1,549 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
No stable middle ground exists between a free economy and a fully controlled one — that is the verdict Vleugels reaches after examining the neglected theory of officially bound prices. Following Mises, he separates Ordnungstaxen, which merely track competitive prices and disturb little, from echte Taxen, genuine controls set below them, and shows how the latter set off a chain reaction. A maximum price below the market cuts supply, diverts goods elsewhere, and forces controls onto substitutes, then onto factors of production and wages, until — invoking Wieser's notion of production relatedness — the whole price structure must be bound together. Neither an enduring order nor a gentle bridge to socialism, genuine price-fixing emerges here as a primitive interventionist measure that harms the very people it means to protect.
Ebensowenig wie ein ausgebautes Taxsystem als Endzustand der Volkswirtschaft denkbar wäre, ebensowenig kommt es praktisch auch als Anfangszustand zur Überleitung in eine sozialistische Wirtschaft in Frage.
English translation: “Just as a fully developed system of price fixings is inconceivable as the terminal state of an economy, so too is it practically out of the question as an initial state for the transition into a socialist economy.”
The Great War left Europe's monetary circulation almost wholly in the hands of central banks, which now furnish money rather than merely regulating it — the departure point for Reisch's practical observations, built on Menger, Mises, and Wieser. He reconsiders the banknote itself: once cash payments were suspended, its promise of redemption became a fiction, so the modern Schilling note is better read as a certificate of value whose parity the bank must defend. A discount rate held below the natural rate, he warns, drives production into overlong roundabout processes that end in liquidation and crisis; a wholly cashless economy, against Hahn, remains a fantasy; and the central bank stands as a primus inter pares disciplining the giro-money creation of private banks.
Es ist daher gewiß richtig, wenn die Federal Reserve-Banken die ihnen überreichlich zufließenden Goldmengen in weitem Maße „unausgenützt“ in ihren Kellern einsperren und nicht als Grundlage weiterer Kreditexpansion verwenden.
English translation: “It is therefore certainly correct that the Federal Reserve Banks largely lock away "unused" in their vaults the excessively abundant gold flowing to them, and do not use it as a basis for further credit expansion.”
The gold standard did not fail of its own defects; it was disabled, and then blamed for failing. First published in 1932 and reissued here with two supplements because the same misunderstandings still shaped policy, Hayek's report pins the interwar monetary collapse on central banks, above all the Bank of England, that refused to let gold outflows force the domestic credit contraction and wage adjustment the system demanded. Britain's 1925 return to prewar parity left costs too high; cheap money and appeals for central-bank cooperation masked the weakness rather than curing it. Behind the crisis lies his attack on price-level stabilization: propping up prices that ought to fall with rising productivity is inflation by another name, breeding the misdirected production that made 1929 unavoidable.
All this means that there has not been too little but too much cooperation between central banks, and that not the gold standard, but efforts aimed at making the gold standard inoperative are the causes of the present monetary troubles.
No explanation of the world crisis can dispense with the business cycle, and none can make do with it alone: from that double warning Schumpeter narrows a broad diagnosis to Germany's emergency policy of cutting prices and incomes together. Were every price, income, and value to fall at the same instant and in equal proportion, nothing real would change, but because book values, debts, inventories, and expectations cannot adjust uniformly, administrative deflation breeds the paralysis it claims to cure, driving unemployment toward seven million. Its one rational function is temporary, a strategic thrust to strengthen the mark and shift the reparations argument, to be dropped the moment it succeeds or clearly fails. The essay closes on fiscal causality, arguing through counterfactual that disciplined spending since 1924 could have spared Germany, since here public finance is destiny.
Für Deutschland sind die Finanzen Schicksal, rationelle Wirtschaft Lebensfrage.
English translation: “For Germany, finance is destiny, and rational economic management is a matter of life and death.”
The one hopeful element in Franco-German relations, Schumpeter argues in this 1932 view written for Lloyds Bank Monthly Review, is the economic factor, yet economics alone cannot overcome a political psychology shaped by victory, defeat, and the memory of war. Reparations are the crucial mixed case: economically damaging, since Germany cannot pay while creditor nations bar the exports that would earn the foreign exchange, but politically indispensable to a France that reads them as right and security, so that no ministry can revise them without courting political death. Against nationalist rhetoric he insists the two economies are complementary rather than antagonistic; agriculture divides them little, and disputes in porcelain, nitrogen, potash, coal, and automobiles are negotiable through committees and cartel-like compromise. French capital cannot substitute for confidence; loans that merely paper over political maladjustment only postpone the crisis.
No party or ministry can afford to neglect them unless it is prepared to encounter political death.
How does one write the life of a statesman without dissolving it into general history or shrinking it to private psychology? Engel-Janosi answers with a political biography of Alexander von Hübner, the illegitimate Viennese boy, rumor made Metternich his father, who rose through the State Chancellery to become one of Franz Joseph's sharpest diplomatic observers. The book follows him through the 1848 collapse in Milan and his near-lynching at Brescia, the Paris embassy under the Second Republic and Napoleon III, his advocacy of the Crimean alliance against Russia, a brief tenure as police minister, and finally Rome, where he watched the temporal power of the papacy fade. Formed by late-Romantic Catholic legitimism, Hübner distrusted mass politics and industrial modernity, holding to a unifying imperial idea over any written formula.
Die Konstitutionen lassen sich nicht erfinden.
English translation: “Constitutions cannot be invented.”
The health of business-cycle research is measured, Hayek insists in this 1933 Festschrift essay, not by the mounting heap of contemporary statistics but by insight into causes—facts being the ever-changing object against which theory is tested, never its substitute. Crisis theory, he judges, has outrun the theory of depression. He gathers the Wicksellian, Misesian and Spiethoffian strands into one diagnosis: credit expansion unbacked by voluntary saving lengthens and distorts the structure of production, and the resulting 'capital shortage' is identical with relative overconsumption. What remains unsolved is recovery—how relative prices, stocks and the direction of resources must be revalued, and how to distinguish price falls that undo prior maladjustment from secondary deflation that persists past its use. Capital maintenance, wage rigidity, expectations and cash balances he names as the field's next work.
Could a better science of business cycles let policymakers smooth the waves of boom and bust? Mises answers that this is a matter of policy and popular pressure, not theory. Writing in 1933 and here in English translation, he takes the circulation-credit, or monetary, theory of the cycle as the prevailing doctrine, then asks why governments keep returning to credit expansion. The appetite for low interest rates, the contradictory political demand for high producer prices and low consumer prices at once, and union wage rates held above market levels all conspire to make pump-priming perennially attractive. He warns that entrepreneurs will not take the bait once they expect expansion to be curtailed, and singles out falling prices as the terrain where economic theory remains weakest.
The credit expansion which evokes the upswing always originates from the idea that business stagnation must be overcome by "easy money."
Austria's spring 1933 gold-clause and foreign-exchange ordinances did not revalue every gold debt at a stroke; they built a classified transition from nominal schilling parity to regulated value payment. Writing as the paper schilling broke openly from gold—127.49 paper schillings for 100 gold schillings on 28 March—Kerschagl turns a vague “gold clause” controversy into a sequence of legal tests: whether an obligation is effective or merely a value clause, whether it sounds in foreign valuta or gold schillings, what kind of debt it is, and whether its Stichtag has arrived. His reading of the Goldschuldenerleichterungsverordnung shows the pattern plainly—revalued mortgage capital paired with longer maturities and reduced interest, temporal redistribution rather than repudiation. Throughout, he insists that technical wording is distributive power.
Also mithin: bei Hypothekentilgung: gleiche Raten, aber mehr Raten, bei Pfandbriefen: aufgewertetes, aber später zu leistendes Kapital.
English translation: “Thus, in short: for the amortization of mortgages, equal installments, but more of them; for mortgage bonds, revalued capital, but payable at a later date.”
Medicine can name and treat the body's diseases; the science of society, by contrast, has barely learned to diagnose the disorders of collective life. Rejecting cheap analogies from biology and mechanics and the abstractions of German philosophical sociology, Thurnwald makes personality the "atom" of social analysis, with character understood as a dynamic product of biological potential and environmental fate. From this unit he builds family, male associations, leadership, and the problem of fitting the right man to the right place through automatic or planned social sifting. American Prohibition serves as his cautionary case of law enacted without regard to social psychology, breeding illegal trade and corruption; race questions in Hawaii and Fiji become social-psychological problems, and Germany, he argues, needs social inventions to match its technical ones.
Wir werden vielfach irregeführt von dem Gedanken, daß Verordnungen, Gesetze, Vorschriften ausreichen, das Gesellungsleben zu regulieren.
English translation: “We are frequently misled by the notion that ordinances, laws, and prescriptions suffice to regulate communal life.”
A plot of fifteen hundred to three thousand square meters, enough for vegetables, potatoes, fruit, poultry, rabbits, perhaps a goat, anchors this Depression-era proposal for Vienna. The wager is that industry, even in recovery, will not again employ everyone eight hours a day, so the unemployed need a supplementary livelihood rooted in the soil rather than merely healthier housing. Mahr designs the whole settlement economy: land secured by lease or hereditary building right rather than costly purchase, construction cheapened through voluntary labor service, serial building, and local materials, even an industrial labor service in which future settlers make their own bricks and window frames against credited wage claims. Financed by domestic loans at roughly fifteen hundred Schilling per holding, Stadtrandsiedlung leaves a lasting productive asset where ordinary public works leave none.
Aus diesen Gründen erscheint die Behauptung durchaus gerechtfertigt, daß die Förderung der Stadtrandsiedlung gegenwärtig unter den Zielen der staatlichen Wirtschaftspolitik an erster Stelle stehen sollte.
English translation: “For these reasons, the assertion appears entirely justified that the promotion of suburban settlement should presently stand in first place among the aims of state economic policy.”
Read as an economic program rather than a devotional text, Pius XI's encyclical Quadragesimo anno becomes, in Bayer's hands, a diagnosis of the Depression. He begins from the paradox of apparent overproduction: goods stand abundant while unemployment destroys the income that would buy them, each production cut breeding fresh joblessness. Against this he defines the economy's rational goal as durable maximum value—rising output adapted to need, income tied to contribution, distribution as even as possible—and finds it confirmed in the encyclical. His remedy is neither socialist planning, which lacks price formation and calculation, nor unrestrained competition, which decays into destructive underbidding and then monopoly. Bayer locates the world crisis above all in monopoly pricing by finance-controlled cartels and in the 'Fehlrationalisierung' of misdirected investment, prescribing a flexible corporative order to hold competition within bounds.
Es ist also weder die freie Konkurrenz noch die mit ihr in ursächlichem Zusammenhang stehende Monopolgestaltung in der Lage, aus sich heraus eine Heilung der Volkswirtschaft herbeizuführen.
English translation: “Thus neither free competition nor the monopoly formation causally bound up with it is able, of itself, to bring about a healing of the national economy.”