3,422 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
The forty-hour week, this 1931 lecture to the German trade-union congress in Frankfurt insists, is no narrow bargaining demand but a response to a capitalism transformed by crisis. Depression at twenty-five percent unemployment differs in kind, not merely degree, from earlier downturns: postwar technical change swept through raw materials, agriculture, transport, and mining at once, cartels and tariff walls held organized prices high while starving smaller export firms of credit, and no automatic compensation reabsorbs the workers machinery displaces. Lederer rejects both autarky, which for a modern nation means poverty and dependence, and isolated currency manipulation in an interdependent world. If technical progress permanently shrinks the necessary volume of labor, work must be shared more evenly — and leisure, rather than mere rest, becomes a terrain of education, solidarity, and emancipation for the working class.
Es ist etwas anderes, ob eine Krise mit 7, 8, 10 Prozent Arbeitslosigkeit oder mit 25 Prozent Arbeitslosigkeit zu kämpfen hat.
English translation: “It is one thing whether a crisis has to contend with 7, 8, or 10 percent unemployment, and quite another with 25 percent unemployment.”
Delivered as a lecture in 1931 amid the deepening Depression, this eight-part address moves from the nature of the market through the business cycle to unemployment, price supports, taxation, and gold. The market, Mises insists, is no anarchy but a form of economic democracy in which consumers, as the final authority, direct production. Crisis appears when policy disables that mechanism: bank credit expansion drives the loan rate below the natural rate, building a boom on sand, while union wages held above market-clearing levels, sustained by unemployment relief, turn joblessness chronic. Price supports for coffee and wheat, protective tariffs, and capital-consuming taxation deepen the disorder. The single way out, he argues, is to abandon every attempt to prevent market prices from shaping production.
Die kapitalistische Marktwirtschaft ist eine Demokratie, in der jeder Groschen eine Wahlstimme gibt.
English translation: “The capitalist market economy is a democracy in which every penny casts a vote.”
Werner Sombart's Der moderne Kapitalismus had synthesized universal economic history and monumental theory; here that theoretical scaffolding is dismantled piece by piece from the standpoint of Robert Liefmann's 'sozialindividualistische' economics. Groß confines himself strictly to Sombart the theorist, attacking in turn the notion of money-seeking as an acquisitive drive, the treatment of Wirtschaftssysteme as historical agents, and the confusion of technique with economy. Against Sombart's grand categories—spirit, institution, productivity, capitalist organism—he sets a theory of individual planning: money becomes an abstract unit of account that keeps plans revisable, and market order emerges from the mutual adaptation of individual plans rather than from any institutional idea. Capitalism, on this reading, is not a productive force but heightened commerce governed by rentability, the quantitative counterpart of a psychically abstract economic principle.
Kapital nennen wir das zum Gelderwerbsmittel gemachte Geld.
English translation: “We call capital the money that has been made into a means of acquiring money.”
A protected apartment can become costly to leave: a growing household cannot find more space, or an unemployed worker cannot move to take a job without losing a cheap tenancy. In this conference speech, presented in its 2022 English translation, Friedrich August von Hayek uses Vienna to examine the tension between security for existing tenants and access for newcomers. He argues that rent controls freeze an accidental distribution of housing, while obscuring which sizes, locations, and qualities of dwelling are actually needed. Housing’s durability makes these effects easy to overlook: buildings remain standing even as incentives to maintain and replace them weaken. His case against controls nevertheless rejects abrupt repeal. Readers can discover both his account of housing prices as coordinating signals and his attempt to reconcile market adjustment with protection against sudden displacement.
Free trade and housing reform meet in Wilhelm Röpke’s brief encyclopedia portrait of Julius Faucher, a publicist of the German Manchester school. Röpke connects Faucher’s work organizing free traders and assisting Cobden with his campaign to improve urban housing—a campaign grounded in Faucher’s diagnosis of land profiteering and tenement development. The biographical details serve a pointed historical judgment: Röpke treats Faucher’s commitment to housing reform as evidence against the charge that German Manchester liberals ignored industrialism’s social problems. This compact entry offers a concrete instance of economic liberalism joined to social concern, while leaving the mechanisms and proposed remedies of Faucher’s housing policy largely unexplored.
Every human gathering, this essay argues, acquires structure almost at once: amorphous mass exists only in the first instant before attractions, repulsions, subgroups, and leaders crystallize out of it. Thurnwald names the winnowing of leaders Siebung and separates it sharply from biological selection—masses actively choose whom to follow—then shows why institutional leadership, fixed in statutes, offices, and inheritance, must sooner or later collide with the natural kind. Sociation itself he treats as process and complementarity: persons associate because they need and complete one another, from sex and age in the family to the division of labor in a workshop. He classifies its forms as Masse, Ballung, and Kristallisation, argues that organizations gain a life of their own by depersonalizing relations, and closes on the conviction that neither individual nor mass alone explains any social form.
Das Führertum ist eine Komplementärerscheinung der Masse. Masse braucht Führertum, der Führer Masse.
English translation: “Leadership is a complementary phenomenon of the mass. The mass needs leadership, the leader needs a mass.”
Stable prices need not mean a stable economy: this is the challenge Gottfried Haberler foregrounds in his 1931 review of Hayek’s Geldtheorie und Konjunkturtheorie. He explains how bank credit can permit investment to outrun real saving without producing a visible rise in the general price level. Yet his sympathetic assessment also finds room for non-monetary explanations: invention or optimism may initiate an expansion that credit makes possible. Haberler’s distinctive contribution lies in separating the initiating event from its monetary enabling condition, rather than insisting on rival theoretical labels. He also marks what Hayek’s book leaves unresolved—how distorted investment culminates in crisis—making this short review an appraisal of both the reach and the limits of the explanation.
L. Albert Hahn's Volkswirtschaftliche Theorie des Bankkredits, revised for its third edition, made credit sovereign over money, savings, capital, interest, and the whole business cycle — and it is exactly that supremacy Reisch sets out to dismantle. Admiring Hahn's dialectical gifts but distrusting his taste for paradox, he rejects the metaphor of the money-holder as a national creditor and the fiction of a cashless economy that has never existed. Where Hahn holds that lending itself conjures the deposits banks lend, Reisch answers with clearing, liquidity, collateral, and public trust; drawing on Böhm-Bawerk's roundabout production, he insists that real capital is machines and subsistence goods, not an abstract power to command them. The book, he concludes, is a veiled plea for inflationary credit.
Niemals aber vermag inflatorischer Kredit „Güter aus dem Nichts zu ziehen“.
English translation: “Never, however, is inflationary credit able to "draw goods out of nothing.”
Single-cause explanations of mass unemployment are the target here. Unemployment turns chronic, Mahr argues, when shocks to profitability collide with rigid union wages, monopoly pricing, monetary disturbance, and political insecurity, forces that in the Depression's depths coincided all at once. The analytic core is marginal productivity: wages driven above the marginal product of labor raise unit costs, restrict output, and displace workers, an effect that often surfaces only later, when demand falls or fixed capital must be replaced and wages prove unable to fall. Rationalization forced by excessive wages generates no compensating rise in labor demand. From these distinctions follow conditional remedies, credit-financed public works chosen for real social utility, wage cuts matched by price cuts, work-sharing at unchanged hourly rates, while Germany's recovery stays hostage to reparations.
Die Steigerung der Löhne über die Grenzproduktivität hinaus, die Überhöhung der Löhne führt so zur Entstehung von Arbeitslosigkeit.
English translation: “The raising of wages beyond marginal productivity, the excessive level of wages, thus leads to the emergence of unemployment.”
Can aggregate saving, investment, and profits explain a monetary crisis if they conceal what happens within production? In this two-part review of Keynes’s Treatise on Money, Hayek argues that monetary theory needs an account of capital committed through time. Profits near the point of consumption can coexist with losses further back in production; spending that maintains existing capital need not finance additional investment. These distinctions give concrete substance to his objections to Keynes’s definitions and equations. Hayek also credits Keynes’s analysis of deposit hoarding, making the review more than a statement of opposition. Readers can trace how disagreements over measurement become disagreements over depression: for Hayek, sustaining expenditure through credit may postpone the reallocation of resources required by unsustainable investments.
When formalism, intuitionism, and logicism each stake a claim to the foundations of mathematics, the deeper trouble, Kaufmann contends, is one of sense: symbolic forms, abstractions, and abbreviations get mistaken for independent objects. This 1931 essay reworks the received theory of abstraction, recasting it not as the stripping-away of features but as the holding-fixed of an invariant structure while others vary, and turns it against conceptual realism and extensional logic alike. Expressions like properties of properties and functions of functions are legitimate only as translatable abbreviations. Natural number, on this account, is neither a class of equinumerous classes nor a property of collections but an abstraction from the ordered act of counting; Peano's axioms define that structure, and complete induction merely excludes further determinations. Undecidability, where it appears, signals not metaphysical depth but presuppositions that have failed to fix their object.
The central problem in the theory of a science lies in clearly grasping the sense of the relevant propositions.
Can socialism retain its analytical force without resting on a single economic doctrine? In this signed encyclopedia contribution, Emil Lederer locates its distinctive achievement in treating capitalism as a historically formed social order rather than a timeless mechanism of exchange. His exposition of Marx shows how exploitation can arise through formally free contracts, without individual fraud: workers’ dependence follows from their exclusion from ownership of the means of production. Yet Lederer distinguishes this structural analysis from disputed predictions about capitalism’s development, and rejects Luxemburg’s claim that accumulation necessarily requires external markets. Readers can discover why he regards socialist inquiry as compatible with marginal-utility methods, while insisting that economic analysis must account for the property relations and class divisions within which markets operate.