3,422 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Profit-seeking, this comparative survey insists, is no natural law of economic life but a peculiarity of modern society. Ranging across Melanesia, Micronesia, East Africa, Sumer and archaic Babylon, Thurnwald treats economics not as mere food-getting but as a social system woven from household reciprocity, rank obligation, ritual, and the conservative force of tradition. He dismantles the tidy evolutionary sequence of hunting, pastoralism and agriculture, follows Edward Hahn in separating hoe from plough cultivation, and reads kula exchange, potlatch display, wergeld and temple redistribution as forms in which wealth circulates for prestige rather than gain. Against Max Weber he derives the Babylonian governor's estate from earlier temple administration, and against Carl Bücher he denies the self-sufficient manor. Capital first appears, he argues, in herds and standing crops.
A characteristic feature of primitive economics is the absence of any desire to make profits either from production or exchange.
A seventy-one-page pamphlet on price formation in the German scholarly antiquarian book trade, trailing a bibliography of theoretical works 'von Gossen bis Wicksell,' is exactly the mismatch of apparatus and achievement Hayek finds intolerable. His single-paragraph notice grants that the subject—rare, heterogeneous goods with widely dispersed valuations—could have been theoretically revealing, then denies that Bruck makes anything of it. The yield for price theory is meagre; the factual information is thinner than a regular reader of booksellers' catalogues could assemble unaided, especially on the two matters that would have mattered most: the movement of antiquarian prices over time and the 'Streuung' of simultaneous prices for identical works. The verdict is disciplinary—casual market observation, bibliographic display and genuine value theory are not the same thing, and Bruck has confused them.
Die preistheoretische Ausbeute ist recht mager.
English translation: “The yield for price theory is decidedly meagre.”
Reviewing Husserl's newly published Cartesian Meditations—still available only in French—Schütz reads it as an attempt to ground all philosophy in transcendental subjectivity, taking up Descartes's radical doubt while correcting its errors through the epoché and the phenomenological reduction. He follows Husserl's analyses of intentionality, the noetic-noematic correlation, and the transcendental ego as a monadic field structured by habitualities and passive genesis. Special weight falls on the difficult fifth meditation and its account of how the alter ego is constituted through appresentation and pairing, yielding an objective world valid for everyone. Schütz marks the work's transcendental idealism and its opposition to psychologism, points toward the tasks it opens for a phenomenologically grounded social science, and closes with the wish that Husserl make the book available to German readers.
„Gegenstände“ sind daher – in der reduzierten Sphäre sowohl als auch in der natürlichen Einstellung – nichts anderes als intentionale Korrelate ihrer Bewußtseinsweisen.
English translation: “Objects" are therefore – in the reduced sphere as well as in the natural attitude – nothing other than intentional correlates of their modes of consciousness.”
Statutes, reserve rules, and central-bank independence all fail, Strigl warns, against the one authority that can suspend them — the state itself. Written amid the crisis after 1929, as several central banks drifted back toward expansionary “accommodating” policy, this essay asks whether a currency can be secured against political manipulation rather than mere mismanagement. Its conceptual pivot is a reversal of Gresham’s law: where people are free to denominate contracts, wages, and credit in a sounder foreign currency, good money drives out bad, and depreciating money survives only through ignorance, habit, or coercion. Strigl’s remedy is not a new currency scheme but a legal one — treaties binding states never to prohibit a partner’s currency, creating an automatic and sensitive index of monetary health. A state that cannot outlaw the foreign money cannot inflate.
Der Geist der Zeit ist inflationistisch und manche Völker werden für ihre Heilung von währungspolitischen Irrtümern jetzt wieder schweres Lehrgeld zahlen müssen.
English translation: “The spirit of the age is inflationist, and some peoples will now once again have to pay dearly to be cured of their monetary-policy errors.”
Hermann Heinrich Gossen hoped his economic treatise would bring him the fame of Copernicus; its neglect instead led him to order the edition destroyed shortly before his death. In this brief encyclopedia entry, republished in 1937, Hayek sets that disappointment beside Gossen’s later recognition as a precursor of marginal-utility economics. His emphasis is precise: Gossen’s contribution lay in connecting diminishing satisfaction with the allocation of scarce resources and the explanation of subjective value. Readers can see how the choice between competing wants becomes a rule for maximizing satisfaction—and how the same reasoning extends to balancing productive effort against its burden. The entry offers a compact encounter with both an overlooked economist and the principles that made his work recognizable to later theorists.
Popular control need not produce radical change. In this signed encyclopedia contribution, William Emmanuel Rappard explains why Swiss referendums and initiatives have, in his judgement, served chiefly as conservative safeguards. He connects that political restraint to older patterns of social equality, cantonal autonomy, and collective executives whose members can remain in office despite voters’ rejection of their policies. His distinctive concern is the fit between institutions and the society sustaining them: federalism and neutrality accommodate linguistic and religious differences, while durable administration limits personal leadership. The account also acknowledges women’s exclusion from suffrage, qualifying Switzerland’s democratic reputation. Readers encounter a compact comparative argument about how popular supremacy can coexist with administrative continuity—and why constitutional arrangements alone cannot explain that balance.
Imports are always advantageous, exports only under certain circumstances: this asymmetry anchors Wilhelm Röpke’s brief account of Karl Heinrich Hagen’s contribution to trade theory. In this signed encyclopedia entry, republished in 1937, Röpke places Hagen between Adam Smith’s classical doctrines and the administrative concerns of older cameralism, then singles out his Cournot-influenced mathematical analysis of trade duties. The entry offers a compact introduction to an early German attempt to measure the effects of commercial policy—and a precise correction to its reception. Röpke rejects the claim that Hagen sometimes favoured import duties, distinguishing that mistaken reading from Hagen’s conditional assessment of exports.
A wool merchant who helped build banks and railroads also sought limits on Prussian absolutism. In this compact biographical encyclopedia entry, Wilhelm Röpke connects David Hansemann’s commercial initiatives with his constitutional politics: economic development required relief from political restraints. Yet the liberalism Röpke describes had definite boundaries—constitutional monarchy and strong representation for the propertied middle class, rather than democratic revolution. The entry offers a concise portrait of how institution-building in commerce and credit could accompany demands for political reform, without abandoning monarchy.
Hansemann was a moderate liberal, his objective a constitutional monarchy with strong representation for the propertied middle class.
More houses do not necessarily mean affordable homes. That distinction gives Karl Pribram’s European housing survey its critical edge. In this signed encyclopedia section, first published in 1932 and reprinted here in 1935, dwelling forms are inseparable from wages, land ownership, credit, and public finance. His comparisons expose the difficult economics of reform: rent controls protect tenants but can discourage maintenance; subsidies expand construction without necessarily putting new dwellings within workers’ reach; small houses require costly transport and infrastructure. Vienna’s municipal building and Germany’s subsidized expansion offer concrete tests of these tensions. Readers can discover why Pribram regards adequate housing as an enduring public responsibility while remaining attentive to the financial conditions that determine whom reform actually serves.
Does labor-saving machinery restore employment simply because it releases purchasing power? In this 1932 assessment of the Verein für Sozialpolitik’s Dresden meeting, Fritz Machlup insists that spending and reemployment are different problems. He tests fellow economists’ explanations against the roles of wages, capital formation, and restrictions on trade, arguing that “industrialization” too often becomes a catch-all for disturbances requiring distinct causal accounts. His defense of market adjustment also sets limits on policy expertise: understanding economic relationships does not tell officials precisely where equilibrium lies. The article offers both a record of economists’ resistance to autarky and an internal critique of their reasoning, showing why agreement against a policy is no substitute for explaining how it produces its effects.
Can a theory of prices explain whether people become better off? In this 1932 review of the first two volumes of G.-H. Bousquet’s Institutes de Science économique, Schumpeter treats that question as a test of economic theory’s reach. He admires Bousquet’s accessible presentation of Walras and Pareto, yet distinguishes equilibrium’s analytical power from its less secure application to the wider social environment. His sharpest discussion concerns Bousquet’s return to subjective satisfaction—and the claim that habit and new wants eventually cancel the felt benefits of economic improvement. Schumpeter praises the ingenuity of this argument without simply accepting its conclusion. The review offers a compact encounter with his critical standards: theoretical clarity matters, but so does recognizing the questions a successful method leaves unanswered.
Christian Jacob Kraus published little, yet his lectures reached officials who would carry out the Stein–Hardenberg reforms. In this compact 1932 encyclopedia entry, Karl Pribram makes that contrast the key to Kraus’s influence. He places the Königsberg teacher between Kant’s moral philosophy and the Scottish thinkers’ accounts of sympathy and economic freedom, then connects these commitments to Kraus’s opposition to guilds, serfdom and noble privileges. The entry offers a concise account of how Smithian ideas entered Prussian administrative circles—not principally through a major published treatise, but through the education of future reformers.