3,673 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
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.”
Mathematical notation can clarify economic reasoning—or merely give familiar propositions a formal appearance. In this signed encyclopaedia subsection, originally published in 1931 and reprinted in 1937, Oskar Morgenstern asks what mathematics actually contributes to explanation. He treats it as a logical instrument, not the doctrine of a separate economic school, and distinguishes its usefulness from its necessity. The contrast between Marshall’s selective analysis and Walras and Pareto’s interconnected systems makes the stakes concrete: manageable simplicity versus comprehensive accounts of market dependence. His historical survey also shows how indifference curves allow economists to compare preferences without measuring utility exactly. Readers can discover a qualified defence of mathematical economics that judges formal techniques by the economic problems they help resolve, rather than by their notation alone.
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.
Idle factories seem to make an obvious case for encouraging consumers to spend. In this 1931 article, Friedrich August von Hayek challenges that inference by asking what machinery needs besides customers to sustain production. His answer directs attention to intermediate goods and the resources committed between the beginning of a process and its finished output. A messenger analogy makes the point concrete: longer journeys require more messengers in transit to maintain regular arrivals. Hayek argues that saving supports this temporal organization, while increased consumption can deprive specialized production processes of the resources they require. The article offers a compact theoretical challenge to spending-led recovery, showing why, in Hayek’s account, visible spare capacity is not the same thing as an abundance of usable capital.
Weimar's debate over Rationalisierung becomes, in this 1931 study, a theory of capitalist dynamics. Against the compensation doctrine that markets quietly reabsorb workers displaced by machinery, Lederer argues that labor-saving innovation can leave durable structural unemployment whenever its tempo outruns capital formation and the growth of jobs. His engine is the organic composition of production: modern progress means more capital and fewer workers per unit of output. A model of dynamic equilibrium disturbed by innovation in coal mining shows the mechanism — the rationalized mines draw capital from static sectors, produce the same coal with roughly half the labor, and shrink the economy's capacity to place workers, so the wage bill falls further than the social product. Neither anti-machine reaction nor laissez-faire optimism will do; what he urges is social control over the pace and direction of technical change.
Bei einem sehr schnellen Tempo des technischen Fortschritts können dann die Freisetzungswirkungen zu einer strukturellen, d. h. die Depressionsperiode überdauernden Arbeitslosigkeit führen.
English translation: “At a very rapid pace of technical progress, the effects of labor displacement can then lead to structural unemployment—that is, unemployment that outlasts the depression period.”
Delivered to the Royal Institute of International Affairs as the slump deepened, this 1931 address refuses the comfort of ideology: the Depression, Somary insists, spared neither capitalist, syndicalised, nor socialised economies alike. He traces the collapse to gold hoarding and a failing gold-exchange standard, to raw-material prices that cratered while finished goods and wages held firm, and to speculation fed by New York's call-money market. Communism, he argues, is the lesser danger; war is the greater, as distress feeds radical nationalism and the Hitler movement. His remedies—wage reductions, the breaking of cartels, state purchases of cheap raw materials, and a Franco-German confidence rebuilt under British leadership—frame his closing warning that the years ahead may earn the historian's name 'Between Two Wars.'
Europe has no lack of capital; what she needs is confidence.