2,793 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
At a moment when economics could not agree on its own object, this 1922 introduction sets out not to found a new system but to ask what abstraction the science actually requires. Its answer: theory is indispensable, yet its concepts are never timeless natural laws — they are constructions fitted to a historically specific order, the capitalist exchange economy, where access to goods runs through money-mediated exchange and homo oeconomicus is a working fiction. Lederer reconstructs the labor-value tradition — Ricardo's rent, Marx's distinction between labor and labor-power, surplus value, the equalized profit rate — as a powerful account of reproducible commodities, then delimits it: it cannot price scarce or monopoly goods. Marginal utility, resolving needs into ranked partial satisfactions, supplies the rest, and he reads classical, Marxian, and Austrian economics as partial theories of one and the same exchange order.
Für die Ware ist die Tauschfähigkeit das Wesentliche, so wie für das Gut: die Brauchbarkeit.
English translation: “For a commodity, exchangeability is essential, just as usefulness is essential for a good.”
Just as a chemical equilibrium shifts to absorb an external shock, an exchange rate moves to keep a nation's balance of accounts in balance—the analogy to Le Châtelier, Van't Hoff, and Lenz from which Rueff builds a theory of currencies as natural phenomena rather than political accidents. Working from wholesale price indices, he defines the 'disparity' between a currency's purchasing power at home and abroad, then demonstrates, mathematically and against 1912–1922 data for France, Britain, and the United States, that disparity moves to equilibrate the balance of accounts. He reads Britain's postwar unemployment as the cost of negative sterling disparity and dismisses the reparations quarrel: to compel Germany to pay while barring her exports is simply contradictory.
La vie économique, dans son ensemble, et pour un groupe important d'individus, paraît bien ainsi régie par la loi la plus générale de la nature.
English translation: “Economic life as a whole, and for an important group of individuals, thus appears indeed to be governed by the most general law of nature.”
A jurisprudence resting solely on the ground of logic — that is the ambition of Kaufmann's outline of a "pure theory of law," which takes Kelsen's reine Rechtslehre and grounds it in Husserl's phenomenology of essence, against every empiricism that dissolves validity into fact. Jurisprudence becomes exact, he insists, only when it stops deriving its concepts from psychology, power, purpose, or moral value. A norm is not an imperative bound to a commander's will but an objectivation of a stance; the legal proposition is a double norm — a subject ought to act, and if it does not, a consequence ought to follow toward that subject — whose juristic core is formal imputation, not causality. From four ground concepts — person, behavior, fact, and ought — he generates the pure legal concepts, recasting the subjective right as nothing but the correlate of another's duty.
Jede theoretische Wissenschaft ist ein Inbegriff synthetischer Urteile a priori.
English translation: “Every theoretical science is a totality of synthetic a priori judgments.”
Does relating the quantity of money to its value explain anything unless the economic connections between them are made explicit? In this 1922 reply to L. von Bortkiewicz, Richard Kerschagl defends his monetary theory through Othmar Spann’s distinction between universalist and individualist explanation. For Kerschagl, the issue is not whether a theory favours society or the individual, but whether it understands economic objects through their functional relationships. His unexpected example is subjective utility theory: a liter of water acquires economic significance through its circumstances, not its physical properties alone. Applied to money, this perspective makes income the mediation he finds missing in quantity theory. The short polemic offers a concrete encounter with the methodological stakes behind a dispute about monetary value.
Before economics can state a single law, Strigl argues, it must decide what “economy” actually means — and ordinary language, saturated with technical, legal, ethical, and social associations, cannot supply the answer. This methodological prolegomenon grounds theoretical economics in pure “economic categories,” the necessary forms in which any economic fact must be grasped, beginning from Gottl’s Lebensnot, the bare condition that goods fall short of wants. The variable “data” of an economy — needs, techniques, milieu, social organization — are not external givens but concretizations of those categories, realized through what Strigl calls the Organisation der Wirtschaft. Against the historical school’s relativism and against Amonn’s attempt to define economics through social exchange, he insists that Crusoe’s isolated household, communist planning, and the market alike remain objects of one law-science.
Die theoretische Nationalökonomie ist keine Sozialwissenschaft, sondern enthält Aussagen über Begriffe, welche soziale und auch nichtsoziale Erscheinungen erfassen können.
English translation: “Theoretical economics is not a social science; rather, it contains propositions about concepts that can encompass social as well as non-social phenomena.”
Luxury and forced labour stand side by side in Eugen Peter Schwiedland’s brief review of Richard Thurnwald’s Psychologie des primitiven Menschen. Praising Thurnwald’s ethnological account, Schwiedland foregrounds two sources of economic change: desires that exceed material necessity and the power to make others work. Shells, beads, and stones acquire value through distinction or supernatural associations; slavery and tribute, in his account, expand production and differentiate occupations. The review offers a compact encounter with an approving interpretation of Thurnwald in which technical limits, symbolic value, and coercion all shape economic life—and in which the language of “progress” accommodates domination as well as invention.
Can artists, scientists, entrepreneurs and technicians form a durable alliance simply because they all invent or create? In this 1922 review of E. R. Curtius’s lecture on French intellectual workers, Emil Lederer tests that promise against the economic divisions it would have to overcome. Where Curtius finds possibilities for a new occupational solidarity, Lederer asks what material interests could hold it together—and whether “syndicalism” accurately describes it. His comparison of the creative producer with Schumpeter’s entrepreneur sharpens the appeal of the idea without endorsing its organizational claims. The review exposes a pointed tension: rejecting cultural nostalgia does not prevent intellectuals from romanticizing their own emancipation, especially when faith in reason obscures the economic forces reshaping their livelihoods.
Can a currency be stabilized without gold—and without directing production itself? In this 1922 review of Gustav Cassel’s second memorandum on the world monetary problem, Emil Lederer presses that institutional question beyond the proposed management of credit and prices. He credits Cassel’s account of the obstacles to restoring the gold standard, but challenges its treatment of Europe’s political constraints and disrupted commodity flows. Gold’s greater purchasing power in Germany and Austria, for example, did not guarantee an adjustment that would relieve deprivation. Lederer’s distinctive objection is that alternating inflation and deflation offers no sufficiently clear rule for monetary policy: stabilization could demand decisions about what an economy produces, not merely how much. This compact review exposes the broader governing responsibilities implicit in an apparently monetary remedy.
Why did the ruble retain any exchange value when Soviet note issuance was immense and opportunities to buy goods so scarce? In this brief 1922 review of Magnus Feitelberg’s documentary pamphlet, Emil Lederer moves beyond the reported circulation figures to suggest an answer: Russian currency remained necessary for purchases, especially in border regions. He distinguishes Feitelberg’s explicitly non-theoretical account from his own cautious inference that unrestricted issuance pointed towards either abandoning the money economy or introducing an entirely new currency. The review offers a compact encounter with a precise monetary puzzle: how continuing transactional need could sustain some value even when, in Lederer’s judgement, restoration of a reasonable currency standard seemed scarcely conceivable.
Why should expanding production end in goods that cannot be sold? In this review of Mentor Bouniatian’s Les crises économiques, Emil Lederer accepts overcapitalization as a promising explanation of recurrent crises but challenges an account confined to production and savings. Credit, he argues, accelerates expansion, while the distribution of income determines whether consumption can keep pace. His distinctive contribution is to connect these mechanisms: profits reinvested in productive capacity may deepen instability when consumers’ purchasing power lags behind. Appreciative of Bouniatian’s clarity and statistical evidence, Lederer nevertheless asks what his theory leaves unexplained—and what monetary and social policy might change. This compact review shows how criticism of a crisis theory becomes an inquiry into the conditions for steadier economic development.
What makes a pocket handbook useful without making it comprehensive? In this brief 1922 review of the third edition of the Wirtschaftliches Arbeitnehmer-Taschenbuch, Volume I, Emil Lederer distinguishes preliminary guidance on currency, finances, and the peace treaty from fuller treatment of works councils and labor law. His recommendation rests on contributors’ expertise, skillful compilation, and what he judges to be objectivity across the contributions. The review offers a concise glimpse of Lederer’s standards for practical public information: accessible breadth, differentiated depth, and brevity suited to readers seeking an initial orientation rather than exhaustive instruction.
Should Austria, before doing anything else, throttle credit still further? Schumpeter's answer, delivered to a June 1922 audience and printed with a sharp editorial rebuttal, is essentially no. He separates normal cyclical tightness and deliberate deflation from Austria's inflationary predicament, where the true disease is state spending for consumption. Restricting credit without restraining expenditure, he warns, would merely shackle production while leaving the fiscal cause untouched; the hope that scarcity would force hoarders to surrender foreign exchange ignores the producer's other exit - simply to stop producing. A liquid money market becomes, paradoxically, a brake on capital destruction. The newspaper's reply presses back: what matters is not the quantity of credit but its use, and forcing uneconomic firms to close is painful but necessary liquidation. The exchange captures a live debate between liquidity and discipline.
Allein es nützt nichts, eine Krise, die kommen muß, hinauszuschieben.
English translation: “But there is no use in postponing a crisis that is bound to come.”