4,249 works (including 483 books, 3,406 articles and 357 historical documents), 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable.
Saving promises security; Emil Lederer asks why capitalist accumulation so often destroys what it promises to preserve. In this 1932 article, the bottomless vessel of the Danaids becomes an image for wealth repeatedly amassed and lost. Evidence from early British limited companies and Austrian share values grounds his challenge to the idea that legal safeguards, competent management, and market adjustment secure lasting capital. Crucially, Lederer distinguishes losses suffered by investors from destruction of society’s productive wealth: a falling share price need not mean a vanished factory. His concern is where recurrent failure does impose social costs—lost livelihoods, reduced consumption, and fresh sacrifices to rebuild capital—while opportunities for gain and exposure to loss remain unequal. The article offers a concrete encounter between financial evidence and a socialist critique of economic rationality.
Collective ownership does not, for Emil Lederer, prove that an economy is effectively planned. In this authorized, slightly abridged 1933 republication of his 1932 essay, he distinguishes Soviet success in building industrial capacity from the unfinished task of coordinating production and meeting needs. His interest lies as much in the motivations sustaining industrialization as in its administrative machinery: socialist commitment releases energies that private profit once mobilized, but exhausted workers, shortages, and agricultural disruption expose its limits. Admiration for collective construction coexists with criticism of bureaucratic pressure and the rejection of economic calculation. Readers encounter a precise tension between the drive to accumulate and the consumption needed to sustain it—and an argument that socialist ownership cannot by itself settle questions of prices, investment, or human endurance.
Bidding farewell to Bonn in July 1932, Schumpeter set aside politics and policy to ask where economics as a science stands and where it is going. His answer is a sequence of methodological theses: economics must become an ethically indifferent empirical discipline that says what is and what will be rather than preaching from the lectern; its logic differs in no way from the other sciences, so mathematical tools need no apology; and its future lies in uniting facts, statistics, and theory, with Trendanalyse the frontier. He calls practical interest the discipline's crown of thorns, refuses to found a Schumpeter school, and judges Walrasian equilibrium aged when set against concrete industrial reality, yet the animating ethos is discovery against authoritative impossibility.
Das Faszinierende an der Wissenschaft ist im Grunde nur der Spaß, den man hat, wenn man tut, was beste Autoritäten für unmöglich erklären; nur die Jagd nach solchen Gelegenheiten ist etwas wert.
English translation: “What is fascinating about science is at bottom only the fun one has in doing what the best authorities declare to be impossible; only the hunt for such opportunities is worth anything.”
A system of simultaneous equations can establish that prices, quantities, and marginal utilities are mutually compatible; it cannot show how any determinate price came to be. That distinction, between genetic-causal theories, which explain how prices arise, and functional theories, which merely describe correspondences once equilibrium is presupposed, drives this methodological reckoning with mathematical economics. Marching through Cournot's demand function, Jevons's and Walras's equilibrium equations, Pareto's indifference curves, and Cassel's scarcity model, Mayer argues that each mistakes a description of finished relations for an account of their formation, and that Pareto's curves rest on the mere fiction of an experiment. Writing from interwar Vienna in the long shadow of the Methodenstreit, he does not spurn formalization but demands a return to causal inquiry into subjective valuation and its temporal sequence.
Das Problem hat sich damit geändert und nicht nur die Betrachtungsweise.
English translation: “The problem itself has thereby changed, and not merely the point of view.”
Max Weber demanded that sociology understand action through its subjective meaning, but never explained what such meaning is, how it arises in lived experience, or how anyone else could grasp it. First published in 1932, this is the book that supplies the missing foundation. Drawing on Bergson and Husserl, Schütz argues that meaning is no hidden mental substance but an act of self-interpretation: an experience becomes meaningful only when reflection lifts it, already elapsed, out of the stream of inner time. From there he rebuilds the whole edifice, the projected act with its Um-zu and Weil motives, the understanding of others through signs and typifications, and a graded social world reaching from the intimate We of consociates to the anonymous contemporaries, predecessors, and successors whose meanings we can no longer revise. Scientific sociology, he concludes, constructs ideal types that must stay answerable to the actor's own meaning.
Gemeinter Sinn eines Erlebnisses ist nichts anderes als eine Selbstauslegung des Erlebnisses von einem neuen Erleben her.
English translation: “The intended meaning of a lived experience is nothing other than a self-interpretation of that experience from the standpoint of a new experience.”
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.”
Protecting German farmers from imports could destroy the industrial purchasing power on which their sales depended. This paradox anchors Emil Lederer’s 1932 conference contribution, republished here in 2020, on the promises of economic self-sufficiency during the world crisis. Lederer examines how European export earnings financed indispensable overseas raw materials, and why a proposed southeastern European trading bloc conflicted with Germany’s exclusion of foreign grain. His distinctive perspective joins an analysis of production and demand to a defence of cultural exchange: national independence, he argues, cannot be secured by severing the connections that sustain both livelihoods and intellectual life. Readers encounter a concrete account of how policies intended to capture markets can instead impoverish their customers.
Abundant productive capacity alongside unemployment and unmet needs: this contradiction anchors Eugen Peter Schwiedland’s lecture, delivered in autumn 1931 and published in 1932. He argues that tariffs, payment restrictions, war debts, and collapsing confidence prevent an interdependent world economy from using its resources. His criticism reaches beyond governments to businesses whose debt-financed mechanization increased output without securing customers. Proposals for European commercial integration and coordinated capitalism turn the diagnosis into a question of institutional design: how can countries restore purchasing power when each seeks to export while excluding foreign goods? The lecture also exposes a tension within Schwiedland’s internationalism. His recognition of economic solidarity coexists with a racially hierarchical defence of European predominance, making cooperation both a remedy for shared distress and a means of preserving unequal power.
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.”