3,187 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
A central bank can be charged with protecting purchasing power while lacking authority over the wages, taxes, and public spending that help determine it. This mismatch drives Richard Kerschagl’s 1967 article. He treats interest rates and reserve requirements not as reliable levers but as instruments whose effects depend on business financing, confidence, and government policy: higher rates may even increase production costs. His proposed remedy is strikingly political—cabinet participation with veto rights over economic decisions and decisive influence on wage-price policy. Giving currency stability priority over full employment, Kerschagl nevertheless resists turning central banking into comprehensive economic planning. The article exposes the tension within that position: how much power over the wider economy can a guardian of monetary stability acquire without compromising the market order it seeks to preserve?
A law can be precisely written yet offer little lasting certainty if legislators can readily replace it. In this memorial address for Bruno Leoni, reprinted in 2013, Hayek explains why his friend’s account of law challenged his own thinking. He reads Leoni’s Freedom and the Law not as a simple demand to abolish legislation, but as an inquiry into qualities that judge-made and jurist-developed rules may preserve better: long-term stability and restraints that protect individual domains. Personal recollections and an explicitly limited knowledge of Leoni’s writings give the tribute its particular perspective. Readers encounter both an intellectual friendship and an unfinished question: how can law prevent injustice without becoming an instrument for directing people towards prescribed ends?
As to many other profound thinkers the task of the law was to him not so much to create justice as to prevent injustice.
Textbook models of perfect competition assume away the very thing real markets accomplish: because they presuppose that all relevant facts are already known, they make rivalry look wasteful and pointless. Hayek turns the objection around, arguing that competition earns its keep precisely as a discovery procedure, a way of eliciting information about scarcities, uses, and capacities that no participant or planner holds in advance. He reframes the market not as an economy governed by a single ranking of ends but as a catallaxy, a self-correcting order steered by negative feedback and price signals, whose value can be judged only by comparing societies rather than by predicting particular outcomes. Along the way he defends pattern prediction, rejects the language of equilibrium, and warns that incomes policy freezes adjustment exactly when circumstances demand movement.
But which goods are scarce goods, or which things are goods, and how scarce or valuable they are – these are precisely the things which competition has to discover.
Scholarly prestige, curial trust, and diplomatic office fused in a single man when the impoverished Austrian republic sent Ludwig von Pastor, the famous historian of the popes, as its envoy to the Holy See. Engel-Janosi's study of that 1920–28 mission argues that Pastor's fame gave a weakened state a Roman voice out of all proportion to its power: Cardinal Gasparri spoke to him with a freedom rarely extended to other heads of mission, making his dispatches a privileged source for Vatican thinking. Through them the interwar Curia appears anti-Versailles, conservative, intensely political, and suspicious of the postwar order, tempted by "providential" strongmen yet unwilling to surrender ecclesial independence. The narrative runs through the Roman Question, Fascism, South Tyrol, the Anima dispute, and the still-unsettled question of Anschluss.
Der Österreicher betont die Vorsicht und die Selbständigkeit dieses Papstes, auf den niemand, selbst kaum sein Staatssekretär Einfluß auszuüben scheint.
English translation: “The Austrian emphasizes the caution and the independence of this Pope, upon whom no one, scarcely even his Secretary of State, appears to exert influence.”
Inherited words—order, law, economy, democracy—make spontaneous social orders look like purposive organizations, and this 1968 essay in political semantics sets out to break their spell through a series of paired corrections: Kosmos against Taxis, spontaneous order against made arrangement; Nomos against Thesis, the universal rule of just conduct against the organizational command; Katallaxie against Wirtschaft, the market as a discovery procedure against the household writ large; and finally Demarchie against Demokratie. Only a Kosmos, Hayek insists, can sustain an open society among strangers who share no concrete ends, so 'social' or distributive justice—the justice of an organization—loses all meaning where no one distributes the results. The tract anticipates Law, Legislation and Liberty, turning the reform of language into a servant of liberal constitutionalism.
Wir wünschen die Meinung der Mehrheit als letzte Autorität, aber wir wollen nicht dulden, daß die nackte Gewalt der Mehrheit den einzelnen regellos Gewalt antut.
English translation: “We desire the opinion of the majority as the ultimate authority, but we do not want to tolerate that the naked power of the majority does violence to the individual in a rule-less manner.”
How can strangers who share no common purpose live together in peace? Not, this short lecture answers, by organizing them around shared aims, but only when they obey the same abstract rules while pursuing different ends. Hayek traces the passage from tribal closure, bound by common purposes, to the open Great Society, whose achievement is to generate order spontaneously and merely to furnish each individual with opportunities rather than prescribe his goals; Roman law and Christianity figure as forces that turned tribal rules into universal ones. The rules such a society needs are mainly negative, delimiting coercion rather than commanding ends—and the same principle, extended outward, is for Hayek the only real foundation of international peace, which no multiplication of international bodies can supply.
Die große Errungenschaft der offenen Großgesellschaft besteht darin, daß sie spontan Ordnung hervorbringen kann, dadurch daß die Individuen abstrakten Regeln gehorchen, das heißt, daß sie eine sich selbst bildende Ordnung ist.
English translation: “The great achievement of the open Great Society consists in its being able to bring forth order spontaneously through the fact that individuals obey abstract rules—that is, that it is a self-forming order.”
Honouring Leonard Read on his seventieth birthday, Hayek turns a tribute into a challenge to defenders of a free society: explain your case better rather than impugn your opponents’ motives. This 1968 speech, republished in 2013, links that obligation to Hayek’s account of civilisation as the unintended outcome of evolving moral and legal rules, whose functions may remain obscure even to those who depend on them. Its personal turn is especially revealing. Hayek admits that he initially regarded Read chiefly as a populariser, then came to recognise an original thinker whose everyday language concealed no lack of depth. The speech offers a compact encounter with Hayek’s defence of inherited institutions—and his recognition that making an argument intelligible can itself advance understanding.
Our chief task therefore must still be to improve the argument on which our case for a free society rests.
The Rio Agreement on Special Drawing Rights succeeded, on Machlup's reading, precisely because it refused to call a spade a spade: by avoiding contested words — credit, loan, reserve, repayment — it let France read SDRs as a repayable credit facility while Britain and America read them as new reserve assets. Reconstructing the negotiations among the IMF and the Group of Ten, he explains SDRs as a closed giro system among monetary authorities, money created by allocation rather than lending, whose acceptability rests on mutual willingness rather than collateral. He endorses the design while insisting on its limits: added liquidity works only indirectly, easing the pressure that pushes governments toward import restrictions and deflation, and it leaves the dollar overhang, gold speculation, and rigid exchange rates unresolved.
Money needs takers, not backers; the takers accept it, not because of any backing, but only because they count on others accepting it from them.
When Treasury Secretary Henry Fowler laid out his 1968 tax-reform agenda—exempt the poor, tax high incomes shielded by preferences, revisit estate and gift duties, curb tourists' spending abroad—Sennholz read compassion as compulsion. His counter-move is to redefine "the rich" not as idle hoarders but as businessmen and investors whose saving builds the factories and stores that employ the poor; to tax their capital, he argues, is to consume the very fund on which rising wages depend. He defends municipal-bond exemption as a constitutional shield for state borrowing, treats a proposed seventy-seven-percent estate levy as either demagoguery or socialism, and reads the curb on foreign travel as a police measure. Invoking Marshall's warning that the power to tax is the power to destroy, he joins economic, constitutional, and civil-libertarian objections to Great Society redistribution.
Taxing Peter to pay Paul has become a respectable way of life with countless pressure groups and their vociferous spokesmen in Congress.
Political thought stumbles because everyday language fuses what must be kept apart: grown orders with designed organizations, law with command, popular opinion with unlimited collective will. Presented here in translation of Hayek's 1967 essay, the lecture threads seven paired distinctions to clear the confusion, cosmos and taxis, nomos and thesis, articulated and non-articulated rules, opinion and will, nomocracy and teleocracy, catallaxy and economy, demarchy and democracy. A cosmos serves no single purpose and can marshal knowledge dispersed beyond any mind; a taxis is imposed toward chosen ends. Because a spontaneous order allocates nothing, social justice can have meaning only inside an organization. From these terms Hayek rebuilds liberal constitutionalism, proposing demarchy, popular authority over universal rules but not over particular outcomes, as the cure for factional, unlimited majority power.
The insight that not all order that results from the interplay of human actions is the result of design is indeed the beginning of social theory.
Reform is easy to want in rhetoric and costly to endure in fact—and that gap, Sennholz argues, is why electoral hope so reliably disappoints. Saving the dollar from inflation, he insists, cannot be a mere central-bank adjustment; it is a political willingness to let earlier errors be liquidated. Halting credit expansion would expose years of malinvestment, raise interest rates, depress stocks and bonds, and bring recession—the price of a sound currency. Drawing on Gustave Le Bon, he frames monetary reform as a moral problem before a technical one: laws only express popular ideas, and the public that cheers reform balks at its consequences. Because stabilization also strips unions of the inflationary cover for rigid wages, genuine reform would mean abolishing the National Labor Relations Board and restoring a market in labor—something he doubts any administration would endure.
Monetary stabilization means price stabilization, which is a fatal enemy of labor unions.
Scarcity sets the members of a species at odds, yet human beings escape that antagonism through the division of labor and peaceful exchange, so that the market becomes the standard form of interhuman relations. Against both anarchism and socialism, this 1968 essay argues that the market cannot defend itself and therefore needs the state—'a grim apparatus of coercion'—to restrain those who break the peace. But no middle sphere exists: talk of a friendly 'public sector' cannot fuse the two opposed principles of voluntary agreement and command. Planning does not merely administer production differently; it transfers the individual's power of choice to a central authority, demanding obedience from cradle to coffin. Mises ends categorically—the market economy is the only order tending toward the cheapest provisioning of consumers.
There is no conciliation between constraint and spontaneity.