1,549 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Albert Hahn’s 1923 review of Adolf Weber’s third edition of Depositenbanken und Spekulationsbanken is a critical reassessment of an older German banking theory under postwar monetary conditions. Hahn treats Weber’s book as historically important but analytically belated: it was formed in the prewar climate of hostility to large credit banks and, in Hahn’s view, cannot simply be carried over into the inflationary present.
This single-author historical essay reconstructs the Viennese juridical-political reading society from its prehistory to March 1848. Its thesis is that the Verein mattered less as an overt revolutionary organization than as a sensitive institutional medium of Vormärz Austria: a “scientific” reading society through which legal education, liberal sociability, censorship, bureaucratic rivalry, and police suspicion became entangled.
Mises's treatise of January 1923 is a crisis text on the German hyperinflation. It distinguishes its topic from the older search for money with unchanging exchange value: now the matter is more soberly the rescue of a functioning monetary system. The eight sections lead from the endpoint of inflation through stopping note issue, return to gold, choice of the stabilization ratio, and critique of balance-of-payments theory to inflationism, a new monetary constitution, and ideological diagnosis. The main thesis is that depreciation is not the fate of poverty or foreign trade, but the result of state-created monetary expansion.
Thurnwald’s 1923 essay offers a comparative anthropology of economic formation. Against rationalist economics and linear evolutionism, it treats economy as a shifting adjustment among needs, technique, environment, psychic dispositions, and political association. Economic life begins in organic self-maintenance and only gradually becomes calculative; even then it remains tied to prestige, fear, ritual, affection, and coercion.
Rueff’s mémoire defines exchange as a measurable natural mechanism and uses it to interpret the postwar monetary world. Its key term is “disparité”: the gap between a currency’s internal purchasing power, inferred from wholesale prices, and its purchasing power abroad, inferred from the exchange rate. The argument begins from a qualified purchasing-power-parity rule. Among countries not undergoing continuous fiduciary inflation, exchange tends toward a level that gives money comparable command over goods at home and abroad:
la monnaie du pays (1) s'échange contre celle du pays (2) à un cours qui lui donnera, à l'intérieur du pays (2), un pouvoir d'achat sensiblement égal à celui qu'elle possède à l'intérieur du pays (1). English translation: The currency of country (1) is exchanged against that of country (2) at a rate that gives it, within country (2), a purchasing power appreciably equal to that which it possesses within country (1).
This file is a single signed encyclopedia entry, issued as a special offprint from the Handwörterbuch der Staatswissenschaften. Its scope is compact but systematic: Strigl defines demand, distinguishes mere desire from effective purchasing demand, treats exceptional demand configurations, and closes by locating demand within the coordination of a monetary exchange economy.
Mises’ essay is a critical review of new attempts to answer his earlier challenge: socialism, by abolishing private ownership of the means of production, abolishes the market prices required for rational economic calculation. He begins by insisting that this is not a secondary technical defect but the decisive issue.
Kerschagl’s book is a postwar reconstruction of money theory written against inflation, exchange-rate disorder, and the older quarrel between metallism and chartalism. Its thesis is that money cannot be understood from its material, its legal name, or its quantity alone, but only from its function inside the organized total economy. He states the methodological premise at the outset:
Für diese Art des Vorgehens war die Auffassung des Geldes als eines mit der Variabilität der Wirtschaft sich ändernden Funktionsbegriffes bestimmend. English translation: Determinative for this approach was the conception of money as a functional concept that changes with the variability of the economy.
Hermann von Schullern zu Schrattenhofen’s Agrarpolitik presents agrarian policy as a systematic science of public action for the postwar German-speaking world. Its premise is that agriculture cannot be treated as a merely private occupation or isolated branch of production, because soil, settlement, food supply, labor, markets, and national culture are interdependent. The opening definition gives the work its broad scope:
Agrarpolitik im weitesten Sinne ist der Inbegriff aller jener Maßnahmen, die der Staat und andere öffentlich-rechtliche Körperschaften durchführen zu dem Zwecke, um die Bodenproduktion zum Besten der Volkswirtschaft und damit des Gesamtwohles zu regeln und zu heben. English translation: Agrarian policy in the broadest sense is the sum total of all those measures which the state and other public-law bodies carry out for the purpose of regulating and elevating soil production for the benefit of the national economy and thereby of the general welfare.
Böhm-Bawerk’s controversy article on J. B. Clark, later joined to the 1900 preface of Einige strittige Fragen der Kapitalstheorie, is a compact defense of the Austrian theory of interest. It does not reopen the entire debate over Clark’s “permanent capital,” but corrects several readings of the Positive Theorie des Kapitales: the use of money examples, the relation to abstinence theory, the meaning of production periods, and the sense in which roundabout production is more “productive.”
This short 1924 policy essay from Die Börse is a public intervention in the League of Nations’ examination of Austria’s stabilization. Its scope is the relation between fiscal balance and the broader viability of the Austrian economy. Schumpeter’s main thesis is sharply bifurcated: the state budget can be balanced, but that does not by itself secure a stable national economy. The real danger lies in Austria’s external imbalance, weak productive organization, and shortage of capital.
Originally published in 1896, this is a single-author polemical article. Böhm-Bawerk answers four American critics of the Positive Theorie des Kapitals—Horace White, Hugo Bilgram, Professor Macvane, and Frederick B. Hawley—after having treated Clark and Walker elsewhere. The structure follows those names, but the argumentative scope is broader: incompatible criticisms become an occasion to restate the logic of capital and interest.