3,422 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Along the middle Kerám, a tributary of the Sepik in inland New Guinea, Thurnwald found a marriage system that European categories of adultery and promiscuity could not describe — and made it the pivot for rethinking “primitive” kinship. Drawn from a 1912–15 expedition and reprinted here from its 1916 appearance, the study reads settlement, descent, ritual, sexuality, and exchange as a single configuration governed by reciprocity, the retaliation of like for like. Exogamic gentes exchange sisters through paired sibs and the institution of the mundü, or sib-friend, while the “goblin-child” separates biological fatherhood from ritual and socially acknowledged care. The elaborate kinship tables, Thurnwald argues against Morgan, Rivers, and Kroeber, are not confused genealogy but a classificatory technology assigning duties, avoidances, land claims, and widow care within a dense social field.
The significance of terms of relationship is found in the social status they accord to the person concerned among his tribesmen.
Cooperation among producers can strengthen their power against consumers without making them more solidaristic. This possibility anchors Emil Lederer’s 1916 response to Eduard Heimann’s “Der neue Wirtschaftsgeist.” Restricting his criticism to economic arguments, Lederer separates institutional coordination from ethical renewal: cartels can consolidate profit-seeking, while consumer cooperatives can serve members’ self-interest without overcoming social antagonism. His methodological point is equally sharp: a theory of value offers a way to explain economic processes, not a key to their ultimate meaning. The interest of this brief intervention lies in its test of an appealing inference—that more organized economic life must foster a new moral disposition. Lederer asks what would actually connect a change in institutions to a change in motives.
At Witkowitz, the ironworks’ responsibilities extended from furnaces and railways to workers’ housing, hospitals, schools, and food supplies. Reviewing a company history and its supplementary welfare volume, Eugen von Philippovich treats this conjunction as an achievement of industrial leadership approaching public administration. Company statistics and his own visits support an approving account of management that coordinates production while providing benefits beyond statutory obligations. Yet the concrete details also expose a tension between assistance and supervision: regulated shops and inexpensive meals accompany efforts to shape workers’ conduct. The essay offers a revealing instance of how technical competence and social provision could become grounds for legitimating private authority—with workers appearing chiefly as beneficiaries rather than independent witnesses.
Schumpeter answers critics, Tugan-Baranowsky above all, who hold that marginal utility explains consumer prices but that wages, rent, and profit are dictated by social power. His governing thesis is that production and distribution are not two acts but one: every productive process is simultaneously a process of distribution, so incomes cannot be a whole first assembled and then divided by external force. Property, class, and legal coercion shape the conditions of the contest without replacing the price-theoretic account of income magnitudes. Wages he treats as the price of a productive service, derived through the entrepreneur from consumers' valuations, with marginal productivity offered not as moral justification but as analysis. The closing pages dissect artificial wage increases, insisting the question is meaningless until institutional conditions, time horizons, and market structure are specified.
Wie sich nun Kartenverteilung und Spieltechnik zueinander verhalten, so verhalten sich im Wirtschaftsleben Machtdiktat und Wirtschaftsgesetz.
English translation: “As the dealing of the cards relates to the technique of play, so in economic life do the dictates of power relate to the economic law.”
Böhm-Bawerk had claimed that even a solitary Robinson, storing grain and shaping tools, would already harbor the core of interest in the swelling value of goods prepared for the future. Sax sets out to refute that positive theory point by point—the temporal gap between need and provision, the alleged systematic underestimation of the future, the productivity of roundabout production—while preserving the marginal-utility theory from which Böhm-Bawerk wrongly thought it followed. His counter-concept is Wertperspektive: future goods carry lower present value because anticipated needs are felt more faintly, a valuation shift that mirrors planned welfare but generates no surplus. Interest, he concludes, is neither natural nor technical but a private-economic exchange gain, rooted in the unequal possession of present goods and absent alike from Robinson's island and a socialist commonwealth.
Die Wirtschaft Robinson’s kennt den uns geläufigen Zinsbegriff nicht.
English translation: “Robinson's economy does not know the concept of interest familiar to us.”
A spirit hall’s paired divisions, distinctions between social and biological fathers, and kinship names that assign duties rather than measure genealogical distance give Richard Thurnwald concrete grounds for questioning familiar accounts of family and state. In this revised German version of his Bánaro study, based on fieldwork in New Guinea in 1913–15, he treats marriage, sexual relations, kinship, and political membership as intersecting but distinct arrangements. His detailed attention to reciprocal obligations also exposes the adjustments required when births, deaths, and infertility disrupt an ideally symmetrical order. Readers can follow how observations of buildings, naming practices, and ritual responsibilities become arguments against a simple evolutionary sequence from family to state—and distinguish that ethnographic evidence from Thurnwald’s more speculative historical reconstructions.
Die Verwandtschaft wird gruppiert nicht berechnet.
English translation: “Kinship is grouped, not calculated.”
Restoring credit in occupied Belgium also meant making German military demands payable. Felix Somary examines this tension from inside the reorganization he helped design: a separate note-issuing department within the Société Générale de Belgique. His 1916 article explains how inaccessible reserves, frozen payments, and proliferating local currencies could paralyse banks whose assets appeared sound. It also defends arrangements that converted requisition claims into spendable francs and financed compulsory contributions through provincial borrowing. Somary’s technical attention to reserve backing and institutional liability sits alongside his justification of occupation policy. Readers can discover how safeguards for noteholders were negotiated against fiscal demands—and how financial reconstruction could serve both everyday exchange and the authority imposing the payments.
A home intended to secure a veteran’s family can become a trap if its legal protections prevent borrowing or departure. In this 1916 report, Karl Pribram makes that tension central to his proposals for soldiers’ homesteads. He distinguishes farms, which must generate their own livelihood, from residential homes supported by earnings elsewhere: they cannot sensibly share identical rules of debt, inheritance, and tenure. His approach joins family protection to economic viability, preserving foreclosure where credit requires it while seeking safeguards against speculation and arbitrary eviction. The reader encounters welfare reform in its concrete legal choices—who may inherit, when a creditor may enforce payment, and whether a widow can retain a tenancy—and discovers why secure possession need not mean unrestricted ownership.
How can private fortunes grow while an economy loses the means to produce? Writing in 1916, Emil Lederer makes this discrepancy central to the transition from war to peace. Money and war bonds can preserve owners’ claims even as machinery, raw materials, and inventories are exhausted; restoring financial confidence is therefore not the same as rebuilding productive capacity. His distinctive concern is how reconstruction’s material requirements interact with class distribution. Foreign borrowing sacrifices future income, while indirect taxation can weaken the workers’ purchasing power on which industrial recovery depends. By separating financial claims from real resources, Lederer shows why debt cancellation cannot undo wartime destruction—and why the choice of who must consume less shapes both the pace of recovery and the social order that emerges from it.
Scarcity alone cannot explain wartime inflation. In this 1916 lecture to the Hungarian Economic Society, Schlesinger tracks how war finance moves through the monetary circuit: reduced output lifts prices only once, but state spending met by newly created money returns as income, is spent again, and drives a progressive depreciation—an indirect tax that quietly strips a portion of purchasing power from every holder. Against this he sets the offsets, arguing that war loans neutralize nothing on their own but merely register private holders refraining from pressing their claims on goods. The agio, likewise, is no separate mystery but follows from domestic prices rising faster than foreign ones, with export prohibitions aggravating it and repatriated foreign assets braking the fall. Stabilizing the currency, he concludes, matters more than restoring any old parity.
Innerhalb einer kurzen Studie kann die wirtschaftliche Entwicklung nicht in all ihren Windungen verfolgt werden; darum kann ich hier nur ein stark stilisiertes Bild der Kriegswirtschaft bieten, dessen Konturen mit denen der Wirklichkeit in keinem einzigen Punkte übereinstimmen.
English translation: “Within a short study the economic development cannot be traced in all its windings; therefore I can here offer only a strongly stylized picture of the war economy, whose contours coincide with those of reality at not a single point.”
How can legal education foster independent judgement without leaving the ordinary, willing student unguided? In this joint 1916 reform pamphlet, five Graz professors—Otto von Dungern, Armin Ehrenzweig, Max Layer, Adolf Lenz, and Joseph A. Schumpeter—connect that question to the practical organization of Austrian university study. They challenge Roman law’s dominance and mechanical lecture transcription, arguing for sustained engagement with economics and public law alongside private law. Their distinctive concern is that intellectual freedom needs institutional support: fewer compulsory lectures, prepared discussions, specialist courses, and examinations that encourage continuous work. The proposal exposes a productive tension between guidance and autonomy, showing why changes in teaching methods cannot be separated from decisions about what students study, in what order, and how their understanding is tested.
Italy mediating between Europe and the East, Spain squandering American conquest, Holland rising on shipping and colonial cultivation: this third edition of 1918 reads world history as a relay of commercial supremacy, in which wealth is the medium that turns collective capacity into cultural and political rank. France succeeds through centralized manufacture, England through the durable synthesis of sea power, colonies, industry, and finance, and then Germany, the United States, Russia, and Japan press against the British system. Reading the World War as proof that great powers' spheres now collide everywhere, Schwiedland argues for large, contiguous, autarkic Weltstaaten. A second part traces the dissolution of medieval corporate bonds into an individualism whose enormous energy also breeds crisis, class polarization, and the acquisitive Americanismus he indicts.
Erwarb früher der Mensch, um zu leben, so lebt er jetzt um zu erwerben
English translation: “Whereas man formerly acquired in order to live, he now lives in order to acquire; Americanism, the view that sees in acquisition the purpose of life, has seized broad strata who sacrifice their life in order to die rich (Müller-Lyer).”