3,422 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Fewer corporate groups need not make consolidated accounts a less pressing question. That distinction anchors Helene Lieser’s brief 1938 review of Artur Wisswedel’s Konzern und Konzernsteuerrecht. She welcomes its compact, orderly treatment of consolidated balance sheets despite what she describes as a tendency toward reduced group formation or dissolution. Her notice records a precise evaluative priority—clarity on a still-current accounting question—rather than assessing Wisswedel’s specific legal arguments.
What makes a legal treatise useful to readers abroad? In this brief review of Guido Bortolotto’s Diritto del lavoro, Helene Lieser singles out the connection between coherent exposition and accessible legal sources. She notes its precise scope—private employment-contract law, with public labour law reserved for a separate volume—and approves its combination of references to statutes and decisions with reproduced legislation and collective agreements. Rather than debating particular doctrines, Lieser offers a compact assessment of how the book equips its readers, grounding her recommendation to foreign readers in its organization and documentary support.
How should banking scholarship explain liquidity regulation without concealing its difficulties or overstating its dangers? In this brief review of Helmut Burchard’s study of German and Swiss banking law, Helene Lieser praises precisely that balance. Her concern is the quality of exposition rather than the merits of individual legal provisions: clear organization, measured judgment, and historical, statistical and bibliographical support that does not overwhelm the discussion. The review offers a concise glimpse of her standards for scholarship intended to make recent banking legislation intelligible beyond a narrow specialist readership.
What makes a statistical reference usable beyond its country of origin? In this brief 1938 review of Tabellen en Grafieken betreffende de Nederlandsche Conjunctuur, Helene Lieser singles out English labelling alongside tabulated business-cycle data and free semiannual updates. Her notice offers a practical appraisal of accessibility and maintenance, rather than a methodological critique: readers discover how this Dutch publication helped users unfamiliar with the language find their way through economic statistics and keep them current.
For Fritz Machlup, brevity in an economics textbook need not mean theoretical impoverishment. His 1938 review of Richard von Strigl’s Einführung in die Grundlagen der Nationalökonomie contrasts the flood of American elementary textbooks with German-language introductions weighed down by bibliographies and footnotes. Strigl offers a different teaching model: supply and demand by page two, and a compact treatment linking roundabout production to wage-fund and marginal-productivity theories. Machlup’s praise makes clear what he values in introductory instruction—rapid access to analytical tools rather than scholarly apparatus. His notice of Strigl’s politically delicate discussion of the “common good,” including its use to justify protection and subsidies for particular groups, also shows how he connects accessible economic teaching with scrutiny of policy claims.
Kerschagl's 1938 inaugural lecture surveys Austria's contribution to modern economics as both doctrinal history and methodological self-portrait, and its verdict is pointed: scientific economics on Austrian soil begins not with cameralism or mercantilism but with the marginal-utility school. Menger supplies the foundations of subjective value and imputation; Böhm-Bawerk extends them into capital, interest, and taxation; Wieser gives the theory a broader social cast—before Mises, Hayek, Schumpeter, Morgenstern, and Haberler enlarge the field. What unites them, he argues, is not uniform doctrine but an elastic analytical core, and he plays down the Methodenstreit with the German historical school as an exaggerated quarrel. Universalist organic economics, associated with Spann, earns cautious respect: valuable for recalling economists to society, but unable to replace causal explanation with metaphysical totality.
Die Ökonomie kann daher auch selbstverständlich keine größere Sicherheit bieten, als eben die beschränkte der Erfahrung selbst.
English translation: “Economics can therefore of course offer no greater certainty than the limited certainty of experience itself.”
National Socialism cannot be grasped as mere immorality, propaganda, or institutional power; it is a religious phenomenon, and a satanic force cannot be beaten by ethics and humanity alone. From that 1938 provocation Voegelin builds a morphology of sacred-political symbols reaching back to Echnaton's Aton cult, where a world-god and god-son king bind cosmos and empire. His decisive concept is the Realissimum: whatever is experienced as holy becomes the most real center around which collective life crystallizes. When secularization lets worldly contents — people, race, class, nation — swell until God vanishes behind them, these become innerworldly apocalypses, and the Führer becomes the point at which the sacred substance of the people speaks. Judged from a Christian standpoint, such divinization of collectives is apostasy.
Wo immer ein Wirkliches im religiösen Erlebnis sich als ein Heiliges zu erkennen gibt, wird es zum Allerwirklichsten, zum Realissimum.
English translation: “Wherever a reality reveals itself in religious experience as a sacred one, it becomes the most real of all, the realissimum.”
Does the equality of saving and investment express an economic fact, or follow from how the terms are defined? In this brief 1938 reply, Gottfried Haberler challenges Copeland’s claim that consistent definitions necessarily produce equality, while defending Robertson’s terminology against an alleged contradiction. His approach is neither to reject accounting identities nor to impose one vocabulary, but to distinguish what definitions establish from what requires economic explanation. The concrete test is timing: today’s earned income is not the same as today’s disposable income when the latter means yesterday’s earnings. Following this distinction, readers can see how spending from hoards or newly created money enters the account—and how shifting the meaning of “income” can manufacture a contradiction.
The vocabulary of freedom, Hayek warns, has been turned inside out — "liberalism" now names the restrictions that collectivists promise will free men from want. Written on the eve of war and anticipating The Road to Serfdom, this Chicago pamphlet argues that comprehensive planning threatens the liberties it claims to enlarge. Its logic is institutional, not conspiratorial: directing all economic life requires agreement on a ranked scale of social ends that plural societies simply lack, so planners must impose values and then manufacture belief in them. Prices, by contrast, combine dispersed knowledge no single mind commands. Because whoever controls the means controls the ends they serve, economic dictatorship cannot stay merely economic — propaganda and the suppression of dissent become essential parts of the system. Only competitive capitalism, he contends, keeps democracy from having to decide everything, and so from destroying itself.
Freedom and liberalism have become terms that are used to describe the exact opposite of their historic meaning.
Agreement that society should be more just does not settle whose needs should take precedence when resources are scarce. In this 1938 article, republished in 1997, Friedrich August von Hayek makes that gap central to his critique of comprehensive economic planning. He acknowledges the socialist ambition to enlarge freedom, but argues that centrally directing individual activities requires a ranking of purposes on which democratic citizens cannot agree. Delegating decisions to experts cannot resolve this conflict of values; in his account, it instead encourages unchecked authority and the suppression of dissent. The article offers a pointed connection between economic allocation and intellectual liberty: readers can examine why Hayek regards disagreement not as an obstacle to social reason, but as one of its necessary conditions.
If saving and investment are equal by definition, what can their equality explain? In this 1938 essay, Gottfried Haberler separates an accounting identity from the monetary processes and changing plans that business-cycle theory must explain. His engagement with Keynes is discriminating: he accepts the saving–investment identity while challenging its use as an explanation of adjustment. The same concern for conceptual precision shapes his treatment of national income as a welfare measure. More medical spending need not mean better health, and government services cannot all be counted alike without risking duplication or misleading valuation. Readers can discover why welfare appraisal, causal explanation, and statistical estimation require different definitions—and why a discrepancy between measured saving and investment need not establish economic disequilibrium.
Every government that gathered at Geneva professed the Cobdenite creed that commerce breeds peace; every government, called to concrete concessions, reached instead for the tariff, the quota, and the bargaining duty. Delivered as the Cobden Lectures at the London School of Economics in February 1938, these three lectures reconstruct two decades of League conferences—Brussels, Genoa, the bold 1927 resolution to halt and reverse the rise of tariffs, the wrecked London gathering of 1933—and ask why they failed. Rappard sorts the protectionist arguments by purpose rather than chronology, weighing infant-industry claims and agrarian defenses, and locates the deepest cause not in ignorance or private greed but in the fear of war, which drove nations toward autarky. From Geneva, he warns, no honest message of optimism can come.
Thus those who could, will not, and those who would, cannot.