2,806 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Imperial conquest can advance even as imperial authority enters a crisis. In this 1936 article, Richard C. Thurnwald locates that contradiction partly in colonial education: schools train subordinates but also equip intellectuals to demand independence. His East African analysis follows less conspicuous transformations, as taxation, wages, missions, and administrative appointments reshape chiefly authority, kinship obligations, and social prestige. Political sovereignty, he argues, would not by itself undo dependence on distant markets or resolve conflicts over cultural inheritance. The article’s distinctive tension lies in its conjunction of support for African cultural autonomy with paternalistic judgments about African readiness for independence. Its concrete institutional observations allow readers to examine both the reach of colonial restructuring and the limits of Thurnwald’s attempt to treat imperialism as a process of cultural contact.
Written for American students in the Governments of Modern Europe series, this account treats Switzerland as a mirror in which the United States might study its own federal habits. Rappard traces the confederation from the 1291 forest-canton alliance through the Sonderbund War to the Constitution of 1848, which consciously borrowed American bicameralism even as Switzerland exported the initiative and referendum back across the Atlantic. He anatomizes the collegial seven-member Federal Council, the supremacy of the legislature, the tenacity of cantonal and communal loyalty, and the slow drift toward etatisme. Neutrality, guaranteed since 1815, he defends as a necessity rather than a virtue, and Switzerland's guarded entry into the League of Nations emerges as the cautious conduct of a small state reluctant to surrender its ultimate safeguard.
For Switzerland, to resort to a more modern metaphor, neutrality is the parachute which she will not abandon until international flying becomes safer.
Frank Knight had reduced capital to a self-perpetuating fund — permanent, self-maintaining, its replacement a mere matter of technology. Against that "mythology" Hayek defends the Austrian insight that capital is no substance behind things but a structure of heterogeneous, perishable goods whose replacement must be economically explained. He concedes that Böhm-Bawerk's single "average period of production" oversimplifies, yet insists Knight's alternative is worse, since it cannot explain how limited capital restricts the choice among known methods. More capitalistic production means investing some factor for longer; a given stock of capital goods offers not one subsistence fund but many possible time-shaped income streams. What matters are prospective returns, not original factors — and the doctrine collapses only under the fiction of perfect foresight.
The theory looks forward, not back.
Can interest remain positive when tastes are constant and capital accumulation has stopped? In this 1936 article, Hayek challenges a premise shared by otherwise opposed theories: that stable tastes imply equal valuations of present and future goods. His alternative treats stability as consistency of choice, not indifference to time. Using indifference maps of an isolated saver, he distinguishes what governs the pace of saving from what determines the return on investment. The resulting argument gives productivity a leading role while accumulation continues, without denying the importance of preferences in determining where it ends. Readers can discover why, for Hayek, explaining the cessation of saving is not the same task as explaining interest throughout the process of accumulation.
An abundant wheat crop lowers prices; dearer labour and cheaper capital spur labour-saving inventions; endangered banks receive central-bank credit — three statements that look logically alike yet do not, Machlup insists, carry equal economic validity. Writing in 1936 amid the quarrels over Lionel Robbins's definition of economics and Ralph Souter's revolt against disciplinary 'regimentation,' he ranks propositions by the anonymity and generality of the conduct they presuppose, a vocabulary he borrows from Alfred Schütz. The payoff is practical. In international transfer theory, a low-generality institutional assumption about central-bank credit gets smuggled into a causal chain as though it were a market law, and the argument collapses. Methodology earns its keep, he concludes, precisely because failing to mark the order of one's statements has serious practical consequences.
The type of the competitive seller is not so likely to disappear from the economic stage as the type of the benevolent central bank manager.
Economic and political liberalism, Mises insists, are of one stock and cannot be divided: strip away market freedom and parliamentary democracy and civil liberty go with it. This short Geneva essay presents the private-property market economy as a form of economic democracy, one in which consumers direct production through their daily purchases while political majorities increasingly vote against that very order. Drawing on William Rappard's study of Switzerland, where democratic expansion marched in step with growing state intervention, he frames the age's central choice starkly, between liberal-democratic freedom and an etatism that, left to its logic, tends toward dictatorship. Interventionism, statism, socialism, and the planned economy figure here not as moderate alternatives but as solvents of the constitutional order itself.
Jeder Groschen stellt einen Stimmzettel dar.
English translation: “Every penny represents a ballot.”
Austrian imputation theory and the Anglo-American theory of cost and returns had grown apart; Strigl's 1936 offprint sets out to build a common foundation for both, citing Bohm-Bawerk and Wieser alongside Sraffa, Chamberlin, and Joan Robinson. From the single assumption of indefinitely divisible factors he derives diminishing returns not as a technical necessity but as a consequence of economic selection among possible combinations, then reproduces the Wicksteed proof that marginal products exhaust the total product. The heart of the essay is the Quantenfaktor, the indivisible factor — above all durable fixed capital — whose original outlay is a merely historical cost, irrelevant to its present value, which residual imputation must nonetheless recover if the good is to be reproduced. From here he reaches free competition, monopolistic competition, and the problem of chronic excess capacity.
Es kann sich der Betrieb niemals in jenem Zustand befinden, in welchem eine Ausdehnung der Produktion zu geringeren Stückkosten führt.
English translation: “The firm can never find itself in a state in which an expansion of production would lead to lower unit costs.”
What makes a collection of tributes evidence of a teacher’s influence? In this brief 1937 review of the volume honouring F. W. Taussig, Hayek points to its restriction to former students and colleagues—and to the editors’ success in keeping forty-eight contributions concise without sacrificing substance. His praise concerns a scholarly community’s collective achievement rather than particular theoretical positions, which he explicitly declines to adjudicate. Readers encounter Hayek as an appreciative reviewer attentive to editorial discipline and intellectual breadth: he notes that “Wages and Capital” encompasses distribution and monopoly theory, while Taussig’s bibliography records interests wider than younger colleagues may know. The review offers a compact account of how teaching, personal association, and economical exposition can sustain a scholarly legacy.
Writing about economic problems before Adam Smith does not, Hayek argues, necessarily make someone his intellectual predecessor. In this brief 1937 review of E. A. J. Johnson’s Predecessors of Adam Smith, he distinguishes influence on public policy debate from contributions to economic theory. Johnson’s attention to mercantilist schemes for increasing productivity prompts Hayek to question the inclusion of writers he regards as planners or propagandists rather than significant economists. Yet he praises the scholarship, especially the research on Postlethwayt’s voluminous publications. The review offers a compact encounter with Hayek’s standards for writing intellectual history: valuable documentation of what once persuaded the public need not establish how a systematic science developed.
Stable prices need not mean a sustainable recovery. In this 1937 conference contribution, Fritz Machlup asks how a boom can be recognized before its collapse—and what monetary authorities can realistically do about it. His distinctive concern is rapid growth in production itself: credit-financed investment may create imbalances even while falling costs keep commodity prices steady. A concrete example of locomotive orders shows why merely slowing growth in demand can produce a sharp fall in investment. Machlup’s case for restraint is deliberately limited: slower monetary expansion may soften a downturn, not abolish it. His discussion of American policy brings out a further tension: central-bank purchases supporting government bond prices can replenish the very bank reserves that credit restraint seeks to limit.
Explaining why firms form cartels is not the same as defending them. In this short 1937 reply to Myron W. Watkins’s review of Cartel Problems, Karl Pribram sharpens that distinction: depressed markets encourage separate firms to suppress competition defensively, even when their cooperation makes the wider economy less able to recover. He contrasts these collective monopolies with unified monopolies fostered by expansion, making market conditions central to his account rather than assuming capitalism’s inherent instability. The policy stakes emerge in his defence of classification: regulators need to distinguish how different combinations shift the risks of contraction onto others. This rejoinder offers a compact encounter with the tension between firms’ efforts to survive and the economic costs of their collective self-protection.
Before 1914, Reisch observes, payments between nations moved smoothly because trade was freer, exchange rates were stable, and gold served as a common standard; the wreck of that order — through inflation, the abandonment of gold, and what he takes to be erroneous theory — is the disorder this book proposes to cure by stages. He rejects Keynes's money as a mere state-defined unit of account and Hahn's notion of banks conjuring purchasing power from nothing, insisting that credit always rests on real goods or claims. With Ernst Ružička he sketches a subsidiary payment system: neighboring states set up foreign trade banks and reciprocal gold-denominated credit lines, issuing Valutabons whose A coupons cover favored imports and whose B coupons, carrying a customs premium, cover tolerated ones — Leistungskompensation in place of shipping gold.
Die Vermengung der Begriffe Zahlungsmittel und Kreditbefriedigungsmittel erweist sich jedoch als verhängnisvoll: Geld ist wohl Gegenstand der Gewährung von Kredit, Kredit aber ist kein geeignetes Mittel, beliebig viel neues Geld zu schaffen.
English translation: “The conflation of the concepts of means of payment and means of satisfying credit proves to be disastrous: money is indeed an object of the granting of credit, but credit is not a suitable means for creating arbitrary amounts of new money.”