3,673 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Can market equilibrium itself generate cyclical price movements? In this French article, Gerhard Tintner makes expectations the hinge between Walrasian equilibrium and economic fluctuations: buyers and sellers anticipate future prices by extrapolating present prices and their rates of change. His deliberately restrictive linear model shows how interdependent markets can produce oscillations that persist, grow, or decay. Applied to American stock, agricultural, and non-agricultural price indices for 1920–1942, it yields a damped cycle of 12.82 years alongside a secular trend. Tintner regards the comparison with observed periodic movements as an approximate fit, not a complete explanation. The article offers a concrete way to examine how assumptions about expectations create cyclical motion—and why a fading cycle need not imply stable prices.
Economic planning already operates within capitalist cartels and trusts: for Hans Bayer, the question is not whether to plan, but how planning can serve freedom rather than concentrated power. This 1947 critical review essay challenges Hayek’s identification of planning with dictatorship, drawing on Hermann Finer while developing Bayer’s own case for democratic coordination. Its distinctive proposal retains competition, private enterprise and prices as signals of individual needs within a partly socialized economy. Bayer also shifts the test of freedom from formal permission to buy goods to the actual means to obtain them, including protection against prolonged unemployment. Readers encounter a pointed dispute over whether prices and democratic oversight can reconcile collective direction with personal initiative—and whether market insecurity itself limits liberty.
Scare quotes do deliberate work in this programmatic restatement of liberalism: the pretended defenders of 'free enterprise' are often, Hayek charges, defenders of tariffs, cartels, and privilege who fear real rivalry as much as any socialist. A genuine competitive order, he insists, is no natural growth that appears wherever the state withdraws; it depends on law—property rules, contract, monetary stability, limits on coercive private power—deliberately built to keep rivalry effective. From this juridical liberalism he attacks the mechanical extension of property to patents and trademarks as a manufacture of monopoly, criticizes steep progressive taxation for eroding the social mobility and independent means that sustain free opinion, and refuses to demand discipline of trade unions before employers have surrendered their own protections. The long-run battle, he argues, is over beliefs, not present political feasibility.
The purpose of a competitive order is to make competition work; that of so-called “ordered competition,” almost always to restrict the effectiveness of competition.
Gerhard Tintner’s 1948 review of Paul Anthony Samuelson’s Foundations of Economic Analysis turns admiration for mathematical rigor into a pointed question: what can maximizing behavior alone tell us about actual economic conduct? Writing from an econometric perspective, Tintner praises Samuelson’s theoretical achievement while challenging the narrow assumptions behind its treatment of dynamics. His most concrete objection concerns expectations and uncertainty: understanding how anticipations form, he argues, offers a more useful bridge from statics to dynamics than formal relations among equilibria alone. This short review lets readers examine the distinction Tintner draws between powerful economic mathematics and empirically informative economics—and why he regards statistical investigation as a necessary complement, rather than an alternative, to theory.
Dismantling nationalist myths does not guarantee a convincing account of the past—or a democratic future. In this 1948 review of Rustem Vambery’s Hungary, To Be or Not To Be, Richard Schüller praises the author’s attack on Magyar self-glorification while questioning his treatment of Habsburg rule and his confidence in Soviet-backed reconstruction. Schüller’s distinctive objection is that Vambery hopes for a Danubian federation and customs union while discounting the regional integration the Austrian Empire had provided. Minority expulsions, political purges, and restrictive press legislation further test those hopes. This brief review offers a pointed distinction between the courage required to criticize an old ruling order and the judgement needed to assess its successor.
How did two reformers turn private conviction into institutional influence? Reviewing Beatrice Webb’s Our Partnership, Hayek admires the Webbs’ patient, often anonymous work through journalism, education, hospitality, and cross-party contacts while opposing the collectivist ends it served. His sharpest tension concerns independence: he argues that private resources enabled their socialist campaigning in ways their preferred society would not permit. The memoir’s accounts of Poor Law Commission work also prompt him to ask whether their research tested political commitments or assembled support for settled conclusions. This 1948 double review, closing with a brief, favourable assessment of Edgar Reichel’s study of Fabian socialism, offers a concrete account of intellectual influence alongside Hayek’s critical scrutiny of claims to disinterested expertise.
When does economic research justify policy advice, and when do its conclusions outrun its assumptions? In this 1948 review of the National Bureau of Economic Research’s anniversary collection, Fritz Machlup tests the reasoning that connects theory, evidence, and intervention. He challenges Harold G. Moulton’s claims to have displaced obsolete doctrines and questions Jan Tinbergen’s case against exchange-rate adjustment, distinguishing domestic-currency import expenditure from demand for foreign exchange. His praise for John Jewkes’s analysis of British employment policy supplies a contrasting standard: practical experience should sharpen questions about inflation, administrative limits, and the evidence still needed. The review offers a compact encounter with Machlup’s critical method—asking whether a proposition holds generally, under what conditions it holds, and whether those conditions support the policy proposed.
An economist’s legacy can reside as much in the research he makes possible as in the books he writes. In this brief 1948 obituary, reprinted in 2013 with editorial annotations and a correction, Hayek honours Wesley Clair Mitchell’s empirical study of business cycles, his role in American institutionalism, and his ability to sustain collective inquiry through the National Bureau of Economic Research. Hayek distinguishes Mitchell’s dissatisfaction with theory from ignorance of it, offering an appreciative account of a different conception of economic science. The portrait gives readers a concrete view of how teaching, collaboration, and institution-building became part of Mitchell’s scientific achievement, while preserving his wider concern with the social sciences’ function in society.
Thurnwald divides his science in two: ethnography gathers the facts, ethnology interprets their tangled connections of time, people, thing, and place. Writing in 1948, he defends German ethnology against the charge of having been mere colonial propaganda, then lays out the fieldworker's discipline—long residence, repeated checking, no suggestive questions smuggling in high-gods or the Oedipus complex. He weighs evolutionism, the Kulturkreislehre of Frobenius, Gräbner and Schmidt, and Malinowski's functionalism, and settles on two leading factors: the procurement of food and contact between cultures. The unilinear march from hunter to herder to farmer is rejected; cases such as the Iramba plateau and the colonial dissolution of Ngoni order show culture as an uneven, accretive process rather than a ladder of stages.
Der Weg des Fortschritts ist holperig.
English translation: “The path of progress is bumpy.”
The consumer faces a problem no equilibrium diagram quite states: how to bring an unrechenbarer Nutzen, a utility that cannot be counted, into the arithmetic of money. Schönfeld-Illy's answer reconstructs Wieser's marginal law, stripping away its accretions until the value it names turns out to be not an inner quantum of feeling but the consumer's demand price. Marginal utility becomes a rule of economical simplification: a disposition found admissible at the margin can be carried over to a whole stock without appraising each unit. From there the book turns on static equilibrium theory, rejecting the Walrasian Universalrechner that would solve prices and demand from outside the economy — whoever manages an economy calculates for himself — and substitutes a dynamic account built on expected data and forward-looking plans.
Die Preise werden durch die Nachfrage determiniert, die Nachfrage wird durch die Preise determiniert!
English translation: “Prices are determined by demand; demand is determined by prices!”
An economy can produce more goods without giving everyone the material security needed to develop their abilities. In this 1948 article, Hans Bayer makes that gap the test of economic freedom: what matters is not merely the independence of enterprises, but the opportunities production and income distribution afford each person. His case for purposeful economic organization turns on concrete tensions—technical progress can encourage industrial concentration, while abundant productive capacity can coexist with unemployment and deprivation. Yet Bayer does not treat planning as unconstrained political command. Economic organization must work with the regularities of development and exchange, much as an engineer uses natural laws. The article offers a compact account of why collective coordination might serve individual development, and why its necessity does not guarantee its feasibility.
The transformation of a loose league of sovereign cantons into a modern federal state in 1848 is the pivot of this centenary study, commissioned by Pro Helvetia and read here in A. Lätt's German translation of Rappard's French original of the same year. He works backward from the French invasion of 1798 through the Helvetic Republic, Napoleon's Act of Mediation, the restorationist Pact of 1815, the Regeneration, and the Sonderbund War, then dissects the charter the revision commission assembled in six weeks—the American-inspired bicameral Assembly, the collegial Federal Council, the deliberately weak Federal Court. Three forces, he argues, made the federal state: the need for national security, for free economic development, and for political liberty and equality. It was, he insists, no foreign import but the act of a nation.
Die Einheit ohne Glieder ist eine leere Masse, die Glieder ohne Einheit sind ohnmächtig.
English translation: “Unity without members is an empty mass; members without unity are powerless.”