1,549 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Haberler’s article is a compact reconstruction of the classical free-trade argument. Its aim is not simply to restate Ricardo, but to rescue comparative-cost theory from common misreadings, from the labor theory of value, and from policy objections based on tariffs, immobile capital, and transitional losses. The central claim is that free trade rests on the gains from international specialization, not on any assumption that one country is absolutely more efficient than another.
Engländer’s second part turns value theory into an analysis of capital, money, credit, and crisis by emphasizing production through time. Prices and profits are not explained by exchange at a single moment, nor by labor alone, but by the placement of goods and inputs within processes whose results emerge later. Capitalist calculation therefore depends on expectations, turnover periods, and the relation between present advances and future consumer demand.
Rappard’s work is a single-author interwar study of European and international cooperation after 1918, ranging from Germany’s postwar condition and Europe’s changing economic position to peace pacts, the League Secretariat, and the League Council. Its central thesis is cautious but forceful: Europe is not being “united” by sentiment, constitutional design, or the simple triumph of idealism, but by the pressure of facts—economic interdependence, intellectual contact, and the insufficiency of sovereign states acting alone.
Ludwig von Mises’s “Verstaatlichung des Kredits?” is a critical review-essay on Robert Deumer’s prize-winning proposal for a state monopoly of credit and banking. Mises treats the detailed legal plan as politically remote and instead examines the intellectual premises behind it: the belief that private banking serves “profit-capitalist” rather than national-economic ends, and that a nationalized credit system could retain commercial efficiency while directing investment toward public purposes.
The file is a single-author scholarly essay on Austrian adult education. Braun’s scope is deliberately limited: rather than narrating all Austria, she concentrates on Vienna and on the institutions for which evidence was available. Her structure moves from intellectual origins, to institutional delimitation, to curricular change, and finally to women’s expanding role as lecturers.
This 1930 crisis-policy article by Joseph Alois Schumpeter asks what Germany risks if it fails to reform the finances of Reich, Länder, and municipalities during depression. The essay is organized as a counterfactual warning: instead of arguing abstractly for reform, it estimates the economic and political consequences of fiscal inaction.
Richard Thurnwald’s letter to Dr. Ernst Harms is a compact exercise in editorial boundary-setting. Written from Zehlendorf on behalf of the Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie und Soziologie, it responds to Harms’s requests concerning participation in a symposium, reviews, a proposed research contribution, and a lecture manuscript. Its main thesis is practical but also disciplinary: the journal is not closed to Harms, but every form of participation must pass through limits of space, documentation, and scientific adequacy. Thurnwald’s core move is to distinguish “openness in principle” from acceptance in fact.
This multi-author lecture volume should be read as a collective inquiry into capital, not as a stand-alone Schumpeter essay. Its contributor-chapters circle a shared problem: capital can appear as a stock of goods, a money sum, a bookkeeping category, a claim of ownership, and a force in capitalist development. The volume’s structure is therefore comparative and cumulative. Some chapters clarify the concept and its measurement; others test it through accounting, socialist calculation, credit, crises, and interest. Schumpeter’s “Das Kapital im wirtschaftlichen Kreislauf und in der wirtschaftlichen Entwicklung” is the central theoretical chapter, but it belongs to this broader conversation.
This file is a single-authored German economic essay. Written amid the Depression, it asks whether capitalism faces a permanent crisis or a normal cyclical downturn made disastrous by other forces. Schumpeter gives the answer immediately:
Ja, zunächst haben wir – jedenfalls hatten wir 1929 und 1930 – die Depressionsphase eines normalen Konjunkturzyklus vor uns. English translation: Yes, first of all we have before us—at any rate we had in 1929 and 1930—the depression phase of a normal business cycle.
Thurnwald’s first volume is a comparative ethnosociological monograph built around “representative life-pictures” of non-European societies. Its governing claim is methodological: sociology must be disciplined by ethnographic particulars rather than by speculative evolutionism, racial explanation, or ready-made cultural types.
Lederer’s 1931 ADGB lecture argues that the forty-hour week is not a narrow wage-policy demand but a response to a transformed capitalism. Working time must be judged within the world crisis, technical upheaval, blocked investment, and mass unemployment. The Depression is unprecedented not simply by degree but because degree has become kind.
This file is a single-author lecture pamphlet: a compact 1931 address in eight sections, moving from market theory to business cycles, unemployment, price supports, taxation, gold, and the question of escape from crisis. Its central thesis is that the depression is not a failure of capitalism as such, but the consequence of repeated attempts to suspend the market’s coordinating function through credit expansion, wage policy, price controls, subsidies, tariffs, and taxation.