3,673 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
A revolution credited with freeing individual initiative also imposes compulsory forms of communal life. This tension gives Eugen Peter Schwiedland’s brief 1922 review of H. N. Brailsford’s The Russian Workers’ Republic its interest. Chiefly reporting rather than testing Brailsford’s favourable assessment, Schwiedland traces Bolshevik support to peasants’ acquisition of land, workers’ personal freedom, and Lenin’s adaptability. Yet the account of released energy and opportunity sits alongside revolutionary atrocities and intrusive government control. The closing hope that peace and productive work will loosen these constraints lets readers see how a sympathetic interpretation of Bolshevik rule could make individual emancipation both its achievement and its unfinished promise.
A weak currency can stimulate exports while fostering production that stabilisation will render untenable; a strong currency can depress exports when recovery demands more goods. This double bind anchors Eugen Peter Schwiedland’s brief English-language review of Richard Kerschagl’s monetary pamphlet. Schwiedland’s emphasis falls on the productive consequences of monetary disorder, rather than currency stability considered in isolation. He values Kerschagl’s comparative account of national reconstruction efforts and identifies statistical tables covering 1913–1920 as its means of connecting inflation, domestic prices, and exchange rates. The review offers a compact view of why neither export growth under depreciation nor monetary strength necessarily signals a sound recovery.
Family organization may underpin communal life without making the state an enlarged family. This distinction anchors Eugen Peter Schwiedland’s brief review of Richard Thurnwald’s study of the Bánaro of New Guinea. Schwiedland foregrounds kinship as a structure of reciprocal duties and political association as a means of mutual protection, while tracing the account’s links between marriage arrangements, chiefly power and economic inequality. His appreciative notice also conveys Thurnwald’s conjectures about early marriage forms, including group marriage, which the review acknowledges is nowhere demonstrable in the present. Readers encounter a concise reception of Thurnwald’s research in which concrete descriptions of kinship pass into speculative institutional history—and definitions of social groups receive particular praise.
Must economics explain people’s preferences, or judge whether they are reasonable? In this comparative review of textbooks by Gustav Cassel, Karl Diehl, and W. Gelesnoff, Ludwig von Mises makes that distinction concrete through a dispute over choosing food for parrots rather than meat for oneself. His defence of subjective value theory turns on the chooser’s ranking of satisfactions—not an observer’s approval or an arithmetic measure of pleasure. Mises presents Austrian economics as part of an international development of classical problems, rather than merely a reaction against German historicism. His differentiated judgments reveal what he considers legitimate theoretical progress: criticism may supersede marginal utility theory, but cannot simply bypass its explanations of choice, production, and exchange.
Advocating deflation is not the same as confronting the difficulties of carrying it out. This distinction drives Eugen Peter Schwiedland’s brief collective review of three monetary pamphlets by Lancelot Hare and Yves-Guyot and Arthur Raffalovich’s Inflation et déflation. Schwiedland finds Hare’s theoretical foundations thin and the French authors’ historical account incomplete, but singles out a telling contrast: threats of the guillotine for refusing assignats did not prevent their eventual abolition. His compressed verdict offers neither a rival monetary theory nor an account of specific implementation obstacles. It instead exposes the practical question he finds unanswered by all four works: what does a commitment to deflation demand beyond arguing in its favour?
Economy does not begin with hunger, appropriation, or consumption, this economic-anthropological treatise insists, but with foresight — the moment human groups anticipate future want and deliberately store, produce, and allocate. Schwiedland traces that emergence across horde, family, clan, and tribe, through hunting and totemism, hoe agriculture bound to mother-right, and patriarchal pastoral nomadism, drawing on Thurnwald and Wundt. He rejects the 'golden age' of natural simplicity as a fiction: the earliest human condition is insecurity and scarcity, without stores or provision. Language, tools, fire, and settled life become the structural levers of a new organized existence, while labor divides by sex and status and property layers common tribal land over personal possession. Exchange grows from raid, gift, and ceremonial reciprocity into barter and money — 'treasure' made mobile — yet its essence remains planned provision, not the market alone.
Der Tauschverkehr ist neben der Herstellung von Gütern die zweite große Quelle des Wohlstandes.
English translation: “Alongside the production of goods, exchange is the second great source of prosperity.”
If money has no intrinsic value, what determines how much of it a buyer will offer for a good? In this 1922 article, Oskar Engländer argues that monetary nominalism leaves this question unanswered. His alternative begins with purchasing priorities: a buyer’s maximum bid depends on the funds remaining after more important needs have been provided for, not on an independently valued monetary unit. This approach makes unequal purchasing power central to price formation. Less urgent wants backed by wealth can prevail over more urgent wants backed by little income. By connecting these individual spending limits with competition and scarce productive resources, Engländer offers a route between cost and marginal-utility theories—and distinguishes conditions that determine a price from those that leave room for bargaining.
"You cannot eat your cake and keep it too" - the English proverb frames Schumpeter's cool assessment of Austria's credit plan and its League of Nations supervision. Foreign oversight may be humiliating, he concedes, but Austria humiliated itself; control is the consequence of an inability to stabilize alone, not an external injustice. His central move shifts the argument from honor to sequence. Domestic consolidation would demand restoring the budget first, then creditworthiness, then the currency and a note-issuing bank - a very painful path. Foreign credit reverses that order, letting stabilization begin with the currency rather than end with it, provided the krone is merely stabilized and never raised. Even so, an industrial crisis is unavoidable, and the slightest fiscal error could yield a catastrophe worse than the present.
Ein Geschenk wird uns sicher nicht gemacht.
English translation: “We are certainly not being given a gift.”
Surplus raw materials and unmet needs coexist in the postwar economy: could guaranteed purchases reconnect production with demand? In this 1922 newspaper article, Emil Lederer scrutinizes a reconstruction proposal advanced by the English periodical The Nation. International, government-backed consortia would buy commodities when prices were depressed, restoring producers’ ability to purchase other goods. Lederer’s distinctive move is to identify these purchases as loans against uncertain future sales: stored coffee or other raw materials cannot provide the same monetary backing as gold. Yet he does not dismiss intervention, which might avert production cuts and prolonged scarcity. The article makes visible the financial risks beneath an apparently straightforward stabilization scheme—and explains why, in Lederer’s judgement, reconstruction requires stronger economies to bear substantial costs.
The scandal, for a scientific mind, is moral philosophy: dozens of competing systems, nearly identical practical conclusions, demonstrations built on undefined terms. Rueff's remedy, in this 1922 essay prefaced by Clément Colson, is to deny any real division among the sciences. Geometry, mechanics, physics, morality, and political economy share one structure — empirical laws drawn from experience, then "causes" constructed through axioms and definitions so that deduction can recover those laws; building a science is thus a création des causes. Moral doctrines become géométries morales, and utilitarianism, interventionism, and Marxian socialism appear as non-Euclidean systems, logically coherent yet untrue to present social conditions. Drawing on Walras but recasting need and utility as created causes rather than psychological measurements, Rueff sketches a statistical mathematical economics: no more a political economy of the individual than a thermodynamics of the molecule.
Dire qu'une théorie morale est vraie, c'est une affirmation qui n'a aucun sens.
English translation: “To say that a moral theory is true is an assertion that has no meaning whatever.”
How could socialism become a German national vocation while Marxist class struggle was rejected? In this 1922 essay, Karl Pribram locates the answer in the conceptual kinship of class and nation: both, he argues, turn groups of individuals into collective agents whose purposes claim authority over their members. His distinctive concern is not simply the convergence of political programmes, but the reasoning that makes devotion to one collective transferable to another. This perspective gives concrete force to his account of democracy’s difficulties: constitutional change need not displace parties’ claims to embody binding national or class purposes. Readers can discover how an inquiry into social concepts becomes a criticism of political authority and economic organization, while Pribram insists on testing doctrines for internal contradictions rather than dismissing their premises outright.
Cashless payment is far older than the banknote: Roman argentarii kept transfer accounts, and Greek Egypt ran giro offices and even a grain giro linking natural, money and credit economies. Commissioned for the fiftieth anniversary of the Wiener Giro- und Cassen-Verein, this historical study traces book-money from antiquity through the medieval exchange fairs of Lyon and Besançon, the Hamburg Girobank and its Mark Banco, English goldsmith notes, the London Clearing House, and Austria-Hungary's own Saldierungsverein. Kerschagl argues throughout that clearing lets an economy function on the smallest possible stock of cash, and closes by criticising Austria's postwar fiscal measures—the Bankenumsatzsteuer among them—for favouring cash over the book transfer just when a credit economy most needed the opposite encouragement.
Von welcher Bedeutung das Clearing für die Geldschöpfung und die Möglichkeit der Erhaltung einer möglichst geringen Geldmenge ist, zeigen am besten wohl die Umsätze des Clearinghouse, die im Jahre 1920 in London allein mehr als 32 Milliarden Pfund betrugen.
English translation: “How significant clearing is for the creation of money and for the possibility of maintaining as small a money supply as possible is perhaps best shown by the turnover of the Clearing House, which in 1920 amounted to more than 32 billion pounds in London alone.”