3,015 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Government planning and the disintegration of the world economy, Sennholz argues, are two faces of one process: the tariffs, exchange controls, and nationalizations that wreck the international division of labor also spawn the unification schemes meant to repair it. Writing from Mises's orbit with Earhart Foundation support, he marches through the postwar projects, Streit's federal union of democracies, Coudenhove-Kalergi's Pan-Europe, the socialist United States of Europe, the Council of Europe, the International Monetary Fund, the European Payments Union, and the Coal and Steel Community, and finds each fatally wedded to the interventionism it cannot survive. Capitalism and socialism, he insists, cannot coexist in one customs-free federation; the ECSC is a supranational monopoly over coal and steel. His alternative is unilateral free trade, sound gold-backed money, and a state confined to protecting life and property.
There is only one reason for an unsatisfactory operation of the market economy: it is government intervention.
What broke postwar Europe into protected national compartments—the free market, or the governments that overrode it? Reviewing Hans F. Sennholz's book of that title, Mises turns the reigning diagnosis on its head. Where pseudo-economists and statesmen blamed capitalism for poverty, unemployment, depression, and international disintegration, he answers that Europe's economic fragmentation is the work of state regulation and protectionism, not of laissez-faire. A government that fixes prices, wages, or output cannot leave foreign competition free to undermine its controls, so isolation follows from planning as a matter of course. Conventions, conferences, and American subsidies, he argues, cannot restore unity while domestic interventionism persists. Europe's survival depends not on new supranational architecture but on removing the national controls that make open exchange impossible.
The economic disintegration of Europe is not an outcome of the unhampered operation of the capitalist system.
Inequality, on Mises's reading, is not a defect for policy to correct but the very mechanism by which consumers steer production—rewarding entrepreneurs who serve them and stripping resources from those who fail. He distinguishes capitalist fortunes, built by supplying the masses with goods once beyond reach, from feudal wealth won by conquest, and argues that confiscating high incomes diverts capital from investment into consumption or state spending. Redistribution, he warns, has no principled stopping point once inequality is branded an evil: progressive taxation becomes a slope toward socialism. Invoking Henry Ford and the fate of the 1895 business structure, he presses the alternative to its edge—consumers or the state, market economy or socialism, with no third solution. The essay opens the collection's broader case against interventionism and the night-watchman state.
Inequality of wealth and incomes is the cause of the masses’ well-being, not the cause of anybody’s distress.
Postwar trade policy broke with the economic nationalism of the interwar years, and reciprocity became its governing principle—the ground on which Mahr, in 1955, builds a case that mutual liberalization, broad enough and paced with care, can raise national income without the feared wave of unemployment. He concedes the transition problem, that sheltered industries contract before resources migrate to exporting ones, but judges it commonly overstated. His decisive addition to foreign-trade multiplier analysis is the acceleration principle: expanding export industries call forth machinery, steel, and construction, a fresh investment demand that outweighs the replacement demand lost in shrinking sectors. Where prior protection ran very high, he allows devaluation over deflation; his caution is reversed against excessive speed, which would overstrain investment-goods capacity. The horizon is OEEC integration, with inner and outer circles of participation.
Therefore the removal of trade barriers, if carried out not too slowly and faint-heartedly, will bestow prosperity upon the industries which produce investment goods.
How much of Keynes’s system survives when its analytical tools are rebuilt? In this 1955 article, Emil Kauder examines revisions from within Keynes-influenced economics rather than announcing its defeat. His examples give reconstruction a concrete meaning: consumption depends on accustomed living standards and social comparison, while spending intended to support employment can generate cyclical disturbances or encounter productive bottlenecks. Kauder asks what these refinements gain in explanatory power—and what they lose in universal applicability and predictive confidence. His distinctive assessment separates changing techniques from enduring commitments: the possibility of equilibrium without full employment and the preservation of a market economy through public stabilization. Readers can discover why criticism of particular Keynesian mechanisms need not amount to rejection of Keynes’s central problem.
Can devaluation cure a trade deficit? The mid-century answer split into two camps, and this 1955 article refuses to let either win outright. Against Sidney Alexander's claim that his 'income-absorption' approach supersedes the older elasticities method, Machlup grants the weaknesses of relative-price reasoning — supply and demand curves for foreign exchange shift once devaluation changes costs and incomes — but shows that the accounting identity Y ≡ A + B, however clarifying, is no causal theory. Alexander's gravest omission is resource reallocation: devaluation can raise real income by moving resources into more valuable uses, an effect no marginal propensity to absorb can capture. Reasoning from identities, Machlup warns, tempts the analyst into implicit theorizing. Neither set of tools can be spared; both relative prices and aggregate spending are needed.
The trade balance is negative when the nation absorbs more than its income.
We encounter people directly, but how do we encounter a friendship, an institution, or society itself? In this essay, reprinted in 1967, Alfred Schütz examines how tangible things make present what lies beyond immediate experience. His phenomenological approach distinguishes reminders, indications, and signs from symbols that connect everyday life with such different provinces of meaning as religion, art, and science. The central tension is reciprocal: individuals inherit socially established meanings, yet symbols also enable them to apprehend the collectivities to which they belong. By separating these kinds of reference, Schütz gives readers a precise way to ask how shared meanings support communication without erasing differences of perspective—and why the same representation can sustain belonging for one group while provoking disagreement in another.
Between apriorism and a crude empiricism that would test every assumption in isolation, Machlup marks out a middle path for what 'verification' can mean in economics. He lowers the stakes deliberately: verification is not access to final truth but a disciplined comparison between what a theory implies and what inquiry discloses. His pivotal distinction separates particular historical propositions, checkable directly, from general hypotheses that yield conclusions only when joined to auxiliary assumptions about conditions and change. Fundamental postulates such as rational action need no independent sense-verification; they make conduct intelligible and are judged by the fruitfulness of the systems they support. Steering past both Misesian apriorism and Hutchison-style ultra-empiricism, and drawing on physics, Einstein, and Braithwaite, he holds that economics stays empirically disciplined while a hypothesis, at most, survives as not disconfirmed.
The hypothesis is confirmed if reasonable correspondence is found between the deduced and the observed, or more correctly, if no irreconcilable contradiction is found between the deduced and the observed.
That the United States had become the world's most prosperous nation was, by 1955, a fact no one contested; what puzzled Mises was why so many treated that abundance as a crime to be redistributed rather than an achievement to be explained. Reviewing William E. Rappard's study, he accepts its four causes—mass production, applied science, the passion for productivity, competition—but drives them toward a single Austrian conclusion: American wealth was not extracted from poorer nations but built at home through capital accumulation. Better tools, plants, and mines raise the marginal productivity of labor, and technical know-how is worthless where saving is discouraged and property insecure. Against Marx, Keynes, and the anti-saving doctrines of the New Economics, he makes the secret plain—prosperity is accumulated, never seized.
America is prosperous because its people wanted prosperity and resorted to policies fitted to the purpose.
Gold seemed the one balance-of-payments figure a statistician could trust: physically definite, internationally traded, central to gold-standard theory. Applying a single reciprocal test — country A's reported gold exports to B should match B's reported imports from A — Morgenstern finds the trust misplaced. For the United Kingdom, United States, Germany, France, and Canada in 1900, 1907, 1928, and 1935, the paired ratios refuse to cluster near unity and sometimes turn absurd, worst of all in the classical gold-standard years. Earmarking, transit trade, misclassification of gold and silver, and traveler-carried coin all corrupt the record, and no scientific ground exists for preferring one nation's figures over another's. If the best-looking data are this poor, he warns, a sound theory cannot rest on them — and trade statistics are likely worse still.
There is no reason why, say, an American economist or a man from Mars should prefer one set of these statistics over the others.
How can ethnology compare cultures across continents without flattening them into evolutionary stages or freezing them into isolated culture areas? Composed in 1945 and published a decade later, this methodological essay answers by way of source criticism: ethnographic “facts” are produced through uneven encounters between observers who differ in patience, language, and purpose, and cannot be treated as interchangeable units. Thurnwald credits the culture-circle theory of Gräbner, Ankermann, and Schmidt with recognizing diffusion, yet rejects its rigid Kulturkreis schemata; he embraces Malinowski’s functionalism for attending to living institutions, then faults it for excluding history. Insisting that no single continent suffices for developmental history, he treats subsistence — hunting, hoe agriculture, pastoralism, seafaring — as the engine of hierarchy and assimilation, and makes cultural history a form of human self-knowledge.
Wir dürfen uns diese Vorgänge nicht statisch vorstellen, sondern im ganzen dynamischen Ablauf.
English translation: “We must not conceive these processes statically, but in their entire dynamic course.”
A currency may buy goods without giving its holder freedom to choose what to buy. This distinction anchors Richard Kerschagl’s 1955 article on convertibility and economic organization. Ration cards provide his concrete test: when purchasing requires a personal entitlement as well as money, equal nominal incomes no longer confer equal command over goods. Kerschagl argues that monetary rules cannot function independently of the institutions governing production, credit, and trade. Yet his criticism of intervention does not become a blanket rejection of transitional arrangements: multilateral clearing, including the European Payments Union, can help advance convertibility. The article offers a way to distinguish restrictions that diminish money’s general usefulness from arrangements that may widen it, making convertibility a question of economic freedom and institutional compatibility rather than exchange technique alone.