3,673 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Delivered as three lectures in Cairo against the postwar tide of import substitution, the Singer-Prebisch thesis, and Myrdal's backwash pessimism, these essays defend trade as an engine of development while conceding narrowly bounded exceptions. Haberler refuses to equate development with industrialization, Switzerland and Denmark being advanced without it, and reframes comparative advantage as a dynamic channel supplying capital goods, technical knowledge, foreign investment, and competitive discipline. He denies that classical theory ever promised income convergence, and dismantles the claim that primary exporters face a secular deterioration in their terms of trade, faulting its reliance on British price series, freight costs, and quality bias. Disguised unemployment he treats as low productivity, not a free resource; infant-industry protection he allows only as a costly, temporary investment, preferring education, health, and infrastructure to trade restriction.
The underdeveloped countries are not exempt from the general law of scarcity—they least of all, unfortunately.
Two biologists can agree on experimental findings yet disagree about what those findings warrant. For Felix Kaufmann, this gap exposes a tension in John Dewey’s account of inquiry: can the development of successful habits explain their authority as standards of judgement? This article defends Dewey’s effort to bring logic into contact with scientific practice while questioning its grounding in the genesis of habits. Kaufmann locates the stronger foundation in the explicit criteria scientists presuppose when submitting results and methods to criticism. His reconstruction shows how inquiry can reach definite conclusions without granting any conclusion immunity from revision—and why explaining how scientists behave is different from clarifying what justifies their inferences.
To state that no scientific result is indubitably established is not to declare that scientific problems cannot be solved.
On the centenary of On Liberty, the liberal problem is deliberately displaced: from the legal freedom of discussion to the harder matter of readiness to discuss. Mill's defense, Voegelin argues, rests on an anthropology of 'improvement' that treats liberty not as a metaphysical right but as an instrument of social order, and so cannot secure the very goods it protects. To recover what rights cannot supply, the essay turns to Plato's Protagoras, where prolixity of speech becomes the model technique for preventing rational inquiry, and where virtue proves teachable only when rooted in episteme, a knowledge of the order of life rather than a stock of rules. Its refusal, Voegelin insists, is amathia, folly; and modern ideological culture has confined reason to weak but genuine enclaves in a jungle of unreason.
Rationale Diskussion der Ordnung in der Existenz des Menschen und der Gesellschaft ist nur möglich unter der Bedingung des Wissens um transzendente Erfüllung.
English translation: “Rational discussion of the order in the existence of man and society is possible only under the condition of knowledge of transcendent fulfillment.”
Political liberalism, in this encyclopedia article, names something narrower and older than democracy or progress: the Anglo-Dutch and above all Whig tradition of limiting and binding state power. Hayek condenses its classical form into three interlocking principles — freedom of opinion, the rule of law, and private property with its competitive economy — and traces the idea from post-Glorious-Revolution England through its rationalist French mutation, its late and failing German career under Bismarck, to its revival after totalitarianism. The French turn is his pivot: confidence in free social development gives way to confidence in a plan, shifting the question from limiting power to seizing it. His sharpest warning is that political and economic liberalism cannot be prised apart, contra Croce; replace competition with direction and the rule of law is hollowed out even where basic rights remain.
Tatsächlich hängt die Eigentums- und Vertragsfreiheit auf das innigste mit der Herrschaft des Gesetzes zusammen: die eine ist ohne die andere nicht möglich.
English translation: “In fact, freedom of property and contract is most intimately connected with the rule of law: the one is not possible without the other.”
Ownership gives entrepreneurs control over production—but, in Mises’s account, consumers continually put that control to the test. This encyclopedia entry from the Handwörterbuch der Sozialwissenschaften presents the market as a process in which purchases, profits, and losses redirect productive resources under conditions of uncertainty. Its central tension lies between private command over wealth and dependence on buyers’ choices. Mises sharpens the argument by distinguishing monopoly ownership from the ability to profit by restricting supply, and by explaining entrepreneurial profit as a temporary result of anticipating change rather than a permanent reward for possession. Readers can trace how consumer sovereignty becomes not only his explanation of market coordination but also his standard for defending inequality and criticizing redistribution.
What can an economist’s marked books tell us that his published arguments leave unsettled? In this article, Emil Kauder examines Carl Menger’s library at Hitotsubashi University, using marginal comments, acquisition dates, and uncut pages to distinguish intellectual influence from mere ownership. He argues for an Aristotelian foundation to Menger’s economics: the ordering of human purposes, beginning with life and health, matters more than an undifferentiated calculus of pleasure. The same evidence brings a neglected predecessor, Joseph von Kudler, into view and complicates allegations of plagiarism. Kauder’s Menger also resists easy identification with unrestricted competition. This preliminary investigation offers a concrete encounter with the evidence behind intellectual history, showing how private reading can revise an interpretation without supplying a complete intellectual biography.
Can an economy gain from foreign trade without changing its domestic institutions? In this review-essay on Ernst Heuss’s Wirtschaftssysteme und internationaler Handel, Alfred Amonn examines trade policy through the economic arrangements it sustains. His sympathetic exposition brings out the stakes of Heuss’s approach: exchange controls may undermine market coordination, while tariffs may protect not simply producers but a particular distribution of income. The tension becomes especially concrete when a centrally planned economy bargains as a single buyer and seller against dispersed market participants. By following Amonn’s presentation, readers can distinguish restrictions that Heuss regards as necessary to preserve an economic system from measures that may instead transform it—a different test from asking whether a policy merely increases trade.
Time, in G. L. S. Shackle's De Vries Lectures, is not a neutral point on a calendar axis but the setting where imagination, decision, and expectation occur—his 'moment-in-being' destroying any easy analogy between economics and mechanics. Lachmann accepts the attack on homogeneous naturalistic time yet resists its solipsistic edge: if every present were wholly self-contained, learning and plan revision would become unintelligible. His repair distinguishes the discontinuity of ends from the relative continuity of knowledge about means, adding to subjective utility a subjectivism of interpretation. Where Shackle's dynamics stays close to the isolated individual, Lachmann extends it to forward markets, which give plans a socially observable form and coordinate expectations without predicting them. Economics forgoes positive forecasting but keeps negative prediction and the interpretive reconstruction of purposes.
As soon as we permit time to elapse we must permit knowledge to change, and knowledge cannot be regarded as a function of anything else.
Can growing wealth bring declining returns on capital—and does Ricardo treat that decline as temporary or lasting? In this review of G. S. L. Tucker’s history of British economic thought, Emil Kauder challenges Tucker’s reading of Ricardo by restoring diminishing agricultural productivity to the centre of the explanation: costlier food raises money wages and squeezes profits. He also welcomes Tucker’s recovery of John Lalor, whose distinction between money saving and profitable investment opportunities offers a closer anticipation of Keynes than Malthus’s account of excessive accumulation. Kauder’s concise assessment shows why apparent similarities between economic theories require careful scrutiny of their mechanisms and timescales, while separating Tucker’s substantive discoveries from the book’s weaknesses in organization and historical context.
Machlup gathered definitions of statics and dynamics from Comte through Patinkin and laid them side by side, only to find the terms pulling in incompatible directions: social order versus progress, stationary states versus growth, undated versus lagged variables. His mischievous observation is that economists tend to call their own theories dynamic and their rivals' static. Rather than legislate a single meaning, he builds a six-part typology that lets a theory like Schumpeter's qualify as dynamic under half a dozen headings at once, and shows how the supposed war between equilibrium and evolutionary economics dissolves once the labels are unpacked. His practical advice: retire the two words where possible in favor of exact ones, growth theory, sequence analysis, period analysis, trend analysis.
The trouble, as I see it, is not that the division of economic analysis into Statics and Dynamics makes no sense, but that it makes too many senses.
Nuclear weapons, delivery systems, and the sheer speed of technological change have made national defense a strategic problem that inherited military categories can no longer grasp. Treating the arms race as a grim equilibrium, Morgenstern argues that neither side can safely reduce effort unless reductions are mutual, credible, and enforceable, so survival becomes a constraint prior to any budget. Defense is never a matter of the single best weapon but of strategies tested against an adapting opponent: interception screens answer yesterday's threat while the next generation is designed to evade them, and stopgaps such as keeping bombers permanently airborne founder on fuel and logistics. Cities, valuable and hard to protect, pose the severest problem. Rejecting both panic and wishful thinking, he makes the case that creative technical thinking, not standardized production, will decide survival.
Unilateral action to reduce the arms race is impossible and not compatible with the desire for national survival.
Strip away the geopolitical alarmism, Mises urges, and the contest between socialism and capitalism reduces to a single measurable test: whether socialism raises the ordinary person's standard of living, as its advocates always promised. By that self-chosen standard, he argues, Soviet planning had already failed—decades of plans, purges, and boasts had left the common man far poorer than his counterpart in capitalist Western Europe or the United States. Capitalism, in this compressed Cold War essay, is nothing but mass production for the masses, a system that raises the worker toward the bourgeois level by serving him. The regime's censorship is itself the confession: it endures only by keeping its citizens from learning how ordinary people live under freedom.
Experience has belied all this empty boasting.