1,549 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Schwiedland’s Der Handel defines trade not by the social type of the merchant but by an economic function: acquisition for resale. Its point of departure is the formula:
Handel ist der Erwerb von Gütern zum Zweck ihrer Wiederveräußerung. English translation: Trade is the acquisition of goods for the purpose of their resale.
Felix Somary’s 1918 work is a policy-technical treatise on executing a one-time capital levy for the German Reich after the war. It begins from the unprecedented scale of a possible levy of a fifth or quarter of national wealth, notes objections to its incidence and administrative danger, and then deliberately narrows the question to practicable financial construction.
Pribram’s 1918 essay argues that the war has not abolished capitalism but has destroyed the self-evidence of liberal economic policy. Economic policy has no autonomous end: it follows from the state’s answer to whether the individual is an end in himself or subordinate to a higher collective purpose. The work’s three movements—prewar liberalism, wartime compulsion, and postwar transition—trace the emergence of that new purpose.
Schumpeter’s wartime essay asks whether the fiscal consequences of the World War force a transition beyond the capitalist “tax state.” Its target is the easy claim that war has proved either capitalism or the state bankrupt. Against slogans, Schumpeter gives “crisis” a strict sociological meaning: not a bad budget, but the immanent failure of a whole social form. If the tax state truly failed, the modern state, private economy, class structure, and cultural “Habitus” would all be transformed.
Markus Ettinger’s wartime pamphlet argues that the fiscal crisis of the coming peace cannot be solved by a crude, one-time capital levy. Such a policy would mistake inflationary paper valuations for real wealth, drain productive funds from firms, and intensify capitalist concentration. Against this, Ettinger proposes a more discriminating program: tax the “virtual” increase of wealth created by war conditions and finance the transition through a general compulsory loan.
Schwiedland’s 1918 essay is a compact environmental economics. Its thesis: a national economy is not an abstract mechanism of labor, capital, and exchange, but a formation shaped through land, climate, water, flora, fauna, mineral deposits, routes, borders, and neighbors. The opening gives Umwelt power over livelihood and disposition:
Die Umwelt ist nicht blos die unumgängliche Voraussetzung alles Lebens, sondern beeinflußt auch die körperliche, seelische und geistige Veranlagung und Entwicklung aller Wesen sowie die jeweilige Richtung ihres Tuns. English translation: The environment is not merely the indispensable precondition of all life; it also influences the physical, psychological, and intellectual disposition and development of all beings, as well as the particular direction of their activity.
Lederer’s essay is a compressed sociology of revolution written at the edge of the German collapse of 1918 and then framed, in the November preface, by the events it had almost anticipated. The preface reads the German Revolution as beginning not in a fully formed socialist seizure of power but in military refusal: the army and navy resist the continuation of a lost war, and only then does the movement become proletarian because, in an industrial state, mass action necessarily becomes workers’ action.
Schwiedland’s wartime essay treats Weltgestaltung as the ordering of power through wealth, transport, territory, and social organization. Its two parts move from the rivalry of states to the social upheaval inside them. The central thesis is that wealth is not the highest good, but it is the medium in which collective capacity becomes cultural and political rank.
This file is a brief 1918 newspaper essay and intellectual tribute from Arbeiterwille (Graz). Its scope is deliberately focused: Schumpeter presents Marx as thinker—economist, sociologist, and founder of scientific socialism—and asks why his work could become a historical force. The thesis is that Marx’s greatness lies less in any isolated doctrine than in joining economic analysis, historical sociology, and political destiny into one compelling interpretation of capitalism.
Thurnwald’s 1918 article is a methodological essay on how kinship terminology may be used to reconstruct social organization among non-literate peoples. He begins by reviewing older ethnographic procedures—travel reports, questioning, observed legal cases—and treats them as necessary but insecure evidence.
Eugen Schwiedland’s expanded 1918 reissue is a compact socio-economic essay on the relation between technical capability, economic organization, and culture. Its scope runs from prehistoric tool use to modern industry, markets, transport, and the cultural crisis of efficiency. The argument begins anthropologically: the human being survives by hands, language, cooperation, memory, and teachable experience. From this grows “Arbeitskunst,” a disciplined, inherited, purposive way of acting. Schwiedland’s first conceptual move is therefore to define technique broadly, before narrowing it to the modern engineer’s sphere.
Rosenberg’s Valutafragen is a wartime intervention in monetary theory, fiscal policy, and legal doctrine. Issued as the second edition of essays first published in 1917 and prefaced in March 1918, it treats Austria-Hungary’s currency problem not as a technical banking matter alone but as a question of social order. The preface gives the work its governing urgency: the stabilization of the currency is bound up with the restoration of economic and political life.