1,549 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Richard Reisch’s 1937 Das Problem des zwischenstaatlichen Zahlungsverkehrs is a policy-theoretical pamphlet: the expanded synopsis of lectures held in Brünn, Olmütz, and Reichenberg, followed by a Ružička/Reisch memorandum, draft concession and statutes for Außenhandelsbanken, a Valutenbon form, and a model credit contract. Its thesis is that international payments failed when the legal-moral expectation of stable money was broken; a gradual cure must rebuild trusted payment promises and compensations rather than rely on devaluation, embargo, or ordinary clearing.
Alexander Mahr’s 1937 monograph treats unemployment after the war as a structural condition rather than a passing fluctuation. War debts, new borders, rationalization, monopoly power, wage conflict, and trade and currency controls have made joblessness a lasting threat to economic and social order. Relief prevents destitution but leaves recipients idle and impoverished; emergency works are too costly to generalize. Mahr therefore asks whether the funds already spent on support can be reorganized so that the unemployed produce necessary goods for one another.
This file is a single German scholarly study of Renaissance historiography. It traces the humanist image of Timur from Poggio Bracciolini through Piccolomini, Fregoso, Cambini, Giovio, Mexia, and Le Roy to its early modern correction. Voegelin’s thesis is that humanist Timur is a constructed Bild: a figure of fame, fortune, terror, charisma, and epochal transition, assembled from limited anecdotes and repeatedly reinterpreted.
Felix Somary’s 1937 text is a printed public lecture delivered to the student body of the University of Zurich and dedicated to Swiss youth. Its ten theses diagnose Switzerland as a small liberal democracy whose prosperity depends on conditions—peace, open exchange, sound money, treaty morality—that the World War and the dictatorships have gravely weakened. Somary frames his intervention as an independent “scientific diagnosis,” not a party program, and builds the argument from Switzerland’s material paradox:
This file is a single-author journal article, originally a presidential address. Across ten sections Hayek reorients equilibrium theory around a neglected question: what must be assumed about the knowledge of separate persons for formal economic analysis to say anything causal about the world? His thesis is methodological and substantive at once: pure equilibrium analysis is a “Pure Logic of Choice,” but it becomes empirical economics only when joined to propositions about how knowledge is acquired, corrected, and communicated.
Strigl’s Einführung presents economics as the causal science of scarcity rather than a catalogue of political wishes. Its first demand is methodological restraint: economics may clarify whether chosen means can achieve chosen ends, but it does not itself legislate those ends.
Hans Bayer's instructional booklet is an introduction to questions of money and credit, organized into 22 questions for Austrian workers' education. Its starting point is currency devaluations, banking crises, and the appeal of monetary reform schemes. Its main thesis is that money and credit are indispensable but serving institutions; they facilitate exchange, accounting, and financing, but they cannot remove economic distress by manipulating the monetary side.
This file is a single-author theoretical journal article. Hayek offers a narrow analytical intervention in trade-cycle theory: he does not explain every boom and crisis, but clarifies a proposition behind monetary overinvestment theories. His target is the static inference that a larger quantity of capital goods must lower the return on further investment.
Strigl’s article is an institutional diagnosis of Austrian economic education rather than a doctrinal survey. Its central thesis is that Austrian universities possessed high-quality economists and a living intellectual tradition, but that economics long remained structurally subordinated to legal studies. The decisive question is not whether economics was taught, but where it was placed in the curriculum, under what examination pressures, and through what forms of student work.
Machlup’s essay is a theoretical clarification of marginal productivity analysis. It does not deny the usefulness of the concept of marginal product; it argues that the concept becomes meaningful only when economists specify exactly what is being varied, how it is measured, and under what market and temporal assumptions the resulting product is valued.
Richard Kerschagl’s 1938 inaugural lecture surveys Austria’s contribution to modern economics as both a doctrinal history and a methodological self-portrait. Its central claim is that Austrian economics becomes scientifically decisive with marginal utility theory, not with earlier administrative or cameralist traditions.
William E. Rappard’s 1938 Cobden Lectures reconstruct the League of Nations’ frustrated campaign for freer trade after the First World War and ask why official unanimity in favor of liberal commerce produced almost no liberalization. His thesis is deliberately complex: the failure cannot be explained only by economic ignorance or special interests, although both matter. It arose from the contradiction between a world verbally committed to interdependence and a system of sovereign states made anxious by depression, currency disorder, debts, social dislocation, and above all the expectation of war.