2,793 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
An equation may describe equilibrium without explaining how anyone arrives there. In this 1953 methodological essay, Ludwig von Mises presses that distinction against mathematical economics, asking what numerical precision can establish when people act on uncertain expectations. His examples give the dispute practical substance: observed demand concerns particular markets and periods, while inventory calculations cannot supply an entrepreneur’s judgment about the future. Yet Mises does not reject abstraction itself. He defends an imaginary economy of unchanging, repetitive production as a means of clarifying profit and loss. The resulting tension makes this essay more than a polemic against formal methods: it asks readers to distinguish a model that helps explain action from one that merely represents a state in which adjustment has ceased.
Surveying business-cycle theory at a moment when the field was fragmenting into rival methods, Haberler imposes order with a single 'modest hypothesis': fluctuations in effective demand are the immediate cause of cyclical swings in output and employment. Written in German, the essay insists this is no narrowly monetary claim — Keynesian, Wicksellian, Austrian, and Schumpeterian accounts all fit beneath it — and reformulates the demand-output link through the elasticity of aggregate supply. He treats Hicks's multiplier-accelerator model as the synthesis's high point yet rejects any mechanical accelerator, keeping only the weaker claim that rising income stimulates investment. The essay's sharpest thrust names the Achilles heel of all Keynes-inspired theory: rigid prices and wages, and an aggregation so coarse it hides the structural maladjustments between production and demand.
Es ist den modernen Konstrukteuren mathematischer Modelle vorbehalten geblieben, über alle diese Dinge hinwegzusehen und ein mechanisches Funktionieren des Prinzips anzunehmen.
English translation: “It has been left to the modern constructors of mathematical models to overlook all these matters and to assume a mechanical operation of the principle.”
Sharing language, history, and culture with the Reich did not make Austrian resistance a mere province of German opposition to Hitler—so runs the thesis of this deliberately provisional survey. Prompted by the Moscow Declaration's call for Austria to earn its own liberation, Engel-Janosi roots the movement less in fresh ideology than in the will 'to remain what one had been,' a determination uniting monarchists, Catholics, socialists, communists, and anti-Prussian conservatives against absorption. Against the charge that resistance came only once defeat was obvious, he documents cells forming immediately after March 1938, from Tyrol to Vienna, and redefines resistance as cumulative and practical: aid to prisoners' families, intelligence networks, Wehrmacht cells, ingenious economic sabotage, the '05' organization, and finally the battle for Vienna and the rescue of bridges and art treasures from last-ditch destruction.
Auch in Österreich wurde die Saat der politischen und geistigen Erneuerung mit Blut getränkt; wir hoffen, daß sie in diesem Boden umso kräftiger gedeihen werde.
English translation: “In Austria too the seed of political and spiritual renewal was watered with blood; we hope that in this soil it will flourish all the more vigorously.”
Social scientists study a world that people have already interpreted: a posted letter presupposes expectations about strangers, institutions, and what others will do next. In this article, Alfred Schütz asks how objective explanation can remain faithful to such everyday meanings. Bringing phenomenology to the study of action, he distinguishes the outcomes people seek from the past experiences that shape their projects, and practical understanding from the detached observer’s models. His fictional model actors sharpen the central tension: their perfect rationality belongs to the scientist’s construction, not necessarily to living people. Readers can discover both why abstraction is indispensable and what constrains it—an explanation of human action must remain intelligible in relation to the common-sense world it seeks to explain.
When the textbooks of Hansen and Schneider reduced the quantity theory of money to the crude claim that prices simply track the money stock, Amonn set out to show they were attacking a straw man no serious theorist had ever held. Tracing the doctrine from Bodin and Hume through Mill and Fisher, he recasts it not as a mechanistic identity but as the application of ordinary supply-and-demand value theory to the special case of money, whose demand and supply enter as simple quantities rather than price-quantity functions. He defends Fisher's equation of exchange against the charge of empty tautology, distinguishes the money actually offered on the market from the total stock, and closes by likening the quantity-theory law to the law of free fall: never perfectly realized, yet valid when other factors are accounted for.
Man wird selbst in der ältesten geldtheoretischen Literatur vergeblich nach einer derart primitiven Fassung der Quantitätstheorie suchen.
English translation: “Even in the oldest monetary-theoretical literature one will search in vain for so primitive a formulation of the quantity theory.”
Reviewing Hannah Arendt's book of the same name, Voegelin reads totalitarianism as the symptom of a putrefaction in Western culture, a cadaveric poison scattering its pathogens through the body of humanity. He praises her eye for the concrete, above all her account of the 'superfluous' human beings left when national societies disintegrate, yet he pushes her origins backward and inward. The deeper source is not imperialism or bureaucracy but the spiritual disease of agnosticism and an immanentist faith that would manufacture salvation within history. His sharpest objection targets the ambition to transform human nature, which he calls a contradiction in terms: to meddle with the nature of a thing is to destroy it. The crisis, finally, is religious, a revolt against the limits of human nature and against transcendence itself.
Die wahre Trennlinie in der gegenwärtigen Krise verläuft nicht zwischen Liberalen und Totalitären, sondern zwischen den religiösen und philosophischen Transzendentalisten auf der einen Seite und den liberalen und totalitären Immanentisten auf der anderen.
English translation: “The true dividing line in the present crisis does not run between liberals and totalitarians, but between the religious and philosophical transcendentalists on the one side and the liberal and totalitarian immanentists on the other.”
May an economist honorably use a theory he does not fully believe? Shackle answers that the alternative would abolish the discipline, since every usable theory remains partial, contestable, and interesting precisely because it is not final knowledge. Sincerity thus becomes disciplined awareness of a theory's limits rather than abstention from theory. The essay runs a sequence of tests—on the arbitrary boundaries that wall economics off from psychology and politics, on the incompatible pictures rival abstractions paint, on equilibrium as a mechanical borrowing, on econometrics and its dangerous phrase 'incomplete information.' Because its subject matter learns, imagines, and invents, economics can never treat fitted equations as eternal truths, and its practitioners, Shackle urges, should form an open craft rather than a guarded mystery.
Economics is not physics, it is psychics, the study of men with all their capacity for learning and experimenting and inventing and imagining.
Can communication explain how a shared social world arises if communicating already requires shared signs and reciprocal understanding? This difficulty sharpens Alfred Schütz’s review of Husserl’s Ideas II, first published in 1953 and presented here in its 1970 republication. Reading from the standpoint of the social sciences, Schütz follows Husserl’s movement from bodily perception to the meaningful environments in which people act, interpret motives, and understand one another. He values the accounts of embodiment and habitual experience without smoothing over the manuscripts’ unresolved tensions. His criticism locates a precise explanatory gap: apprehending another person does not yet explain mutual understanding, and communicating individuals do not automatically constitute a collective subject. The review shows both what phenomenology offers social inquiry and where its account of social relations still needs argument.
Fear built cathedrals and greed built banking houses: across Brooks Adams's Law of Civilisation and Decay runs a single contest between the imaginative type—warrior, saint, priest—and the economic type of merchant, usurer, and financier. Engel-Janosi rescues this neglected American philosophy of history, written before Spengler and Toynbee, from the oblivion it met in optimistic America, reconstructing Adams's formation through the family inheritance, Harvard, Darwin, Spencer, and Guizot. Adams's narrative runs from Rome and Byzantium through the Crusades, Venice, the Reformation, England, and India to modern finance, everywhere charting centralization and the triumph of money power. Engel-Janosi finds the determinism crude beside Max Weber, yet preserves the severity of Adams's question: what governs civilization once belief in progress has collapsed?
Der Titel des geschichtlichen Hauptwerks von Brooks ist Beweis an sich: The Law of Civilisation and Decay.
English translation: “The title of Brooks's principal historical work is proof in itself: The Law of Civilisation and Decay.”
Broader education, stronger professional preparation, shorter degrees: Richard Kerschagl’s 1953 pamphlet asks which promises of Austrian university reform can actually coexist. Drawing on economics and experience of Austrian, British, and American universities, he insists that educational ambitions require staffing, funding, and credible qualifications. Small-group discussion and simulated ministries, businesses, and courts interest him as teaching methods—but not as cost-free improvements. Student hardship, he argues, calls for financial support rather than reduced requirements. His openness to pedagogical experiment sits alongside strict boundaries around admission and academic credentials. Particularly revealing is his treatment of degree reform: a qualification below the doctorate changes little if public employers still demand doctorates. The pamphlet makes university reform a concrete negotiation between educational purposes, institutional resources, and graduates’ occupational standing.
By the mid-1950s managed paper money, deficit spending, and Keynesian full-employment policy had convinced most observers that metallic money was a relic. Mises answers that fiat currency can never be a permanent order, because its stimulus depends on surprise and delay: once prices and wages catch up, the boom dies, and to prolong it governments must accelerate depreciation until the public flees cash for real values. The case for gold, he insists, is not reverence for metal but distrust of political discretion over purchasing power—a supply fixed by nature rather than pressure groups. He rebuts the balance-of-payments objection, recalls the Continental Currency and other inflations, and concludes that restoring gold depends less on mines or conferences than on surrendering the belief that prosperity can be printed.
Most people take it for granted that the world will never return to the gold standard.
No final classification of taxes is possible, Amonn concedes at the outset, because real tax systems are the residue of historically uneven practice. What follows is a concise study aid to the special theory of taxation, tracing each levy—land, building, trade, capital-rent, labour, income, wealth, inheritance, consumption, and turnover taxes—through its object, assessment base, and above all its Überwälzung, the shifting and incidence that determine who truly bears the burden. He distinguishes objective yield taxes from the subjective income tax geared to ability to pay, judges the old yield taxes fit as principal taxes only in economically backward countries, and extends the analysis to public credit, the structure and conversion of state debt, and the fiscal equalization between a federation and its member states.
Eine Zwangsanleihe vereinigt die Nachteile sowohl einer Anleihe wie einer Steuer, ohne die Vorteile einer Anleihe bzw. die Vorteile einer Steuer zu bieten.
English translation: “A forced loan combines the disadvantages of both a loan and a tax without offering the advantages of either a loan or a tax.”