4,249 works (including 483 books, 3,406 articles and 357 historical documents), 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable.
Defending free trade, Haberler argues, requires admitting that tariffs can sometimes confer benefits—even on a country as a whole. In this 1932 review of the committee report chaired by Sir William Beveridge, he praises a method that concedes theoretical possibilities while testing how plausible their conditions are in practice. His concern is both analytical and persuasive: absolute claims leave free traders vulnerable to objections they have failed to answer. Britain’s departure from gold gives that distinction a concrete setting, removing, in his assessment, the basis for Keynes’s proposal to use tariffs instead of devaluation or wage reductions. This short review shows why Haberler regarded qualification not as a retreat from free trade but as a condition of its credible defense.
Between the causal explanation of what exists and the normative account of what ought to be, Engliš carves out a third, autonomous form of reason: teleology, the logic of whatever is willed. On that foundation the second volume of his teleological system, given here in the German of the 1932 Czech original, constructs the state economy as a purposive order governed not by any individual's satisfaction but by an objective 'human and national ideal.' Needs, utility, cost and yield reappear as formal categories, and from them he derives a theory of taxation in which burdens fall first on the highest incomes, producing a steep progression that levels from above, checked only by the need to preserve productive incentive. A sustained critique of Hans Ritschl's rival doctrine closes the book, faulting it for lacking any central ordering purpose.
Proportionalität oder Progressivität sind keine Steuergrundsätze, sondern bestimmte Konstruktionen von Steuersätzen, die sich erst aus den Steuergrundsätzen ergeben müssen.
English translation: “Proportionality or progressivity are not principles of taxation, but particular constructions of tax rates, which must first be derived from the principles of taxation.”
How could rapidly rising prices lead monetary authorities to issue still more money? In this 1932 review of Frank D. Graham’s study of German hyperinflation, Ludwig von Mises locates the answer in doctrines that blinded officials to the consequences of their own policies. He praises Graham’s historical account while arguing that the catastrophe confirmed established monetary theory. His sharpest examples concern everyday calculation: apparently high interest rates encouraged borrowing when debts depreciated faster, and profits recorded in marks concealed losses of real value. As households learned to exchange wages immediately for goods, inflation also ceased to serve the government’s financial purposes. The review connects errors in economic thought with banking practices, misleading accounts, and the public’s changing willingness to hold money.
A loan may fall due in three months while the capital it finances remains committed to production for years. In this 1932 paper, Fritz Machlup examines that mismatch from the standpoint of the productive system rather than the individual creditor. Selling a claim can restore one investor’s cash without freeing any underlying capital; even an advance against inventories can release a borrower’s own funds for machinery. These examples sharpen his challenge to the doctrine of self-liquidating credit. Machlup argues that routine repayment depends on replacement savers sustaining commitments that withdrawing creditors leave behind. The paper offers a concrete way to distinguish contractual maturity from economic duration—and to understand why individually liquid claims need not permit collective withdrawal without a contraction of production.
When one people takes over the tools, rites, and ideas of another, what is adopted rarely keeps its old function. Acculturation, Thurnwald argues here, is a dynamic socio-psychological process rather than a mechanical transfer, driven by individual learning, imitation, and leadership, and passing through distinct phases: initial suspicion, eager imitation, the fear of losing one's identity, and eventual recovery or self-assertion. He distinguishes selective, rejective, eliminative, and transformative responses, drawing on New Guinea, Africa, Japan's reopening, Europe, and Indigenous North America, and stresses that what passes between peoples depends on the receiving culture's own traditions. Wars, migrations, and political upheavals, he concludes, are only the visible climaxes of these deeper and slower adaptations in the life of cultures.
The acquisition of any civilizatory accomplishment is not limited to the act of acceptance like the moving of an object from one case in a museum to another.
No stable middle ground exists between a free economy and a fully controlled one — that is the verdict Vleugels reaches after examining the neglected theory of officially bound prices. Following Mises, he separates Ordnungstaxen, which merely track competitive prices and disturb little, from echte Taxen, genuine controls set below them, and shows how the latter set off a chain reaction. A maximum price below the market cuts supply, diverts goods elsewhere, and forces controls onto substitutes, then onto factors of production and wages, until — invoking Wieser's notion of production relatedness — the whole price structure must be bound together. Neither an enduring order nor a gentle bridge to socialism, genuine price-fixing emerges here as a primitive interventionist measure that harms the very people it means to protect.
Ebensowenig wie ein ausgebautes Taxsystem als Endzustand der Volkswirtschaft denkbar wäre, ebensowenig kommt es praktisch auch als Anfangszustand zur Überleitung in eine sozialistische Wirtschaft in Frage.
English translation: “Just as a fully developed system of price fixings is inconceivable as the terminal state of an economy, so too is it practically out of the question as an initial state for the transition into a socialist economy.”
The Great War left Europe's monetary circulation almost wholly in the hands of central banks, which now furnish money rather than merely regulating it — the departure point for Reisch's practical observations, built on Menger, Mises, and Wieser. He reconsiders the banknote itself: once cash payments were suspended, its promise of redemption became a fiction, so the modern Schilling note is better read as a certificate of value whose parity the bank must defend. A discount rate held below the natural rate, he warns, drives production into overlong roundabout processes that end in liquidation and crisis; a wholly cashless economy, against Hahn, remains a fantasy; and the central bank stands as a primus inter pares disciplining the giro-money creation of private banks.
Es ist daher gewiß richtig, wenn die Federal Reserve-Banken die ihnen überreichlich zufließenden Goldmengen in weitem Maße „unausgenützt“ in ihren Kellern einsperren und nicht als Grundlage weiterer Kreditexpansion verwenden.
English translation: “It is therefore certainly correct that the Federal Reserve Banks largely lock away "unused" in their vaults the excessively abundant gold flowing to them, and do not use it as a basis for further credit expansion.”
The gold standard did not fail of its own defects; it was disabled, and then blamed for failing. First published in 1932 and reissued here with two supplements because the same misunderstandings still shaped policy, Hayek's report pins the interwar monetary collapse on central banks, above all the Bank of England, that refused to let gold outflows force the domestic credit contraction and wage adjustment the system demanded. Britain's 1925 return to prewar parity left costs too high; cheap money and appeals for central-bank cooperation masked the weakness rather than curing it. Behind the crisis lies his attack on price-level stabilization: propping up prices that ought to fall with rising productivity is inflation by another name, breeding the misdirected production that made 1929 unavoidable.
All this means that there has not been too little but too much cooperation between central banks, and that not the gold standard, but efforts aimed at making the gold standard inoperative are the causes of the present monetary troubles.
National independence or a blockade imposed on oneself? In this 1932 newspaper article, Emil Lederer argues that Germany’s pursuit of autarky threatens the employment, agricultural incomes, and international influence it promises to secure. His distinctive starting point is demographic: a population enlarged since 1871 cannot subsist on a return to an older agrarian economy, while farming itself depends on industrial tools and imported feed. Contemporary trade figures sharpen his warning that falling imports are no measure of economic health when exports—and the work they sustain—are disappearing faster. Lederer exposes the practical contradiction in protecting domestic producers by restricting the exchange on which their customers’ purchasing power depends. Economic interdependence emerges here not as the opposite of national power, but as one of its material foundations.
Mit jeder neuen Hemmung der Einfuhr entziehen wir unseren Exporten den Boden.
English translation: “With every new restriction on imports, we undermine the basis of our exports.”
No explanation of the world crisis can dispense with the business cycle, and none can make do with it alone: from that double warning Schumpeter narrows a broad diagnosis to Germany's emergency policy of cutting prices and incomes together. Were every price, income, and value to fall at the same instant and in equal proportion, nothing real would change, but because book values, debts, inventories, and expectations cannot adjust uniformly, administrative deflation breeds the paralysis it claims to cure, driving unemployment toward seven million. Its one rational function is temporary, a strategic thrust to strengthen the mark and shift the reparations argument, to be dropped the moment it succeeds or clearly fails. The essay closes on fiscal causality, arguing through counterfactual that disciplined spending since 1924 could have spared Germany, since here public finance is destiny.
Für Deutschland sind die Finanzen Schicksal, rationelle Wirtschaft Lebensfrage.
English translation: “For Germany, finance is destiny, and rational economic management is a matter of life and death.”
A preference is not a sum of money: this distinction drives Oskar Engländer’s contribution to the edited economics volume Die Wirtschaftstheorie der Gegenwart in Darstellungen. In Wertlehre, he retains marginal-utility reasoning while denying that utility is measurable or that efficient allocation necessarily equalizes weighted marginal utilities. His account of willingness to pay turns on a concrete budget problem: what remains after higher-ranking needs have been provided for? It yields the counterintuitive possibility that a buyer’s maximum total expenditure on a larger quantity may be lower than on a smaller one. Following these comparisons reveals both the reach and the limits Engländer assigns to subjective value theory: individual rankings constrain purchases, but explaining the relationships among market prices also requires production conditions and technical substitution.
How can economics remain value-free while taking a definite position on economic policy? In this concluding intervention in a discussion of value theory, published in 1933, Ludwig von Mises draws the line between choosing ends and judging means. Protectionism supplies a concrete test: economics can, he argues, establish a loss of output without deciding whether other political aims justify that loss. His replies to fellow participants also defend abstract economic reasoning against claims that theoretical truth depends on class position or that practical relevance requires abandoning abstraction. The interest lies in the tension between his avowed liberalism and his insistence that economists assess policies against their proponents’ own purposes—a compact statement of what he thinks economic theory can, and cannot, tell political actors.
Je reiner und abstrakter die Theorie ist, desto besser dient sie dem Leben und Wirken.
English translation: “The purer and more abstract the theory is, the better it serves life and action.”