4,099 works (including 472 books, 3,268 articles and 356 historical documents), 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable.
Private enterprise claims the credit for economic dynamism—but who keeps it alive when crisis strikes? In this 1932 newspaper article, preserved as a reprint, Emil Lederer contrasts Ivar Kreuger’s fraud with the public credit and purchasing power sustaining a contracting economy. Prussia’s electricity enterprises and publicly owned railways give his defense of the state concrete institutional grounding, though he also warns of private suppliers’ influence over railway management. His standard of entrepreneurship is prudent construction rather than speculative expansion with other people’s savings. The article’s sharpest tension lies between public rescue and private authority: if society bears the risks and supplies the means of survival, Lederer asks, why should economic leaders retain unchecked control? Economic democracy emerges here as a demand for accountability, not a detailed institutional blueprint.
As the European gold-exchange order broke apart in the early 1930s, states began seizing, centralizing, and rationing foreign means of payment—and Kerschagl sets out to explain, in strictly economic terms, why. Foreign-exchange control (Devisenbewirtschaftung) is treated here not as a currency system but as an emergency bridge forced by the convergence of trade deficits, capital flight, and reserve losses across the trade balance, the payments balance, and what he calls the Währungsbilanz. Its defining move—allocating scarce exchange—is a form of partial planning that inevitably reaches into imports, production, and consumption. Clearing arrangements, priority lists, and blocked accounts follow the same logic of restriction. Controls can buy time, he argues, but cannot themselves restore the equilibrium whose absence created them.
Der Weg zu dauernd gesunden Währungen führt über wirtschaftliche Vernunft.
English translation: “The road to permanently sound currencies leads through economic reason.”
As the Depression hardened public opinion into a verdict, capitalism has failed and only planned economy or socialism remains, Mises answers that the verdict mistakes its object. What collapsed was not liberal capitalism but decades of anti-capitalist policy: nationalization, municipal enterprise, tariffs, union privilege, unemployment relief, social insurance, inflation, militarism. Economics, he argues, discovered market laws no coercive power can override, and liberalism is simply the practical application of that discovery, not a class morality; the isolated intervention cannot reach its aim and produces effects its own authors never wanted. Even businessmen turned interventionist prove only that they too absorb their age's ideas, as success comes to hinge on connections rather than serving consumers well and cheaply. The crisis, he concludes, belongs to interventionism: not Bastiat but Marx and Schmoller failed.
Gegen Logik setzten sie Ethik, gegen Theorie Ressentiment, gegen Argumente den Hinweis auf den Willen des Staates.
English translation: “Against logic they set ethics, against theory resentment, against arguments the appeal to the will of the state.”
Half memoir and half post-mortem, this three-part volume moves from Sieghart's own rise through the Ministerratspräsidium under Koerber, Gautsch, and Beck to a structural anatomy of the empire that employed him. Writing in 1932, after Saint-Germain had already dismembered the monarchy, he insists that its unresolved national problems survived in the successor states, and that the Danube basin's true foundation was an economic community of small peoples that dualism had corroded. He portrays universal suffrage as a state-preserving clamp, defends the reformers against the militarism of Conrad von Hötzendorf, and rejects the determinist verdict—associated here with Ludwig Mises—that internal decay doomed the realm: only a world war of unprecedented scale, he argues, could destroy it.
Von allen Einrichtungen der Monarchie war der Dualismus, wie er sich herausgebildet hatte, die unseligste!
English translation: “Of all the institutions of the Monarchy, Dualism, as it had developed, was the most calamitous!”
Karl Bücher's picture of an original closed household economy, sealed off from trade, is the adversary this third volume keeps returning to; Thurnwald rejects it as a construction unsupported by ethnography or history. Reciprocal giving, barter, ceremonial exchange, and market fairs, he shows, reach down to hunters and gatherers; the Trobriand Kula circulates armrings and necklaces as prestige rather than property, while Northwest Coast potlatch turns wealth into power through ceremonial dispersal, not hoarding. He coins Naturkapital for the self-renewing capital of seed and herds in moneyless economies, traces money from preferred exchange objects to cowries and cattle, and reads women and slaves as the earliest concentrated labor capital. Against Durkheim and Bücher he denies that economic development reduces to a growing division of labor, calling economic activity a psychically and socially conditioned process.
Was wir Wirtschaft nennen, kommt erst durch die Organisierung der Menschen eines bestimmten technischen Könnens zustande.
English translation: “What we call economy comes about only through the organization of people possessing a certain technical capability.”
The evolutionary set-pieces of ethnology are dismantled one by one in this second volume: primordial promiscuity and group marriage, read by Morgan and MacLennan out of Hawaiian kin-terms, and bride capture as an original form of marriage, which Thurnwald re-explains as staged ritual resistance rather than real abduction. Family, kinship, and the men's houses, initiations, and secret societies that overlay them are his subject. Mother-right and father-right, he insists, almost never appear in pure logical form; classificatory kinship sorts people by social obligation, not genealogical degree. Marriage orders teem with positive prescriptions, not only prohibitions, and what Europeans call incest is often better named social disgrace. Milk kinship and blood brotherhood extend the same logic, binding strangers into kin through the magical power of substance.
Es gibt ja keinen Menschen an sich, sondern nur männliche oder weibliche, junge oder alte.
English translation: “There is no such thing as a human being in the abstract, but only male or female, young or old ones.”
Money serves its holder even when it lies unspent. From this observation, Ludwig von Mises develops an account of monetary value grounded in individuals’ desire to maintain cash balances, rather than in aggregate measures of circulation. This 1932 contribution to an edited volume asks how money can have a distinctive economic function without requiring a separate theory of value. Its force lies in connecting that question to concrete distinctions: holding money versus spending it, ordinary lending versus issuing unbacked money substitutes, and changing purchasing power versus uniformly changing prices. Readers can discover why Mises treats monetary disturbances as sequences that redistribute wealth and alter relative prices—and why, for him, money’s indispensable role in economic calculation does not make it an invariant measure of value.
Der Gelddienst erschöpft sich nicht im Umsatz.
English translation: “Monetary service is not exhausted by transactions.”
Profit-seeking, this comparative survey insists, is no natural law of economic life but a peculiarity of modern society. Ranging across Melanesia, Micronesia, East Africa, Sumer and archaic Babylon, Thurnwald treats economics not as mere food-getting but as a social system woven from household reciprocity, rank obligation, ritual, and the conservative force of tradition. He dismantles the tidy evolutionary sequence of hunting, pastoralism and agriculture, follows Edward Hahn in separating hoe from plough cultivation, and reads kula exchange, potlatch display, wergeld and temple redistribution as forms in which wealth circulates for prestige rather than gain. Against Max Weber he derives the Babylonian governor's estate from earlier temple administration, and against Carl Bücher he denies the self-sufficient manor. Capital first appears, he argues, in herds and standing crops.
A characteristic feature of primitive economics is the absence of any desire to make profits either from production or exchange.
A seventy-one-page pamphlet on price formation in the German scholarly antiquarian book trade, trailing a bibliography of theoretical works 'von Gossen bis Wicksell,' is exactly the mismatch of apparatus and achievement Hayek finds intolerable. His single-paragraph notice grants that the subject—rare, heterogeneous goods with widely dispersed valuations—could have been theoretically revealing, then denies that Bruck makes anything of it. The yield for price theory is meagre; the factual information is thinner than a regular reader of booksellers' catalogues could assemble unaided, especially on the two matters that would have mattered most: the movement of antiquarian prices over time and the 'Streuung' of simultaneous prices for identical works. The verdict is disciplinary—casual market observation, bibliographic display and genuine value theory are not the same thing, and Bruck has confused them.
Die preistheoretische Ausbeute ist recht mager.
English translation: “The yield for price theory is decidedly meagre.”
Reviewing Husserl's newly published Cartesian Meditations—still available only in French—Schütz reads it as an attempt to ground all philosophy in transcendental subjectivity, taking up Descartes's radical doubt while correcting its errors through the epoché and the phenomenological reduction. He follows Husserl's analyses of intentionality, the noetic-noematic correlation, and the transcendental ego as a monadic field structured by habitualities and passive genesis. Special weight falls on the difficult fifth meditation and its account of how the alter ego is constituted through appresentation and pairing, yielding an objective world valid for everyone. Schütz marks the work's transcendental idealism and its opposition to psychologism, points toward the tasks it opens for a phenomenologically grounded social science, and closes with the wish that Husserl make the book available to German readers.
„Gegenstände“ sind daher – in der reduzierten Sphäre sowohl als auch in der natürlichen Einstellung – nichts anderes als intentionale Korrelate ihrer Bewußtseinsweisen.
English translation: “Objects" are therefore – in the reduced sphere as well as in the natural attitude – nothing other than intentional correlates of their modes of consciousness.”
Should Cantillon be read for his place in economics’ ancestry, or for what his reasoning can still teach? In this 1932 review of Henry Higgs’s edition and English translation of the Essai, Hayek firmly favours the latter. His praise for making the work accessible accompanies a precise textual objection: neither the printed French nor the reconstructed English is straightforwardly the original, and the edition does not adequately distinguish its English sources. The review brings Hayek’s theoretical commitments into contact with the practical demands of scholarship. Readers can discover why he regards historical priority and conjectures about influence as less compelling than direct engagement with Cantillon’s analysis—and why access to that analysis still requires editorial transparency.
Statutes, reserve rules, and central-bank independence all fail, Strigl warns, against the one authority that can suspend them — the state itself. Written amid the crisis after 1929, as several central banks drifted back toward expansionary “accommodating” policy, this essay asks whether a currency can be secured against political manipulation rather than mere mismanagement. Its conceptual pivot is a reversal of Gresham’s law: where people are free to denominate contracts, wages, and credit in a sounder foreign currency, good money drives out bad, and depreciating money survives only through ignorance, habit, or coercion. Strigl’s remedy is not a new currency scheme but a legal one — treaties binding states never to prohibit a partner’s currency, creating an automatic and sensitive index of monetary health. A state that cannot outlaw the foreign money cannot inflate.
Der Geist der Zeit ist inflationistisch und manche Völker werden für ihre Heilung von währungspolitischen Irrtümern jetzt wieder schweres Lehrgeld zahlen müssen.
English translation: “The spirit of the age is inflationist, and some peoples will now once again have to pay dearly to be cured of their monetary-policy errors.”