3,673 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
A tax’s legal name does not tell us who ultimately bears it. In these closing remarks from a 1926 conference discussion, Hans Mayer shows why even a question as apparently precise as whether land tax can be shifted requires distinctions between recipients of differential rent and marginal producers. His defence of deduction is also a statement of its limits: theory may identify how burdens move, but cannot alone measure how much falls on each participant. Mayer proposes comparing price changes with consumption and sales data, including across countries. This brief intervention offers a concrete view of the gap between legislative intention and economic incidence—and of the evidence needed to move beyond a simple verdict that a tax either is or is not shifted.
The label social liberalism promised a synthesis; Mises reads it instead as an equivocal name for anti-liberal intervention. Framed as a review of the Brentano Festgabe, the essay treats that volume as evidence that Kathedersozialismus and the Historical School have exhausted their scientific content while keeping their political influence. His wedge is ownership of the means of production: liberalism, socialism, and syndicalism are rival institutional arrangements, not moral temperaments, and property as immediate control over production is indivisible. He counts the Methodenstreit settled against the historicists, denies that unions can raise labor's income as a whole by force without cost, and portrays Max Weber breaking painfully from Prussian statism toward liberal conclusions. Socialism, he insists, foundered not on resistance but on its own impracticability.
Nationalökonomische Erkenntnis führt notwendigerweise zum Liberalismus.
English translation: “Economic understanding leads necessarily to liberalism.”
Can a theory of the state explain its object without presenting political preferences as necessary truths? In this review essay on Hans Kelsen’s Allgemeine Staatslehre, Felix Kaufmann makes that methodological question the basis of his endorsement. He distinguishes what scientific reasoning can establish from the ultimate values it cannot prove, then examines Kelsen’s identification of state and legal order. His defence confronts a concrete objection: if the state is experienced as an effective social reality, why treat it as a system of norms? Kaufmann argues that understanding obedience still requires identifying what is obeyed. The essay offers readers a philosopher’s account of Kelsen’s legal theory—and a precise way to distinguish causal explanation, normative validity, and political judgement without declaring values irrelevant.
What can a people be made to pay without destroying the conditions that make future payment possible? Amid Weimar fiscal strain and the reparations debate, Schumpeter recasts tax capacity as a problem of national time rather than an accounting residue, and rejects the seductive arithmetic that takes national income, subtracts a subsistence minimum, and hands the remainder to the state. Fiscal extraction is not a neutral transfer of purchasing power; it changes conduct, and reparations cost more than their nominal sum by worsening export terms. His decisive distinction is between short emergencies, which citizens endure without changing their habits, and permanent high taxation, which reshapes savings, ambition, entrepreneurship, and capital formation. Protect saving, he urges, and load the burden onto consumption; a society cannot demand capitalist performance while suppressing capitalist motives.
Die unmittelbaren Wirkungen einer Politik oder einer bestimmten Maßregel springen in die Augen.
English translation: “The immediate effects of a policy or of a particular measure leap to the eye.”
Bankrupt firms and idle workers are political facts no government can ignore, yet Schumpeter refuses to treat postwar business stagnation as one uniform European disease, insisting that depression, inflationary aftermath, war damage, and each nation's fiscal position combine differently across Germany, Austria, England, and France. His sharpest objection to general subsidy is that a state funding relief out of the very income stream already sustaining private demand creates no new purchasing power but merely reroutes what exists. The essay's original turn takes up Alfred Mond's proposal to convert unemployment relief into employment subsidies, which Schumpeter reads not as demand stimulus but as a cheapening of labor costs that permits lower prices and greater output. He grants the risks of propping up weak firms, yet concludes the policy is no logical absurdity.
Subventionen müssen ja aus Quellen stammen, die ohnehin den Strom der Wirtschaft speisen, und wer der Wirtschaft damit aufhelfen will, erhält infolgedessen eine fatale Aehnlichkeit mit Münchhausen, der sich an seinem eigenen Zopf aus dem Sumpfe zog.
English translation: “Subsidies, after all, must come from sources that already feed the stream of the economy, and whoever wishes to help the economy in this way therefore acquires a fatal resemblance to Münchhausen, who pulled himself out of the swamp by his own pigtail.”
Did the loss of an empire make Austria economically unviable? In this short 1926 address and accompanying discussion response, Mises separates the country’s diminished political territory from its prospects for recovery. He attributes fiscal stabilization to the end of subsidized government food purchases, monetary financing, and excessive expenditure, while warning that budget balance alone does not secure recovery. His reply to a question about Vienna sharpens the distinction: the city’s livelihood rested on industry, finance, and trade, not simply on imperial administration. Even as its financial role declined, he argues, commerce among the successor states offered new opportunities. The pairing captures Mises’s qualified optimism at a concrete postwar juncture, with domestic reform constrained by European trade barriers rather than national size alone.
An unemployment total may count people registered at employment exchanges, receiving benefits, or covered by insurance: the same label can conceal different populations. In this article, Karl Pribram uses such difficulties to ask what makes labour statistics a distinct field. His answer locates its identity not in exclusive ownership of facts, but in questions about workers’ conditions and their improvement. That reforming purpose raises a methodological tension: social policy can set the questions, but must not dictate the findings. Pribram shows why international comparison requires scrutiny of administrative categories, why economic and labour statistics legitimately overlap, and why an average wage cannot establish an adequate wage. The result is a concrete account of how measurement can serve social purposes without pretending to supply its own standards of justice.
World revolution had not arrived, yet the Communist International had acquired practical power. In this 1926 Encyclopaedia Britannica article, Emil Lederer examines that divergence through the organisation’s centralised direction of national parties and its close connection with Soviet Russia. He distinguishes revolutionary objectives from adaptable tactics: parliamentary participation, alliances with socialists, and recruitment beyond industrial labour need not signify abandonment of the ultimate aim. His account gives particular weight to anti-colonial and racial grievances in Asia and Africa, while noting their usefulness to Russian foreign policy. The sharpest judgement concerns what the International could prevent rather than achieve: Lederer regards domestic opposition to European war against Russia as probably its greatest success. This compact contemporary assessment shows how revolutionary organisation could become an instrument of geopolitical defence.
Defining an economic equilibrium does not explain what brings it about. In this second reply to Franz Oppenheimer’s reconstruction of objective value theory, Alfred Amonn tests that distinction against occupational choice: a worker may be capable of better-paid work yet prefer an easier job, so lower earnings do not establish inferior ability. His criticism targets the passage from convenient assumptions to purported explanations. Most sharply, he argues that taking the relative values of different kinds of skilled labor as given leaves a general theory of value assuming what it should explain. The exchange offers a concrete way to examine the limits of economic abstraction: when does a definition clarify a causal problem, and when does it merely conceal an unanswered question?
Vienna’s commercial privileges could protect a market without producing merchants willing—or able—to expand beyond it. In this archival article, Friedrich Engel-Janosi examines the city’s loss of commercial reach from the mid-fifteenth to the mid-sixteenth century, with evidence extending into a later, partial recovery. He connects warfare, currency debasement, and foreign competitors’ superior credit networks with a more difficult question: did merchants increasingly prefer secure household wealth to an enduring enterprise? Tax assessments and wills suggest an investment ideal centred on property and independence, while Alexius Funk’s ledgers disclose overdue payments and debts settled in goods. Read together, these records allow readers to weigh Engel-Janosi’s interpretation of diminished commercial ambition against the insecurity that made caution reasonable.
Clearer exposition is not the same as an answer to criticism: this distinction gives Oskar Morgenstern’s 1927 review of Schumpeter’s revised Theory of Economic Development its critical edge. Morgenstern admires the entrepreneur-centred account linking development, credit, profit and economic fluctuations, but questions Schumpeter’s decision to restate his position rather than confront objections, notably Böhm-Bawerk’s. His discussion brings into focus a consequential distinction in Schumpeter’s theory: cycles belong to development itself, while abnormal panics and crises might be moderated. This brief review offers a contemporary assessment of the revised edition that combines enthusiasm for dynamic economics with a precise reservation about what theoretical clarification can accomplish.
Careful documentation does not yet amount to explanation: this distinction guides Helene Lieser’s brief 1927 review of two studies of Swiss banking. She credits Albert Linder’s historical dissertation with extensive research and Hans Drechsle’s statistical account with clear, interesting data, while finding both theoretically underdeveloped. Her comparison of Swiss and Austrian banking gives the criticism concrete substance. Industrialization and railway construction helped shape institutions that combined deposit banking with commercial and industrial credit and securities issuance. The review offers a compact view of these institutional connections—and of Lieser’s insistence that banking scholarship do more than assemble historical facts or present figures.