation: “His conception of the economic process, his methods, and his results are no longer ours.”
One God in heaven, one lord on earth: the Mongol letters and edicts of 1245–1255 turned that cosmic analogy into a working juridical doctrine of world conquest. Voegelin collects and classifies the documents carried between the papal and French courts and the khans—two khan letters, two edicts, two commanders' letters—reconstructing their preambles after Pelliot and reading them as formal legal instruments rather than mere barbarian arrogance. The empire they proclaim is an imperium mundi in statu nascendi, a world-empire-in-the-making in which every ruler, upon contact, must submit and enter as vassal or be destroyed as rebel. What lifts the study above orientalist antiquarianism is Voegelin's closing move, comparing the Mongols' sacral literalism—killing and conquest proclaimed as divine judgment—to the peace rhetoric of modern communist regimes.
Das Opfer der Aggression ist der Aggressor.
English translation: “The victim of aggression is the aggressor.”
Austria's long transformation from the Ottomans' frontier antagonist into their guarantor, the price of holding Russia back from Constantinople, frames this account of how Vienna met the birth of the Greek kingdom. Engel-Janosi weighs Metternich's reluctance, who saw in the war of independence only a rebellion, against King Ludwig of Bavaria's dynastic investment in his son Otto, and gives Prokesch-Osten, Austria's envoy in Athens, the central role: a conservative trying to shore up an independent Greek monarchy amid the rivalry of Britain, France, Russia, and Bavaria. Through the Armansperg and Rudhart ministries, the constitutional revolution of 1843, and the duel of Maurokordatos and Kolettis, the project decays. Austrian passivity, great-power intrigue, Greek factionalism, and Otto's weakness, he concludes, made an independent conservative Greece untenable.
Staaten hat noch niemand geschaffen; sie schaffen sich selbst.
English translation: “No one has ever created states; they create themselves.”
'I am not running a drug store,' Schumpeter told the Economic Club of Detroit in the spring of 1941 — no pills to hand out, only a diagnosis. Wartime defense spending, he warned, could be the catalyst that turned America's excess reserves and government-monopolized gold stock into inflation, no greenbacks required. The deeper argument is constitutional: gold was never essential to money, but like Supreme Courts and constitutions it restrained the freedom of action of government, telling the truth, like a naughty child, about a nation's finances. Planned economies resent exactly that discipline, so gold's old function is gone — though he allows it a narrower postwar life within an Anglo-American convention or bullion standard, if governments will accept limits on their own sovereignty.
Gold has no function, for planned economy has come to stay.