1,549 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Haberler’s essay surveys business-cycle theory at a moment of methodological expansion, but its purpose is not encyclopedic. It imposes order by returning to a basic empirical regularity: cyclical movements in output and employment normally move with the money stream, prices, and effective demand. He begins from a deliberately narrow definition:
Friedrich Engel-Janosi’s essay is a single-author historical article: a deliberately provisional survey of Austrian resistance from the Anschluss to liberation. Its main thesis is that Austrian resistance must be analyzed separately from German opposition to Hitler, even while acknowledging shared language, history, and culture.
The source should be read as a journal issue or edited-volume unit, not as Schuetz’s text in isolation: archival/editorial matter, Schuetz’s 1953 contribution, its notes, and a Spanish-language extract frame the same methodological problem. Its substantive center is Schuetz’s chapter on how social science can be objective while studying actors who already interpret their world. The contributing voices are functionally distinct: Schuetz supplies the main argument; Whitehead, Husserl, Weber, Parsons, and rational-action theorists appear as cited interlocutors, giving the chapter its genealogy in anti-positivism, phenomenology, interpretive sociology, and model theory.
Amonn’s essay reconstructs the quantity theory in response to what he regards as its mid-century simplification. Hansen and Schneider present the doctrine as $P=f(M)$—prices as a simple function of the money stock—and then reject it as mechanistic. Amonn’s first move is historical: even the oldest monetary writers related money to goods brought to market, and therefore saw money value as a relation, not as an automatic effect of money alone.
Voegelin’s essay is a review of Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism and a compact statement of his own theory of modern political disorder. He accepts Arendt’s subject as a world-historical crisis, not a merely German, Russian, or institutional problem. Totalitarianism appears as the symptom of a deeper collapse in Western civilization.
This file is a single-author scholarly review-essay in which Alfred Schütz presents Husserl’s posthumously edited Ideen II as a major transitional work: unfinished, internally strained, but decisive for phenomenology and especially for the foundations of the social sciences. Schütz first reconstructs the publication history, stressing that Husserl left the manuscript unpublished because the problem of intersubjectivity had not yet been satisfactorily solved. The essay then follows the architecture of Ideen II: material nature, animate nature, the spiritual/personalic world, and finally the ontological priority of spirit, before closing with critical objections.
Engel-Janosi’s essay presents Brooks Adams’s The Law of Civilisation and Decay as a neglected American philosophy of history: an ambitious attempt, before Spengler and Toynbee, to explain world history through recurrent civilizational laws. Adams matters to Engel-Janosi not because the system is finally persuasive, but because it converts late-nineteenth-century evolutionary thought into a pessimistic diagnosis of modernity, finance, and historical decline.
Amonn’s second volume is a systematic treatise in public finance. Its scope is the “special” part of fiscal science: the classification and theory of particular taxes, the theory of public credit, and the problem of fiscal equalization among connected public authorities. The work’s governing thesis is methodological as much as substantive: fiscal institutions cannot be understood through a single formal criterion. They must be classified by the relation between taxpayer, taxable object, public purpose, economic effect, and administrative feasibility.
Friedrich Engel-Janosi’s scholarly essay in intellectual history and philosophy of history surveys historicism from Burckhardt to Toynbee and Vico. Its thesis is that historicism reaches its fullest force when it turns all human forms into historically conditioned objects, yet at that same point exposes its insufficiency: life, dogma, myth, and an “Ur”-history press beyond mere historical appearance. The essay unfolds through exemplary confrontations: Burckhardt’s contemplative historical culture, Nietzsche’s protest, Acton and Döllinger at Vatican I, Spengler’s determinism, Toynbee’s universal comparison, and Vico’s “ideal eternal history.”
This file is a scholarly review-essay by Alfred Schütz, presenting Husserl’s Ideen III as an early but unusually unified manuscript on the phenomenological grounding of empirical science. Schütz’s main thesis is that the volume clarifies how regional ontologies, rational psychology, and transcendental phenomenology relate to one another, and why empirical sciences require eidetic clarification of their basic concepts.
This single-author journal article is a history-of-economic-thought essay on why marginal utility was not accepted earlier. Its scope runs from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century value theory to the reception of Menger, Jevons, and Walras. Kauder’s main distinction is between discovery and acceptance: subjective value theory existed long before 1870, but disciplinary and cultural conditions delayed its authority.
Kerschagl’s essay argues against the hope that full employment can be secured by monetary technique. It begins by placing Keynes within a longer line of reformers who, in Kerschagl’s view, repeat John Law’s error: trying to replace a missing production factor, capital, with credit. The central claim is that uncovered credit does not abolish scarcity; it creates purchasing power before consumable goods exist and thereby forces present consumers to finance future production through lower real consumption or higher prices.