2,809 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
For Gerhard Tintner, reliable confirmation can matter more than striking novelty. His 1936 review of Allen and Bowley’s Family Expenditure praises their use of household budgets to connect demand theory with statistical evidence, while questioning one simplifying assumption: a linear preference scale maintained throughout the investigation. Where that assumption appears to fail, he wants statistical tests, not merely a workable approximation. This brief review offers a concrete view of Tintner’s standards for econometric research: close knowledge of the data, explicit testing of theoretical assumptions, and economic interpretation of numerical results. His praise turns on what the calculations establish about household spending—not on mathematical sophistication alone.
Mahr reopens the Austrian puzzle of productive interest by asking precisely what the 'time element' contributes to it. Accepting from Jevons and Böhm-Bawerk that capitalistic production is temporally extended and present factor payments oriented toward future revenues, he defends—against Schumpeter—the persistence of an interest rate in a static economy: statics inherits the rate that development established and finds no force to remove it. His sharpest correction targets Böhm-Bawerk's 'average period of production,' whose inclusion of a capital good's whole past history breeds infinite regress and makes an old mine lengthen a present process merely by age. Distinguishing production period from use period, Mahr rebuilds the concept as the technically necessary time embodied in the portion actually consumed, and denies that more capital must always lengthen production or lower returns.
Die Einbeziehung der Nutzungsperiode der Kapitalgüter in die Berechnung der durchschnittlichen Produktionsperiode scheint mir die hauptsächliche Quelle aller Widersprüche und Ungereimtheiten darzustellen, die diesem Begriff bisher anhafteten.
English translation: “The inclusion of the period of use of capital goods in the calculation of the average period of production seems to me to constitute the principal source of all the contradictions and inconsistencies that have hitherto attached to this concept.”
Austria's 1934 constitution, and the authoritarian turn behind it, mark for Voegelin not a sudden rupture but a late episode in a state that never quite became one. Total and authoritarian, he argues, are political symbols forged in struggle rather than scientific concepts, and he assembles their elements—Carl Schmitt's total state, economic Vermachtung, mass activation, the monopoly of propaganda, the education of a people by its elite—before turning to the specifically Austrian problem: an empire of many nations that produced no unified Staatsvolk to will the republic into being. Much of the book is a sustained critique of Kelsen's pure theory of law, whose reduction of the state to a system of coercive norms Voegelin reads as an administrative evasion of political substance, and as the very formalism that made the 1933–34 transition so hard to name.
Die Machtquelle bleibt anonym.
English translation: “The source of power remains anonymous.”
A gift given, a service rendered, a wrong avenged: beneath these Thurnwald finds one impulse toward counter-performance, and here he raises reciprocity into the organizing principle of social life. Association begins in the bio-psychical complementarity of the sexes and ages—marriage as durable mutual care, parent and child bound by deferred return, the living tied to ancestors through offerings. He rejects any primitive communism of products, reads barter, kula, and potlatch as personal repayment rather than impersonal purchase, and interprets Buin shell money as a memory-sign of obligation. Stratification bends reciprocity into clientage, feudalism, serfdom, and slavery—equilibria that turn unjust once valuations shift—while law, morality, and revenge appear as its formalized demands. Cultures decline, he warns, when this balance is lost.
Jede Leistung aus der „Spezialität“ des einen Partners soll zur Erwiderung beim anderen anregen.
English translation: “Every service arising from the "specialty" of one partner is meant to prompt a reciprocal response from the other.”
Three movements organize a century and a half of Swiss constitutional history in Rappard's telling: the emancipation of the individual, the triumph of democracy, and the rise of the state. He begins with the great paradox — that the Helvetic Constitution imposed by French bayonets in 1798, with its liberty, equality, and unitary citizenship, came to shape modern Switzerland more than the old Confederation ever did — and traces the sequence through the Act of Mediation, the reactionary Pact of 1815, the liberal cantonal revolutions of 1830, the federal Constitution of 1848, and the centralizing revisions after 1874. The individual who freed himself from the aristocratic state, and then mastered it through referendum and initiative, ends by surrendering to a federal statism of tariffs, railways, insurance, and subsidies whose swelling debt Rappard reads as the measure of lost independence.
Pour triompher définitivement en Suisse, le libéralisme avait donc dû faire appel au moins libéral des arguments.
English translation: “To triumph definitively in Switzerland, liberalism had thus been obliged to resort to the least liberal of arguments.”
The Methodenstreit had hardened into a war of slogans, naturalism against Verstehen, nomothetic against idiographic, value-free against normative, and this 1936 German treatise sets out to disarm every one of them. Kaufmann offers not a doctrine but a critique of principles: methods earn their place by problem-type and research aim, never by metaphysical prestige. Physical objectivity itself rests on schemas and measurement; social science differs because its objects include alter egos, projects, and socially available meanings, so understanding is indispensable yet never sovereign. Drawing on Weber and Schütz for controlled interpretation, he recasts marginal utility theory as an analysis of purpose-rational choice within a ranked goal-order, treats ideal types as instruments of causal control, and credits Kelsen with purifying legal dogmatics while rejecting the Sein/Sollen dualism. Plurality is preserved; its inflation into pseudo-conflict is what must go.
Demgemäß ist alle Kritik in diesem Buche Prinzipienkritik.
English translation: “Accordingly, all criticism in this book is criticism of principles.”
Keynes defines the multiplier as the reciprocal of one minus the marginal propensity to consume — and in that definition, this methodological critique argues, the celebrated result is already smuggled in. To infer a large multiplier from a high propensity to consume explains nothing, Haberler contends, unless that propensity has been established independently; otherwise the argument merely renames the unknown magnitude it claims to illuminate. He separates the formal aggregate propensity, which is just the algebra of the multiplier, from the psychological propensity describing how people actually spend, and shows that leakages, time lags, monetary velocity and displaced investment stand between them. The same defect, he adds, runs through Keynes's Treatise, where saving and investment are defined into equality and then made to explain one another. Identities can clarify accounts while misleading theory when mistaken for mechanisms.
By assuming something about the marginal propensity to consume he assumes something about the multiplier, but this is no more an explanation of the multiplier that pauvreté is an explanation of poverty.
Beneath the visible quarrels of schools, systems, and policy creeds runs more logical continuity than economists usually grant, and this essay reads the history of theory as sedimentary rather than revolutionary: Ricardo clarifies Smith, while Jevons, Walras, and Menger carry classical work forward rather than discarding it, like geological layers conditioning the ones above them. The occasion is Taussig's Wages and Capital, which Schumpeter credits with finally disposing of the wages-fund doctrine and, alongside Böhm-Bawerk, supplying a theory of capital as a time-structured process that marginal utility and marginal productivity alone could never reach. Along the way he names the Ricardian Vice — presenting simplified models to the public as policy certainties — as the standing temptation the theorist must resist.
There is more logic in the history of those tools of analysis which we have come to call economic theory than either its friends or its foes admit.
Understanding an action is not the same as establishing that one’s interpretation is correct. In this article, Felix Kaufmann makes that distinction central to a social science that neither imitates physics wholesale nor claims exemption from empirical testing. His example of a naval distress signal shows how deciphering words, recognizing a request, explaining an emergency, and inferring the sender’s knowledge require different evidence. Drawing on Weber and Schütz, he replaces sweeping disputes over scientific method with precise questions about what investigators assume and how their claims can be checked. Readers can discover why uncertainty need not mean vagueness, and why practical interests may shape the choice of a research problem without deciding what counts as an adequate answer.
An unfavorable but respectful tribute is how this 1936 review casts its verdict on Keynes's General Theory, granting the book's public impact while charging it with reviving the Ricardian habit of smuggling situated policy into theory disguised as universal law — on every page, Schumpeter writes, the ghost of that policy looks over the analyst's shoulder. His technical objections are sharp: the aggregate demand and supply schedules illegitimately stretch the Marshallian cross to social aggregates; treating employment as an index of output assumes invariant production functions and so assumes away the continuous revolution in production methods that defines capitalism; the propensity to consume enters as a deus ex machina, and liquidity preference names rather than explains. The whole closes with a satirical bow to the spending of Louis XV.
Economics will never have nor merit any authority until that unholy alliance is dissolved.
Social insurance may protect against individual misfortune, but what happens when economic contraction makes unemployment a mass condition? In this contribution to the 1936 National Conference of Social Work proceedings, Karl Pribram challenges the stability assumed by social legislation without dismissing its protective purpose. He locates recurrent crises in monetary and credit imbalances, distinguishing these from the trade barriers and international debt difficulties that, he argues, deepened the Depression. His practical concern is how protection should change with economic conditions: shorter hours, public works, and wage adjustments cannot be judged independently of industry and timing. The essay offers a pointed encounter between business-cycle analysis and social policy, showing why preventing economic breakdown and relieving its uneven consequences require distinct but coordinated measures.
"Overcapacity" is less an industrial fact, this 1936 lecture contends, than a political dogma — the belief that competition either adopts new techniques too slowly or squanders capital by scrapping serviceable machines. Hayek dissolves the charge by separating technical from economic capacity: a machine may still run yet be worth nothing, because new capital does not duplicate the old but economizes on labor and materials, freeing them for use elsewhere. Old plant should survive only while the new method's total cost exceeds its bare operating cost. From this he attacks "capital preservation" as a false end, whether protecting railways against motor traffic or shielding state assets, and ridicules forced standardization for letting an authority decide what consumers ought to like. Idle plant, he adds, may signal a scarcity of capital, not a surplus.
Die Normierungsfanatiker begeben sich da auf ein außerordentlich gefährliches Feld, und ich wenigstens kann mich nicht für die Idee begeistern, daß jemand anderer für mich entscheiden soll, was mir gefallen oder schmecken soll und was nicht.
English translation: “The fanatics of standardization are venturing here onto extraordinarily dangerous ground, and I, at least, cannot warm to the idea that someone else should decide for me what I ought to like or find tasty and what not.”