1,549 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Richard Kerschagl’s Silber is a raw-material monograph whose thesis is that silver can be understood only where mineral occurrence, extraction technology, and monetary history intersect. Its sequence—properties and chemistry, metallurgy, currency and price history, industrial uses, and geography of deposits—turns an encyclopedic survey into an argument about historical reversal. Silver begins as the prestige currency metal of Europe and the Mediterranean, but by 1960 it has become chiefly an industrial and by-product metal. Kerschagl’s central move is to redefine the silver problem as geological-economic rather than merely monetary.
This German translation of Theory of Games and Economic Behavior presents von Neumann and Morgenstern’s foundational attempt to recast economics as a mathematical theory of strategic interaction.
Rosenstein-Rodan’s essay, written in the context of India’s Planning Commission, is less a statistical review of the Five Year Plans than a theory of democratic development policy. Its governing claim is that planning is meaningful only when it openly ranks competing ends: higher growth, present consumption, employment, equality of opportunity, reduced inequality, and limits on concentrated power.
This file is a single-author polemical essay in political economy. Its object is the category “public sector” in national-income statistics and in arguments for expanded government. Rothbard’s thesis is that the term makes coerced expenditure look like one productive compartment of a neutral “national product,” when it is actually a diversion of resources from market-tested wants. He starts by treating terminology as theory in disguise.
Kauder’s article is an archival reinterpretation of Carl Menger built from the marginalia and manuscript fragments preserved in Menger’s library at Hitotsubashi University. Its premise is that the unpublished papers clarify why Menger was so persistently misread—as plagiarist, Kantian, Manchester liberal, or merely obscure philosopher rather than economist.
This is a short, single-author theoretical article in labor economics and social policy. Bayer’s scope is not a technical wage-calculation model but a conceptual account of how wage determinants change as the economy moves from an approximately free market order to an organized, institutionally and monopolistically structured market economy. His opening premise is systemic:
Lohnbildung und Lohngestaltung sind mit dem Wirtschaftsablauf und der Wirtschaftsentwicklung eng verbunden. English translation: Wage formation and wage structuring are closely bound up with the course of economic activity and with economic development.
Morgenstern’s essay is a methodological defense of game theory as more than a mathematical curiosity or auxiliary calculating device. He begins by conceding its autonomous scientific standing, then asks whether economic situations themselves are often strategic games rather than ordinary maximization problems.
Haberler’s introduction presents Ragnar Nurkse’s collected writings as the work of an economist whose apparently varied concerns—capital movements, monetary equilibrium, balance-of-payments adjustment, trade, and development—were unified by the problem of international economic order. The biographical opening, moving from Estonia to Edinburgh, Vienna, the League of Nations, Columbia, Geneva, and Stockholm, is not ornamental: it locates Nurkse within the main theoretical currents of mid-century economics while showing why his work remained unusually cosmopolitan and institutionally informed.
This file is a single philosophical essay, reprinted from the Proceedings of the British Academy. Its scope is broad: Hayek moves across psychology, philosophy of mind, linguistics, ethology, and the methodology of the social sciences. The central thesis is that human conduct and understanding depend on rules that are followed, perceived, and communicated without being explicitly known.
Fritz Machlup’s The Production and Distribution of Knowledge in the United States is a single-author economic monograph and national accounting study. Its scope is deliberately expansive: it treats knowledge not as a cultural ornament or a residual of “real” production, but as a measurable field of economic activity in mid-twentieth-century America.
Mises’s late methodological essay defines economics as the most elaborated branch of praxeology, the science of human action. Its argument is directed against positivism, behaviorism, historicism, and the imitation of physics in the social sciences. For Mises, economic theory begins not with accumulated observations but with the fact that men act: they select means in light of chosen ends. The book therefore joins epistemology to liberal social theory: misunderstanding method produces misunderstanding of markets, intervention, and freedom.
Richard Kerschagl’s 1962 book is a single-author policy monograph in the Austrian UNESCO Commission series. It treats development aid as a linked problem of economics, finance, science, schooling, and adult education. Its seventeen chapters move from definition, population pressure, psychology, ideology, and political systems to donor and recipient obligations, partnership, financial instruments, the Marshall Plan, international agencies, legal security, currency policy, education, and technical assistance. The central thesis is that aid can work only when material investment is joined to knowledge, discipline, legal order, and integration into the world economy.