3,422 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Either a theory of money folds into the general theory of exchange, or it explains nothing—this is the fault line Mises draws between catallactic and acatallactic doctrines. Acatallactic theories ground money in metal, in state command, or in analogies to blood, language, and law; catallactic theories integrate it into price formation and subjective value. From that standpoint he prosecutes Knapp's state theory of money for producing formal histories of laws and decrees while saying nothing of purchasing power, wages, or prices. He corrects the polemical label metallism, denying that Smith and Ricardo were naive metallists—Smith defended replacing gold with paper, Ricardo proposed removing coin from domestic circulation—and faults Wieser and Philippovich for absorbing Knapp's errors into the history of monetary thought.
Eine bis zu Ende gedachte Geldtheorie muß in eine Verkehrstheorie münden, sie hört damit auf akatallaktisch zu sein.
English translation: “A monetary theory thought through to the end must issue in a theory of exchange; therewith it ceases to be acatallactic.”
A monopoly designed to cheapen Vienna’s meat supply failed when Hungarian cattle suppliers boycotted its market. In this 1918 review of Karl von Peez’s study of the Landsverleger-Compagnia (1622–1624), Eugen Peter Schwiedland reads archival business history through the pressures of First World War provisioning. He singles out currency depreciation, price ceilings and dependence on external producers as points of comparison, while praising Peez’s use of company accounts and official scrutiny. The tension is concrete: imperial privilege and a sovereign’s share in the profits could not secure control over supply. This brief review offers a focused encounter with Schwiedland’s economic-historical judgement—particularly his attention to the constraints that cross-border trade placed on wartime price regulation.
Property, in this second edition of 1918, is an institution 'of overriding, all-dominating effect' whose usefulness is inseparable from its dangers — dependency, class power, and duty. Schwiedland separates factual possession from socially recognized right, then follows the tacit proviso that binds ownership — Paulsen's clause that the community may dispose otherwise where welfare requires — through agrarian history: from village use-rights, Flurzwang, and Allmende to the conquest-born great estate that concentrates power and hardens social ranks. Urban land becomes speculative capital, movable wealth becomes securities and industrial enterprise, and inheritance law carries wealth and position to descendants. Surveying personality, legal, labour, and utility theories, he finds each partial and settles on social usefulness as the only decisive ground, defending rent limits, inheritance restrictions, and expropriation where ownership threatens the common welfare.
Der Großbesitz ist der Ausdruck, aber auch ein Anreger der gesellschaftlichen Klassenscheidung.
English translation: “Large property is the expression, but also an instigator, of class division in society.”
A currency can keep payments moving while shifting the cost of what it buys onto those compelled to accept it. In this 1918 article, Alfred Amonn examines that tension through the occupation lei issued in Romania against deposits at the Reichsbank. His distinction between financial backing and purchasing power explains why those deposits neither guaranteed redemption nor prevented inflation. The decisive question is who ultimately pays: under the peace settlement he describes, Romania would assume the note issue, freeing the occupiers’ deposits. Amonn judges the arrangement operationally successful while explicitly identifying its role in economic exploitation. His account lets readers trace how bank deposits, exchange rules and redemption obligations turned an instrument of everyday circulation into a means of transferring occupation costs.
Against the wartime cry that 1914 had rendered economics obsolete, this 1917/18 essay treats the currency crisis as an intensified version of recurrent problems and sets out to salvage what metallists, nominalists, quantity theorists, and Knapp had each seen rightly. Money, for Schumpeter, is a claim-ticket, an Anweisung, on a social product that consists solely of consumption goods; its purchasing power rests neither on metal nor on state decree but on the goods it commands. From a broadened definition of money and a notion of velocity recast as efficiency, he derives the fundamental equation E = M·U, equating the income sum with the price-sum of the social product. Most consequential is his account of bank credit, which creates purchasing power before the goods it finances exist, forcing a kind of saving and driving capitalist development while breeding inflation, booms, and crises.
In der Kreation solchen Geldes liegt das Wesen des modernen Kredits.
English translation: “In the creation of such money lies the essence of modern credit.”
How could overseas colonial possession count as economic self-sufficiency? In this 1918 article, Richard Thurnwald treats the wartime blockade as evidence that Germany must recover and develop New Guinea to secure tropical raw materials. Drawing on his travels, he grounds that demand in concrete assessments of coconut plantations, mineral deposits, transport, and labour. The revealing tension lies between his attention to workers’ food, wages, and treatment and his racialized proposals for importing and settling labourers. Conservation, too, serves a programme of intensified extraction rather than an alternative to it. The article shows how practical knowledge of colonial production becomes an argument for territorial entitlement, while Indigenous ownership and political wishes remain outside the reckoning.
Legal protection did not necessarily give Austria’s wartime salaried employees power over their working conditions. In this 1918 social-policy chronicle, Emil Lederer examines that gap through legislation and the practical resources of employee associations. Bank employees could sustain resistance funds and win salary concessions; technical employees, despite professional standing, faced restricted mobility, unpaid overtime and unilateral changes to contracts. Lederer’s comparison with Germany challenges the assumption that salaried employment necessarily favoured conservative organization: Austria’s less extensive associations could also be more receptive to radical unionism. His account makes concrete the difference between securing an entitlement and possessing the solidarity to enforce it, while showing how demands for minimum salaries brought employees into cooperation with workers’ unions.
With the German Reich facing ruin at the war's end, Somary sets aside whether a capital levy of a fifth or a quarter of national wealth can be justified and asks only how it could actually be carried out. His answer treats emergency taxation as financial engineering: a managed conversion of wealth that avoids forced liquidation, drains inflationary money, and transfers capital to the Reich through verifiable, self-declared valuations. Agricultural land could be taken in kind and resettled on war invalids; a National Ground-Charge Bank would issue Pfandbriefe against priority land charges, a National Securities and Industrial Bank four classes of obligations, and these privately backed instruments, exchanged against war loans, would quietly convert public debt into private claims. He rejects fiscal co-ownership of enterprise, insisting the spheres of state monopoly and private business stay separate lest each corrupt the other.
Soll nicht die Wirtschaft den Staat und der Staat die Wirtschaft korrompieren, so muß das Gebiet des Staatsmonopols und das der Privatunternehmung vorerst getrennt bleiben.
English translation: “If the economy is not to corrupt the state and the state the economy, then the sphere of state monopoly and that of private enterprise must for the time being remain separate.”
War, Pribram argues, did not abolish capitalism but destroyed the self-evidence of liberal economic policy. Written in 1918, the essay follows three movements—prewar liberalism, wartime compulsion, and an uncertain transition—to show how a scale of urgency displaced selection by purchasing power: copper could no longer go to the highest bidder when the army needed it, nor bread be allocated by wealth. Property, profit, and enterprise survive, suspended only as the exigency of the day requires. Yet the deeper thesis is ideological: nationalism, strengthened by war, threatens to replace individualist liberalism with a collective will that binds economic life to the nation imagined as a purposive personality. Austria, a Nationalitätenstaat pulled apart by rival peoples, becomes the limiting case where no unified economic policy can hold.
Der Geist des Nationalbewusstseins fordert von neuem die Unterordnung des Wirtschaftslebens unter einen deutlich vorschwebenden, einheitlichen, höheren Zweck: den Machtzweck der Nation.
English translation: “The spirit of national consciousness demands anew the subordination of economic life to a clearly envisaged, unified, higher purpose: the power-purpose of the nation.”
Does the World War's fiscal wreckage force society beyond the capitalist "tax state"? Schumpeter refuses the easy answer. Against slogans proclaiming capitalism or the state bankrupt, he gives "crisis" a strict sociological sense—not a ruined budget but the immanent collapse of a whole social form—and grounds his reply in what he calls Finanzsoziologie, the reading of budgets as the state stripped of ideology. He reconstructs the modern tax state from the late-medieval crisis of domain finance, where princely appeals to the estates in the name of common necessity first carved out a public sphere, then defines it as the fiscal parasite of bourgeois society, bounded by the need not to destroy the motives it feeds on. His answer to 1918 is a one-time wealth levy that burns inflated paper claims rather than nationalizing production.
Wer ihre Botschaft zu hören versteht, der hört da deutlicher als irgendwo den Donner der Weltgeschichte.
English translation: “Whoever knows how to hear its message hears there, more clearly than anywhere else, the thunder of world history.”
Support for struggling banks need not mean preserving them all. In this brief 1918 account, Karl Schlesinger describes Hungary’s Geldinstituts-Zentrale, a state-backed cooperative founded in 1916 to provide liquidity while also rehabilitating, merging or liquidating weak institutions. His medical vocabulary—“therapeutic” and “preventive”—frames banking policy as both repair and continuing oversight. Especially revealing is the connection between assistance and scrutiny: smaller institutions borrowing from the Zentrale were subject to detailed audits, which Schlesinger expected to become a regular feature of Hungarian banking. Written in anticipation of urgent capital demand after peace, the piece offers a concise view of the institution’s intended public purposes, rather than evidence of its eventual success.
New money reaches military suppliers before it reaches everyone else: this uneven passage through the economy anchors Mises’s account of wartime inflation in Die Quantitätstheorie (1918). He defends the quantity theory without treating it as a mechanical rule linking money and prices in fixed proportions. What matters is how monetary expansion changes purchasing power—and who gains while wages and prices adjust at different speeds. His distinction between demand for cash and demand for loans also challenges the claim that expanding circulation merely accommodates commerce. These arguments give concrete stakes to the krone’s future: stabilizing its depreciated value and restoring its former gold parity require different policies. The article connects an explanation of inflation’s unequal effects with the monetary constraints on postwar currency repair.