3,187 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Monetary nationalism promised escape: independent paper currencies, variable parities, and wide gold points that would seal a national economy off from foreign shocks. That promise, Hayek argues in this contribution to The Economist's debate over a future international order, is a delusion — real international adjustment cannot be evaded, only redirected, and discretionary depreciation breeds fresh conflict. Yet gold too is defective, since shifts in the demand for gold can inflict grave disturbances. His resolution treats fixed parity as a coordinating rule rather than mere attachment to metal, and proposes regulating gold-exchange reserves — central banks' realizable claims on other currencies — with a body such as the Bank for International Settlements varying the permitted ratio to offset gold's swings while leaving national reserves intact.
If an international standard is wanted, the gold standard, in spite of its undeniable defects, is the only practical choice.
Was the Depression an exceptional disruption, or did ordinary business cycles continue beneath it? In this brief, author-prepared summary, Schumpeter distinguishes the downturn’s cyclical shape from its catastrophic severity. He proposes three overlapping cycles rather than a single wave, interpreting the descent to August 1932 and the ensuing recovery through their coinciding depressive phases. Yet he assigns the catastrophe’s intensity to outside disturbances, including what he regards as mistaken efforts to stabilize “prosperity plateaus.” The distinctive interest is this boundary between cyclical explanation and policy judgement: Schumpeter sketches how theory, historical evidence, and statistics might identify an underlying movement without claiming that it alone explains the disaster.
A unified unemployment policy need not mean a single remedy. In this 1935 paper, Karl Pribram asks which forms of joblessness can be insured, which demand public relief, and which call for investment to restart production. His distinctive combination of confidence in capitalist recovery and support for loan-financed public works turns on the purposes of expenditure: projects intended to revive basic industries should not be judged simply by how many people they employ directly. He likewise separates calculable unemployment risks from the unpredictable scale of cyclical losses. Readers encounter a concrete argument about institutional responsibility—why employers and workers should pool some risks, why taxpayers should bear others, and why stimulating recovery differs from meeting immediate hardship.
What would count as reliable evidence about Soviet economic planning? In this 1935 foreword to Boris Brutzkus’s Economic Planning in Soviet Russia, reprinted in 1997, Hayek argues that neither political detachment nor firsthand observation is enough. An investigator must distinguish specifically Russian conditions from effects of the economic system—and understand what planning is supposed to accomplish. His endorsement of Brutzkus turns on this combination of theoretical clarity, knowledge of Russian agriculture, and access to internal Soviet discussions rather than material prepared for foreign audiences. The foreword offers a compact view of Hayek’s standards of economic inquiry: readers can see why he regards Brutzkus’s early analysis and subsequent historical investigation as mutually reinforcing, while recognizing that the detailed evidence belongs to the book he introduces.
A practical guide to foreign-exchange controls can clarify the law without replacing its study. That distinction anchors Helene Lieser’s brief 1935 review of Albrecht Buschke’s account of German exchange regulations. She values its independent exposition, rather than reproduction of statutory texts, for practitioners who encounter the system only occasionally. Her measured endorsement offers a precise criterion for judging such handbooks: whether they orient newcomers toward the legal sources they still need to consult. The review assesses the usefulness of an explanation, not the economic merits of the controls themselves.
Knowing where a tax truly lands, this 1935 treatise argues, must precede any judgment of tax policy. Engländer separates two domains of public finance—general tax theory and the theory of tax shifting—and grounds the obligation to pay not in any equivalence between tax and state service but in the value of the organized community itself. Tracing incidence through his own price theory, he reaches a pointed conclusion: a consumption tax does not merely burden consumers but, by curbing their spending elsewhere, drives down other producers' returns until it merges with the workings of direct taxation. From the Bernoulli-Bentham law of sacrifice he derives progressive rates and exemption of the subsistence minimum, then rejects every single-tax scheme in favor of a system that combines direct and indirect taxes to satisfy competing principles at once.
Nicht die Kaufkraft der Einkommen vermindert sich, sondern indem ein besonderes Staatseinkommen aus Steuern auftritt, vermindern sich die anderen Einkommen.
English translation: “It is not the purchasing power of incomes that diminishes; rather, as a distinct state income from taxes arises, the other incomes diminish.”
Cartelization means isolated planning—that judgment anchors this comparative study of European collective monopolies, written at the Brookings Institution as the United States debated its National Recovery Administration. A cartel, for Pribram, is defined not by its legal form but by its price policy: whether it stabilizes prices, allocates markets, and restrains output to convert competitive uncertainty into administrative allocation. Cartels flourish, he argues, not from industrial maturity but from weak, overbuilt, contracting markets, where the home market comes to look like a fixed quantity to be apportioned; the German movement before and after 1914 supplies his central evidence. Their planning is sectional, privileging producer security over consumer interest and market entry—order, but partial and self-interested, and likely to aggravate the very crises it claims to tame.
The real touchstone enabling the observer to arrive at an adequate understanding of the exact nature of cartels is the price policy they pursue on the controlled markets.
By 1935 Austria's authoritarian state had declared itself built 'auf ständischer Grundlage,' and this concise official guide maps what that meant in practice. Bayer walks through the emerging apparatus of corporatism estate by estate—agriculture, the public service, the Gewerkschaftsbund of workers and employees, and the parallel employer federations for industry, trades, commerce, transport, finance, and the free professions. His argument is made through correspondence: each workers' Berufsverband is to face a structurally matching employer body, so that collective bargaining, consultation, and arbitration can be regularized into 'Arbeitsfrieden' and class antagonism replaced by supervised parity. Membership is nominally voluntary, yet agreements bind all; leaders rise from local units even as ministers keep decisive powers of appointment. The result is Austrofascist ideology translated into concrete administrative machinery for absorbing labour and capital into supervised public structures.
Eine der größten Gefahren der berufständischen Ordnung wäre eine Abschließung der Berufstände gegeneinander; dies würde nichts anderes bedeuten, als daß an Stelle des Egoismus des einzelnen der Gruppenegoismus der Berufszweige treten würde.
English translation: “One of the greatest dangers of the occupational-corporative order would be a sealing-off of the occupational estates against one another; this would mean nothing less than that the group egoism of the occupational branches would take the place of the egoism of the individual.”
Out of the collision and layering of ethnically distinct groups—Überschichtung—Thurnwald derives the state, in this fourth volume tracing political form from egalitarian hordes, clans, and sibs up through sacral chieftainship, feudal tribute, caste, and rationalized despotism. Conquest, pastoral migration, and marriage, not kinship alone, generate rule. He rejects Freud's primal father-horde and Rousseau's unregulated state of nature, holds that society climbs no single ladder from simple to complex, and gathers cases from the Marind-anim of southern New Guinea to Norse Greenland and Polynesian sea-aristocracies. States may rise and vanish, he concludes, yet the knowledge won in building them is never wholly lost.
Der Klan ist eine Extremgestaltung, wobei politische, Kult- und Heirats-Organisation zusammenfallen.
English translation: “The clan is an extreme formation, in which political, cultic, and marriage organization coincide.”
Read through the political vocabulary of the Fascist “new state,” Pius XI's encyclical Quadragesimo anno becomes, in this 1935 tract, the moral principle that saves a corporative order from mere statism. Kerschagl presents Italian fascism as the force that overcame liberal weakness and socialist disorder—liberalism having atomized society into isolated individuals, socialism having overrun weak parliaments—and reads the Lateran settlement as proof that Church and regime can coexist when neither encroaches on the other's sphere. Fascism is redefined as organization: hierarchy, vocational grouping, and service to the whole, with freedom relocated from liberal autonomy to ordered incorporation. The encyclical's contribution, he argues, is a regulative principle the market cannot supply—social justice and social charity—binding both laissez-faire capitalism and class socialism to moral law.
Es soll gezeigt werden, daß ein faschistisches Programm ganz dem Geiste der großen Enzyklika entsprechen kann.
English translation: “It shall be shown that a Fascist program can fully correspond to the spirit of the great encyclical.”
Protecting workers against loss of income is not the same as preventing a depression. This distinction anchors Karl Pribram’s 1935 assessment of what American economic-security planners could learn from European social insurance. He treats compulsory insurance as an adaptation of individual risk-pooling to social purposes, crediting contributory schemes with replacing charity by legal claims while insisting on sound actuarial foundations. German arrangements show why different risks demand different financing and institutions; American unemployment proposals expose the danger of pools too narrow to balance favorable and unfavorable risks. The article’s distinctive tension lies between institutional autonomy and coordinated planning: readers can see how individually defensible schemes may together burden industry, and why broader coordination need not mean merging every risk into one fund.
Social insurance is the result of individualistic reasoning adapted to the needs of social objectives.
A government may collect abundant figures yet lack a coherent account of the economy it seeks to regulate. This is the difficulty Karl Pribram identifies in the New Deal’s statistical services. Drawing on his own work with the Austrian Statistical Yearbook and on German administrative practice, he argues that statistical organization reflects competing conceptions of society and the state. His comparison sharpens a practical distinction: coordinating departmental inquiries is not the same as integrating their findings. This short 1935 essay asks what American regulation requires beyond more tables—substantive economic training, stronger local observation, and an understanding of interdependence. It offers a concrete way to examine how administrative arrangements determine what governments can know, while leaving the New Deal’s institutional future open.