3,187 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
From Poggio Bracciolini's first sustained notice, through Enea Silvio Piccolomini's richly imagined portrait, to Louis Le Roy's culminating myth, Voegelin traces how Renaissance humanists built and handed down an image of Timur. The conqueror served in turn as proof that modern deeds could rival antiquity, as an emblem of fortuna balanced against Bajazid's fall, and finally as the violent founder-sign of a new cultural age, comparable to Alexander before Hellenism. Voegelin's method is to catalogue the recurring anecdotal elements—the humble origin, the sworn band of first companions, Ankara, the three tents, the claim to be God's wrath—and to show that their very selection, stripped of Mongol political history, is what lends the portraits their characterological force. Only widening knowledge of Oriental sources and source-critical philology finally dissolved the fixed image.
Das persönliche Charisma, die Schöpfung eines Bundes und die Steigerung der erobernden Vernichtung bis zur Idee einer Exekution des göttlichen Willens sind die innersten Sinngehalte, bis zu denen die Humanisten in ihrem Bild von Timur vordringen.
English translation: “Personal charisma, the creation of a covenant, and the intensification of conquering destruction into the idea of an execution of the divine will—these are the innermost layers of meaning to which the humanists penetrate in their image of Timur.”
Naturally among the poorest countries in Europe, yet per head the richest in capital: from this paradox Somary's ten theses, delivered at the University of Zurich in February 1937, unfold a warning to a small neutral state. Switzerland's fortune, he argues, rests on four centuries of peace and a liberal order that replaced power between states with achievement between individuals—an order now collapsing. The decisive modern conflict, he contends, lies not between liberalism and socialism but between a peace economy and a war economy, in which the sovereign consumer becomes a burden and bureaucratic allocation supplants the market. He tracks the exposure of Swiss creditors to German debts, condemns Britain's 1931 devaluation as a spreading contagion, and grounds the country's last defense in the inviolability of life, liberty, honor, and property.
Auf das dringendste muß gefordert werden, daß die Pandorabüchse der Abwertung endgültig versiegelt und künftig nie anders als bei Kriegsgefahr geöffnet werde.
English translation: “It must be demanded in the most urgent terms that the Pandora's box of devaluation be sealed once and for all, and henceforth never opened except in the event of the danger of war.”
Shell valuables in Buin can buy pigs and manufactured objects, but not ordinarily taro: money’s reach is a social arrangement, not a given. In this contribution to the 1939 edition of the Lehrbuch der Völkerkunde, Richard Thurnwald examines economic organization through kinship, customary obligation, prestige, and political dependence rather than monetary calculation alone. Reciprocal help complicates household self-sufficiency; chiefly generosity connects distribution with power. These cases let readers distinguish planning from market exchange and wealth from capital without assuming that economic purposes stand apart from religious or social life. Thurnwald’s attention to local valuations also sits uneasily beside his hierarchical civilization language and racial and biologized assumptions—a tension that marks the limits of his account of economic diversity.
Wir sind es ja, die einzelne Tätigkeiten als „wirtschaftlich“ bezeichnen und herausheben.
English translation: “It is we, after all, who designate and single out particular activities as "economic.”
How can practitioners find their way through four major laws, five implementing regulations and hundreds of administrative circulars? In this brief 1937 review of Alfred Etscheit, Alexander Etscheit and Otto Böhmer’s Handbuch des Devisenrechts, Helene Lieser judges the handbook by its usefulness in navigating German foreign-exchange law. She singles out its organization by factual situations, supported by an introduction that directs readers to the relevant provisions. Her concern is practical access rather than the merits of exchange controls: even practitioners abroad, she observes, benefit from these coordinated finding aids. The review offers a compact example of legal criticism attentive to how readers actually consult a reference work.
In two sentences, Helene Lieser’s 1937 review places a colonial source collection’s political purpose beside a brief favourable appraisal. She quotes Ernst Gerhard Jacob’s declared aim of equipping speakers, youth leaders and political instructors to demand the restoration of German colonial possessions, then notes its wealth of interesting material. The revealing contrast is between that mobilizing rhetoric, which casts colonial loss as an affront to national honour, and Lieser’s narrowly informational judgement. This short notice lets readers examine that juxtaposition without mistaking it for a developed argument about colonial policy or a critical assessment of Jacob’s sources.
Strip away its empirical content, and equilibrium theory is merely a "Pure Logic of Choice" — true by definition, silent about the world. In this 1937 presidential address Hayek asks what must be assumed about the knowledge of separate minds before such analysis can say anything causal. Equilibrium, he argues, means the compatibility of individual plans through time, and "correct foresight" is not a premise added from outside but the very thing equilibrium describes. The familiar appeal to a perfect market merely disguises omniscience as market form. What economics neglects is the division of knowledge — as fundamental as the division of labor — and the learning by which dispersed, situated fragments come into alignment. The essay marks Hayek's turn toward his mature account of markets as coordinators of knowledge no single mind could hold.
The situation seems here to be that before we can explain why people commit mistakes, we must first explain why they should ever be right.
Meant to arm the reader against vulgar economic slogans and the reflexes of interest-group politics, this 1937 textbook compresses the secured foundations of economics into a single systematic course. Strigl begins from the free-market price as a selective mechanism, builds through diminishing returns, the Malthusian population law and its qualification by capital and technical progress, and marginal productivity as the key to wages and distribution. Capital enters as roundabout production and a subsistence fund, interest as the marginal product of capital-time. The later chapters carry the apparatus into money and the gold standard, the credit-driven boom and its Harvard-barometer crisis, tax shifting, comparative costs and the case against protection, and finally the socialist calculation problem. Throughout he insists that economics studies the consequences of measures and must never prescribe political ends.
Eine Darstellung wirtschaftlicher Zusammenhänge muß sich gegenüber allen Fragen der Politik neutral verhalten.
English translation: “A presentation of economic relationships must remain neutral with respect to all questions of policy.”
What makes a legal compilation useful? In this brief 1937 review of Erich Bohley and Hermann Krutsch’s Das Sparkassenrecht in Bayern, Helene Lieser values the consolidation of scattered legal sources rather than a novel interpretation. She singles out its inclusion of previously unpublished implementation decisions alongside Reich and state provisions, and notes its treatment of national banking legislation’s effects on savings banks. Her concise verdict identifies the practical basis for her praise: making Bavarian savings-bank law accessible as a coherent overview.
What makes a legal handbook useful to laypeople as well as lawyers? In this brief 1937 review, Helene Lieser commends Franz Bachmayer’s guide to the judicial invalidation of documents under Austrian law for combining statutory provisions and highest-court decisions with an intelligible account of procedure. Her concise assessment identifies a practical standard for legal exposition: authoritative material must be accompanied by a clear explanation of how proceedings unfold.
Neither wealth in itself nor a lever that could hoist an economy out of distress from the monetary side alone, money and credit are for Bayer indispensable but strictly serving institutions. Cast as twenty-two questions for workers' education, this booklet moves from the emergence of money out of barter and the division of labour, through coinage, banknotes, and cashless giro payments, to banking, the credit market, the stock exchange, and the note bank's discount policy. Its governing norm is neutrality: currency serves best when it merely facilitates the course of the economy. From that standard Bayer dismisses the fashionable reform schemes of the day—index currency, and above all Silvio Gesell's depreciating 'Freigeld'—and reads the 1932 Wörgl experiment not as proof of shrinkage-money theory but as an unusual method of collecting municipal taxes, its losses falling on small traders.
Das Geld als Zahlungsmittel ist aber ebensowenig Kapital wie der elektrische Leitungsdraht elektrische Kraft ist.
English translation: “Money as a means of payment is no more capital than the electrical conducting wire is electrical power.”
An apparent glut of gold may be a problem of distribution rather than worldwide supply. In this brief 1937 letter to The Times, republished here in 2022, Friedrich August von Hayek brings preliminary London School of Economics research to bear on that distinction. He measures both accumulated monetary gold and annual production against the central-bank liabilities and paper currency they support, rather than treating rising quantities as self-explanatory. His figures temper alarm about global abundance while showing why concentration in Britain and the United States could produce a different impression. The letter offers a compact example of Hayek’s empirical caution: the observed increase is not necessarily alarming, but further production growth could make maintaining the gold price and preventing dangerous credit inflation difficult.
What makes a difficult banking law usable, especially for a foreign reader? In this brief 1937 review, Helene Lieser praises Hans Pröhl’s commentary for combining clear explanation with the documents needed to interpret the statute, including reporting guidelines and agreements on maximum deposit interest rates. Her assessment offers a precise distinction: she commends the commentary’s practical aids to understanding, not the law’s economic purposes or effects.