3,015 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
A diagram can show how prices and quantities depend on one another without explaining the social relations they express. This distinction guides Emil Lederer’s 1927 review of Enrico Barone’s theoretical economics in its German edition. Lederer welcomes Barone’s graphical method as training in rigorous thought, yet questions what equilibrium analysis leaves unexplained. His treatment of interest makes the objection concrete: capital’s capacity to yield a surplus does not by itself explain why interest exists. Neither rejecting formal theory nor accepting its explanatory sufficiency, Lederer asks readers to recover the economic circumstances behind its constructions. This short review offers a precise account of what mathematical discipline can contribute to economic understanding—and why it needs historical and social interpretation alongside it.
A history of capitalism can open new questions without adequately explaining the processes it describes. This distinction governs Schumpeter’s 1927 review of the third volume of Werner Sombart’s Der moderne Kapitalismus, here republished in 1954. Schumpeter values Sombart’s historical synthesis while testing its categories against economic mechanisms: does a vivid portrait of entrepreneurs explain their function, and does business concentration necessarily improve efficiency? His counterexample of bank-led combinations preserving inefficient firms makes the stakes concrete. The review offers a revealing encounter between historical construction and causal analysis, showing why Schumpeter regards entrepreneurship, credit creation, and cyclical movement as connections an account of capitalist development cannot leave unresolved. Its criticism also preserves a distinction easily lost in scholarly disputes: theoretical weaknesses need not cancel a work’s historical value.
Industrial capitalism, in Emil Lederer’s account, threatens the family and village solidarities that earlier conquests of China had left intact. Yet their disruption also creates new possibilities for collective action through factories, unions, student organizations, and a political party. Writing in 1927, Lederer asks what makes this upheaval more than another cycle of dynastic collapse. His distinctive emphasis falls on the social foundations of state power: how people secure livelihoods, acquire education, and organize beyond inherited obligations. The Kuomintang’s coalition of workers, intellectuals, and nationalist business interests becomes a test of whether new solidarities can sustain public authority despite sharpening class conflict. Read as a contemporary interpretation rather than a settled history, the article offers a concrete account of the connections Lederer draws between industrialization, political organization, and China’s capacity to resist foreign domination.
Compulsory protection against sickness, accident, invalidity, and old age marked, for Lederer, something historically new: neither charity nor the older law shielding workers at the bench, but the incorporation of wage earners into state-organized security. He traces its origins to Bismarck's conservative answer to socialist agitation and the Sozialistengesetz, weighs Brentano's liberal objections, and identifies compulsion as the decisive innovation that voluntary mutual aid could never supply. Comparative chapters set Britain's approved societies against Soviet Russia's employer-financed system; accident insurance, he argues, matters most where it shifts industrial risk onto the Berufsgenossenschaften. After the war, inflation and mass unemployment loosen the tie between contribution and benefit, turning insurance into public provision. Part of the Grundriss der Sozialökonomik, the chapter reads social insurance through a set of durable oppositions: insurance versus provision, compulsion versus the self-administration of the insured.
Mit Recht sieht man in der Unfallverhütung ein volkswirtschaftlich wichtigeres Ziel als in der Unfallentschädigung.
English translation: “Accident prevention is rightly regarded as an economically more important goal than accident compensation.”
Classical economists had shown a general glut impossible and crises probably intrinsic to capitalism; it was Juglar who transformed the puzzle by revealing crises as one phase of a broader cyclical movement. Reviewing Pigou's Industrial Fluctuations, Schumpeter distinguishes seasonal swings, the business cycle, long waves, and secular trend, then presses past Pigou's many-sided survey of causes toward a single center. His answer is innovation, new combinations in products, methods, markets, and organization that cannot be reached by marginal steps, clustering because one entrepreneur's success draws imitators into a swarm called prosperity, with depression the forced readjustment that follows. Bank credit supplies the mechanism: purchasing power created before the goods exist, forced saving, then self-deflation as loans are repaid. Against Hawtrey he denies the cycle is merely monetary.
Our science is past its childhood, but has not reached its manhood yet.
No single economic doctrine, this textbook insists, can honestly be presented as the last word; the older theories remain indispensable for understanding the present. So Kerschagl leads beginners through the whole succession—mercantilism and physiocracy, Smith and Ricardo, the German historical school and the Methodenstreit, utopian and Marxian socialism, the socialization schemes of interwar Vienna, and the Austrian marginal utility school of Menger, Wieser and Böhm-Bawerk with its problem of imputation. Money theory runs from Bodin's early quantity doctrine through the Currency and Banking controversy to chartalism and metallism, and the closing chapters take up Spann's universalism, Cassel, Liefmann, Pesch's Catholic solidarism and Keynes on the end of laissez-faire. Here in its second unchanged edition, it treats the economy as a means to higher human ends, never an end in itself.
Nur wer die Dogmen der Volkswirtschaftslehre kennt, kennt überhaupt „Volkswirtschaftslehre“.
English translation: “Only he who knows the doctrines of economics knows "economics" at all.”
Theory is not a worldview to be defended but a technique of thought, to be practiced like a language before one can join the conversation, and this conviction drives Schumpeter's introduction to the German translation of Barone's Grundzüge der theoretischen Nationalökonomie. German economics, he argues, has spent too long treating theory as philosophy divided into warring systems; what it needs is disciplined training, and Barone's elementary, elegant textbook is built for exactly that. He situates Barone in the Walrasian line running through Pareto, praises his handling of the monopoly problem over Cassel's, and credits him with the step beyond the older marginal-utility form toward an equilibrium system grounded in acts of choice. Barone matters here less as an original researcher than as the master of a lucid initiation into the discipline's working apparatus.
Denn der Lehrer Barone hat dem Forscher Barone in diesem Buch einen unerbittlichen Kappzaum aufgeschnallt. Stets — und mitunter mehr als mir zweckmäßig erscheint — wird das Maximum von Einfachheit angestrebt.
English translation: “For in this book the teacher Barone has strapped an unrelenting curb-bit on the researcher Barone. Always—and at times more than seems expedient to me—the maximum of simplicity is aimed at.”
Modest to a fault, scrupulous in crediting predecessors, radical enough to have been imprisoned, and late to the discipline he transformed, Knut Wicksell is, for Schumpeter, not the founder of a school but a living workshop of modern analysis. This introduction to Wicksell's final essay, nominally a review of Bowley's textbook, turns the Swede's very refusal of polished closure into a virtue: the reader watches the machinery of a researching mind at work. Schumpeter traces how Wicksell inserted Böhm-Bawerkian capital theory into a Walrasian system and advanced money, credit, and price theory, insisting that true originality proceeds only from inherited instruments. The essay's climax is price formation under limited competition and multiple monopoly, a burning problem in Wicksell's word, pointing toward a general price theory in which perfect competition is merely one special case.
Die in diesen Punkten in der Tat nicht ganz befriedigenden Darlegungen Bowleys kritisierend hat uns Wicksell Saatkörner hinterlassen, die reiche Ernte bringen können, wenn man sie nur zu nehmen versteht.
English translation: “In criticizing Bowley's expositions—in these points indeed not entirely satisfying—Wicksell has left us seed-grains that can yield a rich harvest, if only one knows how to take them.”
If labour and capital jointly produce a good, how can their separate contributions be valued? In this reply to Willem Valk, first published in 1927, Joseph A. Schumpeter defends marginal productivity theory by separating physical cooperation from variation at the margin. His distinctive concern is to dissolve a misleading rivalry: tracing the value of productive resources back to consumer goods and explaining factor prices through market exchange are, he argues, compatible procedures. The reply also confronts a concrete difficulty—machines and acquired skills cannot be freely recombined overnight. By distinguishing adjustment periods and examining what counts as a small change in inputs, Schumpeter shows where he believes the theory answers objections and where indivisibilities demand more specific analysis.
Since Böhm-Bawerk, the interest problem had seemed to demand a single answer: capital yields interest because men systematically undervalue future wants. This 1927 essay refuses that psychological premise. Reframing the question, Hayek argues that the puzzle is not why present goods outrank the future products made from them, but why longer and shorter production processes are not extended until their yields carry equal value. Because time-consuming, roundabout methods raise physical output, such equalization would perversely require the larger future stock to fall below the present one in marginal utility. Drawing on Wieser, Mayer, Schönfeld and Strigl, he insists that whole temporal plans of provision, not isolated utility comparisons, govern intertemporal choice—and that interest belongs to static equilibrium, dissolving the 'dynamic' theories that treat it as an anomaly.
Macht die Böhm-Bawerksche Formulierung des Kapitalzinsproblemes die Annahme einer Minderschätzung künftiger Bedürfnisse unvermeidlich?
English translation: “Does Böhm-Bawerk's formulation of the problem of interest on capital make the assumption of an underestimation of future wants unavoidable?”
Mahr rejects the classical specie-flow orthodoxy: gold movements are too small and mistimed to explain how international claims and liabilities rebalance. Writing from interwar Vienna in 1927, amid reparations, hyperinflation, and violent currency swings, he fuses Angell's credit-volume theory with Wieser's account of the balance of payments as the sum of individual payment balances, deriving external equilibrium from the interdependence of debtors, creditors, and domestic-only actors. Inflation is the great disruptor, swelling nominal purchasing power that spills into foreign goods and securities; against Cassel and Keynes he denies that purchasing-power parity governs the exchanges, insisting the causation often runs the other way. Speculation, he argues from the Austrian crown and the wartime mark, is no mere forecast but itself a cause—capable of igniting fresh inflation.
Andererseits ist die Erkenntnis, daß die fortgesetzte Inanspruchnahme der Notenpresse zur Deckung eines staatlichen Defizits unweigerlich zur Kurswertsenkung führt, heutzutage wohl schon Gemeingut der ganzen Welt.
English translation: “On the other hand, the insight that the continued resort to the printing press to cover a state deficit inevitably leads to a fall in the exchange rate is today probably common knowledge throughout the world.”
Statistical usefulness need not depend on new findings. In this brief 1928 review of Die deutschen Banken 1924 bis 1926, Helene Lieser credits the German Statistical Office with bringing scattered banking figures into an intelligible whole. She distinguishes the compilation’s merits from claims to originality: its material comes from existing publications and business reports, while its tables and graphics make that evidence accessible to wider audiences. The review offers a concise example of Lieser’s evaluative priorities—attention to the scope of banking statistics, their sources, and the practical value of their presentation.