2,806 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Could the successor states of Austria-Hungary restore stable monetary relations without surrendering their newly acquired sovereignty? In this 1921 article, Alfred Amonn separates the case for predictable exchange rates from the demand for a single currency. His proposal is concrete: revive the old gold crown as a shared standard while allowing national currencies and names to remain distinct. Gold accounting, he argues, would also expose what nominal wage and dividend increases conceal about purchasing power. The article offers a revealing distinction between recovering an economic mechanism and restoring an imperial political order. Its editorial reservations sharpen the practical tension: Amonn’s gradual programme depends on fiscal restraint precisely where budget difficulties and renewed note issuance threaten to undermine it.
Friedrich von Wieser praises a critic who rejected his own explanation of interest—and explicitly refuses to retract that explanation. This tension gives his brief 1921 foreword to the fourth edition of Böhm-Bawerk’s Geschichte und Kritik der Kapitalzinstheorien its particular interest. Defending the decision to leave the text unchanged after its author’s death, Wieser distinguishes a history of theoretical problems from a chronicle of recent publications. He values Böhm-Bawerk’s criticism for reaching beyond misleading verbal formulations to the facts an explanation must confront. His closing reservation shows precisely where admiration stops short of assent: Wieser credits Böhm-Bawerk with clarifying the problem while maintaining that certain facts escaped his judgement.
Preserving a theory need not mean declaring it complete. In this 1921 foreword to the fourth edition of Böhm-Bawerk’s Positive Theory of Capital, Friedrich von Wieser explains why a contested work must nevertheless be reprinted unchanged after its author’s death. Having followed Böhm-Bawerk’s thinking from its beginnings, he expects that further revisions would have come—but refuses to invent them on his behalf. His tribute also acknowledges a fundamental division within the Austrian school over interest. This brief text offers a precise distinction between fidelity to an author and assent to his conclusions: for Wieser, a theory’s fruitful connections can outlast acceptance of its central explanation.
Beneath the technical squabble over whether to borrow in crowns or in foreign currencies lies a single cause, and this 1921 policy essay drives straight to it: the krone stands low because of the enormous state deficit, not merely because of banknote issue. Further taxation cannot close the gap, since productive incomes are already heavily burdened and the slogan of taxing the propertied can scarcely be taken seriously. A forced or voluntary foreign-currency loan is dismissed as self-defeating, for it would strike the visible reserves businessmen hold for legitimate purposes while concealed hoards withdraw further from sight. Credit, Schumpeter insists, presupposes restored confidence rather than creating it. His conditional preference is therefore a large domestic crown loan, less destructive than the alternative and capable of automatically depressing foreign-exchange rates by absorbing crowns.
Unsere Krone steht tief infolge des ungeheuren staatlichen Defizits.
English translation: “Our krone stands low as a consequence of the enormous state deficit.”
The ministers' journey to London had not delivered the interim loan the public hoped for, yet it set the stone rolling, and that, this 1921 newspaper piece argues, was its real service. Large Entente credits will not come while Austria's policy suppresses its own production, above all in agriculture, which state interference treats as if the aim were to reduce it to a minimum. Credit here is a judgment on institutions: foreign lenders need assurance of effective savings and a genuine liberation of economic forces before they finance a country's habits. Schumpeter separates transitional state credits from the industrial capital that matters more, and that can only return through ordinary profitable transactions, not patriotic urgency. Reversing the fear of Ueberfremdung, he warns that a state cannot prosper while making capital feel unwelcome.
Es ist umsonst, die Welt einfach zwingen zu wollen, sich für uns zu interessieren, das Interesse kann nicht anders erwachen, als daß einzelne spekulativ angelegte Leute einzelne Transaktionen mit Erfolg durchführen.
English translation: “It is useless simply to try to force the world to take an interest in us; interest cannot be aroused otherwise than by individual, speculatively minded persons carrying out individual transactions with success.”
Can the greater productivity of time-consuming production explain interest if that productivity can only be measured through value? Franz Xaver Weiss’s 1921 article defends Böhm-Bawerk against his critics, then challenges the independence of his technical explanation. Quarrying with hammer and chisel and quarrying by blasting require different kinds of labor and resources: counting labor-days cannot establish equal physical costs. Weiss argues that their comparison already involves valuation. His reconstruction preserves the importance of intermediate goods and waiting, but locates their effect on interest in the competition between present provision and distant yields. The reader encounters a critique from within Böhm-Bawerk’s theoretical framework, showing why the physical sequence of production matters without, in Weiss’s account, supplying an autonomous technical explanation of the premium on present goods.
Can nationalism be explained without treating it as the organic outgrowth of the past? In this brief English-language review, Eugen Peter Schwiedland welcomes Waldemar Mitscherlich’s alternative: a theory of “plurality” that considers social phenomena through their distinctive conditions of existence. His praise centres as much on this sociological method as on the book’s account of nationalism. Particularly revealing is his interest in forces that might surpass nationalism, including “state unionism”—a voluntary association of sovereign states retaining their independence. The review offers a compact encounter with Schwiedland’s methodological sympathies and his approval of an approach that makes nationalism historically conditioned rather than inevitable.
Can economic cooperation escape domination merely by freeing itself from political command? In this review essay, Emil Lederer tests Berthold Thorsch’s proposal for socialization through autonomous, worker-controlled enterprises rather than state administration. Sympathetic to its emancipatory aim, Lederer challenges its central distinction: competition can generate monopoly, and ownership itself confers power. His criticism becomes concrete where cooperative ideals meet the different demands of building enterprises, mining, and iron production. What works in one sector may fail in another. The essay offers a pointed examination of the distance between designing institutions without domination and bringing them into existence: solidarity and moral commitment matter, but neither rational persuasion nor organizational reform explains why entrenched interests would surrender control.
Victory by force can destroy the very wealth it seeks to command. This contradiction anchors Emil Lederer’s 1921 essay on violence as a force in social organization. His claim that violence has outlived its usefulness rests not on faith in moral progress, but on a contrast between feudal conquest and capitalist interdependence: land and dependent labour could be seized, whereas capital requires circulation, markets, and purchasing power. Organized workers, meanwhile, cannot be ruled in the same way as dispersed dependent producers. Reading war and class conflict through these altered conditions, Lederer separates the capacity to inflict destruction from the capacity to establish lasting authority. His argument offers a precise question for assessing coercive power: does its apparent success undermine the social relationships on which it depends?
Money can be legally constituted without its effects on distribution being explained. This distinction drives Richard Kerschagl’s 1921 article, which shifts the debate from metallic substance versus state authority to the relations among production, consumption, and claims on goods. His universalist perspective treats money as an instrument of economic interdependence, rather than merely a convenience for individual exchange. Yet it does not yield blanket approval of monetary reform: he can recognize the distributive intention behind Bendixen’s proposal to convert German war debt into notes while rejecting its practical viability. The article offers a way to distinguish theories of what makes money valid from theories of what money does—and to examine why neither a metallic basis nor state recognition alone settles the latter question.
Postwar Vienna offered the starkest specimen of a disorder that ran across all of Europe: a fiscal and monetary breakdown so complete that buyers, sellers, credit, and prices could no longer meet in stable markets. Taxation that made ordinary transactions impossible, fear of the currency, blocked trade, and the flight of capital into speculation and hoarding define the crisis more than poverty itself. Schumpeter resists the easy culprits: neither labor militancy, nor socialism, nor capitalism's alleged exhaustion, nor currency depreciation alone explains it. Even inflation, he argues, might in another setting have financed the passage from war production to peace. Recovery cannot come from a monetary decree or the suppression of symptoms; it demands renewed confidence, usable credit, and the concrete entrepreneurial decisions that restore regular exchange.
Unsere Politik vertreibt das Kapital aus den Banken, macht die produktive Anlage immer schwerer und verurteilt es eben, so lange es geht, zum Schiebergeschäft und sowie das nicht mehr geht, zur Untätigkeit, respektive zum Spiel oder zur Konsumtion.
English translation: “Our policy drives capital out of the banks, makes productive investment ever more difficult, and condemns it, as long as this remains possible, to profiteering, and once that is no longer possible, to idleness, or to gambling, or to consumption.”
For Emil Lederer, the supposed postwar crisis of socialism exposes a different crisis: intellectuals unable to recognize a society changing around them. In this brief, signed introduction to Soziologische Probleme der Gegenwart (1921), he attacks the nostalgia that mistakes the beneficiaries of the old order for the creators of its wealth—and blames socialism for the collapse of a society it never governed. His commitment to socialist reconstruction is inseparable from a demand for sober attention to economic possibilities and limits. The introduction offers a pointed account of how political judgement fails when inherited comforts become its measure, and explains why Lederer regards intellectual clarification, education, and moral responsibility as practical tasks rather than retreats from politics.