3,422 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Renaissance Italy dazzles, yet beneath the dazzle, this study insists, ran the same social and economic anxieties that burden any age: sovereign defaults, collapsing banks, fortunes tied to the unstable Florentine Monte. Rather than construct another causal theory after Weber or Sombart, Engel-Janosi sets out to describe how different circles judged wealth, acquisition, and vocation. He reads the Church's penitential summae and its preachers, Antoninus of Florence, Bernardino of Siena, Aquinas, on just price, usury, and the God-given ordo; the poverty ideals of heretical sects; Savonarola's prophetic politics; the pedagogy of Alberti and the humanists Salutati, Poggio, and Valla; Petrarch's Stoic withdrawal; and finally Machiavelli, in whom the Renaissance worship of human power collapses into a confession of its meaninglessness. Issued as a supplement to the Vierteljahrsschrift für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte.
Die Epoche, die ihr Kennzeichen von der Verehrung für menschliche Kraft erhalten durfte, schließt mit dem Bekenntnis der Sinnlosigkeit eines menschlichen Erfolges.
English translation: “The epoch which took its distinguishing mark from the veneration of human power closes with the confession of the meaninglessness of any human success.”
Where does one seller’s market end and another’s begin? In this theoretical article, Frank Albert Fetter makes the boundary depend on prices as well as distance: customers compare the cost of goods delivered, not simply proximity to a trading centre. For homogeneous goods, with freight proportional to distance and transport following straight routes, he derives a hyperbolic boundary that shifts as relative prices change. The practical force of this geometry emerges in his criticism of shipment statistics: drawing an arbitrary district can manufacture an apparent shortage and support a misleading pricing argument. Readers can discover how transport costs protect local sellers, how lower prices enlarge their territories, and why an elegant spatial model must remain a first approximation when confronted with actual freight schedules and geography.
Freight is no neutral overlay on the map; in this transport theory it dictates where goods are produced, what they cost, and how far they travel. Written by a railway director and professor at Prague, the book follows freight charges outward from a single production point across concentric market areas, deriving sales radii that shrink in inverse proportion to the rate, market areas varying with the square of distance, and Thünen-like rings of agricultural intensity around a consuming city. Part II turns to the rates themselves, contrasting the monopolist's drive for maximum net revenue with a 'public-benefit' tariff aimed at the greatest summation of primary values, and argues through Böhm-Bawerk's subtractive imputation that freight rates must rest on willingness to pay, with marginal cost as their floor.
Nicht weil die Bahn an Kosten erspart, gewährt sie den Nachlaß, sondern damit sie an Kosten erspare.
English translation: “It is not because the railway saves costs that it grants the rebate; rather, it grants the rebate in order to save costs.”
Restoring a depreciated currency to its former metallic parity can look like an act of restitution. In this 1924 essay, Ludwig von Mises asks whether it actually compensates those whom inflation injured. His answer turns on a concrete mismatch: money and claims have changed hands, debts have been repaid, and new contracts reflect depreciated values. Appreciation therefore benefits present creditors, not necessarily past victims, while burdening debtors who may never have gained from inflation. Mises distinguishes the legal promise of redemption from money’s subsequent monetary function, and contractual compensation from a general rise in purchasing power. His treatment of sterling’s international standing tests the competing case for restoring confidence. The essay clarifies why repairing a currency and repairing losses are different policy tasks.
Public anger over abused custody accounts is justified, Schumpeter concedes, but indignation makes bad law. This 1924 banking intervention asks a narrower and harder question: how can Austrian statute protect a depositor's securities without turning ordinary custody, pledge, and clearing into costly formalism? His answer bends civil-law categories toward economic function. Since a depositor of fungible shares needs only the return of an equivalent quantity, not the very numbered certificates, rules demanding separate storage, serial registers, and rigid individualized ownership would burden Vienna's efficient Giro- und Kassenverein and raise banking conditions for everyone. He prefers selective prohibition, naming the dangerous acts such as repledging encumbered customer securities while sparing established practice. The result is a plea for technically exact regulation that secures the claim without fetishizing the paper.
Aber die Frage, wie das geschehen kann, bleibt dessen ungeachtet schwierig.
English translation: “But the question of how this can be done nonetheless remains a difficult one.”
A currency that buys a constant basket of goods may still unsettle the calculations on which investment depends. This tension drives Martha Stephanie Braun’s 1924 critique of managed currency. Against Fisher’s compensated dollar and Keynes’s proposals for monetary management, she shifts attention from the creditor’s purchasing power to the borrowing entrepreneur’s comparison of costs and expected receipts. Her wheat trader and railway examples show how adjustments tied to an aggregate price index could overturn calculations for reasons unrelated to a particular enterprise. Yet Braun does not present gold as an untouched natural standard: she acknowledges its institutional foundations and the influence of American gold accumulation. The article offers a precise distinction between stabilizing purchasing power and preserving a dependable unit of account—and explains why Braun permits contractual indexation while opposing its extension to the monetary standard.
Respect for a founder need not mean accepting his final formulations. In this 1924 review, Franz Xaver Weiss examines the posthumous second edition of Carl Menger’s Principles, reconstructed by Karl Menger from his father’s manuscripts. Weiss’s sharpest test concerns capital and interest: if a capital good’s value already includes its useful services, counting those services as an additional productive contribution risks double counting rather than explaining interest. Drawing on Böhm-Bawerk’s criticism, he distinguishes unfinished revisions from theoretical advances. His treatment of purposeful action likewise resists making interpretation an alternative to causal explanation. The review offers a concrete encounter with critical loyalty within Austrian economics: Weiss defends Menger’s achievement while asking where its implications lead beyond positions Menger himself accepted.
Did printing money drive the German mark’s collapse, or did it follow a collapse already under way? In this short English review of the sixth edition of Karl Helfferich’s Das Geld, Eugen Peter Schwiedland endorses the latter explanation, contrasting the growth of note issuance with the far steeper rise of the dollar and import prices. His sympathetic assessment brings the practical demands of paying wages and sustaining enterprises into a dispute over monetary causation. It also questions who actually benefited from depreciation: debt relief offered governments little comfort, while industrial profits could mask the consumption of productive assets. The review gives readers a compact, pointed account of an exchange-rate-centred explanation of German inflation and the economic losses concealed by nominal gains.
Can monetary cooperation preserve the sovereignty of states whose economies remain interdependent? In this English-language review of Elemér Hantos’s Das Geldproblem in Mitteleuropa, Eugen Peter Schwiedland brings that institutional difficulty into focus. Hantos proposes a currency convention among six successor states of Austria-Hungary: national issuing banks would retain distinct policies while accepting common supervision, potentially by the Bank of England. Schwiedland’s measured reconstruction distinguishes the countries’ experiences of inflation and draws attention to the unprecedented arrangement envisioned for their recovery. This short review offers a concrete encounter with the tension between monetary stabilisation and national autonomy—and with a proposal that sought regional coordination without a single issuing bank.
Can a currency economize on gold without escaping the discipline of monetary adjustment? In this 1925 review of Fritz Machlup’s Die Goldkernwährung, Hayek distinguishes the practical appeal of minimizing gold circulation from claims that such arrangements permit greater independence in discount policy. He praises Machlup’s explanation of how gold outflows defend a currency’s external value through monetary contraction, rather than merely by financing a payments deficit. Yet he doubts that gold-core currency constitutes a fundamentally distinct monetary mechanism or makes adjustment substantially less painful. The review offers a compact encounter with Hayek’s critical priorities: the mechanism behind reserve movements matters more than the monetary system’s label, and a useful route from inconvertible paper back to gold need not be a release from gold’s constraints.
An accessible introduction is not necessarily a basis for scholarly debate. In this brief review, Hayek assesses the German translation of Fisher’s own abridged account of dollar stabilization—not the merits of the monetary plan itself. He regrets the decision to translate a popularized extract rather than the complete work: German specialists, he argues, need material for critical examination, not advocacy for adoption. Yet he warmly acknowledges the translation’s usefulness to students. The review offers a compact example of Hayek distinguishing a publication’s pedagogical value from its adequacy for scientific discussion.
Can marginal utility explain economic choices if its calculation already presupposes that goods have been allocated? In this 1925 review of Parts I and II of Leo Schönfeld’s Grenznutzen und Wirtschaftsrechnung, Hayek tests an attempt to resolve that circularity by starting from total utility. His sharpest objection concerns interdependence: several reallocations made together may improve the whole even when each change, taken separately, would make matters worse. Defining the best allocation is therefore not the same as explaining how decisions can reach it. Sympathetic to Schönfeld’s theoretical ambition but cautious about an unfinished project, Hayek distinguishes useful conceptual advances from unresolved foundations. The review offers a focused encounter with his demand that subjective value theory explain choices rather than merely describe their completed results.