2,793 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Rereading Herbert Spencer's The Man Versus the State from the vantage of 1969, Hazlitt recovers a thinker usually dismissed as a laissez-faire relic and finds instead an uncanny prophet of the welfare state. Two surprises drive the essay: how precisely Spencer foresaw coming state encroachments, and how many supposedly modern interventions, from compulsory insurance and nationalized railways to rent control and state education, had already begun by 1884. The engine of decline Spencer named is political momentum, in which each intervention becomes precedent for the next and every failure is read not as a verdict against coercion but as a reason to expand it. Following Spencer, Hazlitt argues that redistribution rests on the hidden premise that earnings are held only by the community's permission. Spencer's coming slavery finds its completed form, he suggests, in Orwell's 1984.
Failure does not destroy faith in the agencies employed, but merely suggests more stringent use of such agencies or wider ramifications of them.
Suppose the molecules in a physics laboratory suddenly began to speak — disputing the textbook account of Brownian motion, offering their own versions of events. Machlup’s parable dramatizes the one methodological difference he thinks genuinely separates social from natural science: the social scientist studies beings who talk, interpret, theorize, and lie about themselves. Rejecting both a wholly separate logic for social inquiry and the claim that no real difference exists, he refines Verstehen into the disciplined construction of models of purpose and belief that must also treat actors’ own testimony as data — data that may mislead. Bankers deny they create credit; businessmen reject profit-maximization; yet economics, he insists, cannot be learned by watching or interviewing, only through abstract constructs of purposeful action.
It is one of the characteristics of the natural sciences that their subjects of investigation do not talk about themselves.
A word that means one thing in Vienna and nearly its opposite in Washington cannot anchor a coherent politics — and liberalism, Machlup argues, has drifted until an American liberal would count as an anti-liberal in Europe. Originating as a Hayek lecture, the essay traces that drift from Lockean individualism through the reinterpretation of freedom as effective power, and dissects two governing confusions: being free to act versus being free from want, and what one may do versus what one can do. Against the slogan that freedom is indivisible he sets a catalogue of some two dozen distinct liberties — economic, political, intellectual, moral — that routinely collide. The genuine liberal, he concludes, ranks freedoms and restricts one only to secure another, and refuses to let welfare be relabeled as liberty.
Food is not liberty, and liberty is not food. Medical care is not liberty, and liberty is not medical care.
Once general-equilibrium theory made real markets look deficient, measuring them against a fictitious world of perfect competition, simultaneous equations, and Pareto-optimality, the old alliance between economic theory and the market collapsed. Lachmann's reconstruction, written for a Hayek volume, defends capitalism not as a static allocation mechanism but as a process of plans, expectations, disappointments, and capital revaluations under uncertainty. Methodological individualism, he argues, is the demand that no explanation of social phenomena satisfy us until it leads back to a human plan; Hayek's compositive method works forward from plans to their compatibility, while Verstehen works backward. Indifference curves smuggle in given tastes and evade how plans are actually made and revised. The Stock Exchange, pricing divergent expectations over existing assets, becomes the institution in which this vision is most visible.
In fact it is hardly an exaggeration to say that without a Stock Exchange there can be no market economy.
The pound was sliding, French reserves draining, and the Group of Ten meeting in emergency session—yet Sennholz reads the 1968-69 turmoil not as a passing squall but as the postwar gold-exchange system nearing collapse. Monetary crisis, his thesis runs, is the international face of domestic inflationism: once de Gaulle decreed wage increases after the strikes of 1968, France had to inflate to make them payable, and rising prices then drove gold and capital abroad. Gold, for Sennholz, is no symbolic reserve but the disciplinary mechanism that exposes monetary mismanagement. He groups Britain, America, and France as inflationary debtors whose liabilities outrun their bullion, and predicts that devaluation or suspension of gold payments will bring runaway inflation and split the Free World into a dollar bloc and a hard-currency gold camp.
After all, gold is the only international money and, like all other economic goods, tends to flow towards areas where it commands greater purchasing power.
Interviewed by Percy Greaves in 1969, amid dollar weakness and gold anxiety in the last years of Bretton Woods, Mises reduces the era's monetary troubles to a single fiscal evasion. Inflation, he insists, is not a mysterious rise of prices but a policy of creating money by fiat to spend beyond taxes and honest borrowing; because new money enters through particular hands, it redistributes purchasing power toward first receivers and strips it from savers, pensioners, and endowed institutions. He overturns the folk image of inflation as the poor debtor's friend—ordinary households are now the creditors, through deposits, bonds, and insurance—and rebuts the balance-of-payments alibi that blames importers and tourists. Sound money, he concludes, is inseparable from limited government, and the gold standard's merit is that officials cannot manufacture it to cover their deficits.
The gold standard did not fail. The governments sabotaged it and still go on sabotaging it.
The label "Austrian School" began as a term of abuse flung by Berlin's Historical School, and only later became a badge of honor. Tracing the movement to Carl Menger's 1871 Grundsatze, Mises argues that Menger's marginal-utility breakthrough owed nothing to any Viennese circle - he likens him to isolated Austrians such as Bolzano, Mendel, and Freud - and that Bohm-Bawerk and Wieser learned from the book rather than at his feet. The heart of the essay is the Methodenstreit, the clash with Gustav Schmoller over whether a theoretical science of human action, distinct from history, could exist at all. Mises reads Germany's rejection of economic theory as politically motivated, a servant of protectionism and Sozialpolitik, and follows Werner Sombart's drift from Schmollerite historicism to open apologetics for Hitler.
Until the end of the Seventies there was no "Austrian School." There was only Carl Menger.
Revolution is not the barricade—that reduction is exactly what Rothbard means to overturn. Taking up Karl Hess's description of libertarianism as revolutionary, he redefines revolution as a long, many-sided process of theorists, writers, organizers, activists, patrons, and institutions, in which street confrontation is only an episodic expression. His historical frame is the classical-liberal tradition of the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries, recast as "classical radical": the force that broke monarchy, feudal privilege, mercantilism, theocracy, and war, and opened modern liberty and prosperity. From La Boétie and the Levellers through Paine, Cobden, the abolitionists, Bastiat, and Molinari, he traces a continuous radical lineage—and then denies socialism the title, calling it a New Toryism that pursues liberty through statist means. The old revolution's unfinished promise, he concludes, is ours to complete.
Only libertarianism is truly radical.
The empiricist picture has the mind beginning with concrete particulars and later distilling abstractions from them; here that order is turned on its head. Sensations, perceptions, and images are not primitive givens but products of classifications the mind already performs, so that abstraction holds causal priority over the concrete it makes perceptible. Ranging across ethology, sensory psychology, skill, and linguistics, and citing Helmholtz, Bartlett, Ryle, Polanyi, and Chomsky, Hayek argues that animals respond to patterns, grammar is obeyed before it is described, and skilled action rests on rules the actor cannot state. A stimulus calls forth dispositions toward whole classes of action, and concrete conduct emerges from many superimposed generic instructions. Some governing rules, he proposes, are better called 'super-conscious' than subconscious, since they shape awareness without ever entering it, and thus condition the very perception they escape.
What I contend, in short, is that the mind must be capable of performing abstract operations in order to be able to perceive particulars, and that this capacity appears long before we can speak of a conscious awareness of particulars.
Framed as a correction of Sir John Hicks, this compact defense restates a capital-theoretic theorem: under full employment, a rise in consumer-goods prices relative to factor prices induces producers to abandon capital-intensive methods for less durable, less labor-saving equipment, so that stronger consumer demand can actually lower certain investment. Hayek carries the argument from real relative prices into monetary theory, contending that credit expansion enters at particular points and sustains an artificial margin favoring longer production processes, an ongoing injection rather than a momentary disequilibrium Hicks could wave away. When the credit inflow stops, capital-goods prices fall while consumer prices keep rising, exposing the boom's unprofitable investments at its upper turning point. A third elucidation answers the objection about borrowing freely at the market rate: rising indebtedness raises lender risk, so successive loans become different, costlier commodities.
The effect I want to consider is that of a change in the prices of the product relative to the prices of the factors, and I shall primarily consider the case in which the former rise while the latter remain unchanged.
Small, literate, European in origin and once counted among Latin America's prosperous nations, Uruguay is Hazlitt's chosen exhibit of a country needlessly ruined by welfare policy. Rather than build a model, this 1969 essay assembles six chronological snapshots from firsthand observers between 1956 and 1969, letting their repetition become the argument: the same deficits, swollen state payrolls, pension claims, strikes, and collapsing peso recur in every report. His central move is to show how a subsidy or pension, once granted, hardens into a "right" that becomes politically impossible to reduce whatever the fiscal crisis. A statistical appendix translates the dossier into monetary collapse, with consumer prices rising 88, then 49, then 136 percent in successive years. Uruguay becomes his universal caution against a welfarism easy to launch and nearly impossible to reverse.
No politician here can hope to get a majority by advocating austerity, harder work, and the sacrifice of even some of the Welfare State features.
A creed may hate the State and still remain alien to liberty—that boundary line drives this New Left-era intervention. Rothbard reverses the anarcho-communist story in which the State creates and guards property; for him the State is property's chief invader, and private property, free markets, profit-and-loss accounting, and material abundance stand or fall together. He grants anarcho-communism only its claimed voluntarism, then undercuts it with the Spanish anarchists' wartime confiscations and penalties for using money. The philosophical core is a defense of individuality against egalitarian communalism; the economic core is Mises's calculation argument, that once money and prices are abolished a complex economy loses the signals telling it where scarce labor and capital are most valued. Against "post-scarcity" fantasy Rothbard insists scarcity endures, closing with Ortega y Gasset on the fragility of civilization.
Civilization is not “just here,” it is not self-supporting. It is artificial.