3,673 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
A statistical pattern is not yet an economic explanation—and a plausible model fit is not yet a tested result. These distinctions sharpen Gerhard Tintner’s brief 1940 review of Herman Wold’s study of stationary time series. Tintner admires Wold’s mathematical framework but questions what its applications to wheat prices and Swedish living costs actually establish. His reservation is specific: without significance tests, the validity of the results cannot be assessed. The review offers a compact encounter with an economist’s demands on mathematical statistics, showing why theoretical advances in describing fluctuations still require methods of inference before they can support empirical conclusions.
What began as a 4,000-word review for Economica, commissioned by Hayek, had swollen into a 20,000-word analysis—"a monster," Schütz calls it—of Talcott Parsons's The Structure of Social Action. This 1940 letter opens the celebrated transatlantic exchange between the émigré phenomenologist and the Harvard theorist of social action. Schütz reports reading Parsons's unpublished second manuscript three times, reserves his sharpest comments for an oral meeting he proposes in New York or Cambridge, and presses gently on their differences over the foundations of a theory of action. He encloses his essay "Phenomenology and the Social Sciences" from Farber's Husserl memorial volume and mentions his forthcoming paper on William James, folding a personal letter into a document at the crossroads of phenomenology and American sociology.
Ich verdanke Ihren Theorien auch dort unendlich viel Gewinn und Anregung, wo ich von ihnen abweiche.
English translation: “I owe your theories an infinite amount of profit and stimulation, even where I depart from them.”
Does buying shares withdraw purchasing power from the market for goods and services? In this 1940 paper, Fritz Machlup challenges the idea that stock speculation necessarily absorbs funds during a boom. His distinctive move is to follow bank deposits rather than classify loans by borrower or collateral: the effect depends on where money came from, where it goes, and what it would otherwise have financed. Against Keynes’s account of speculative liquidity preference, he shows how bearish sellers could seek liquidity through interest-bearing call loans rather than idle cash. Readers can discover why heavy trading and large brokers’ loans do not by themselves establish monetary contraction—and why Machlup judged speculation’s net effect during the twenties’ boom probably inflationary, while allowing that hoarding and debt repayment could become deflationary in the downswing.
Protection from competition could become a loss of independence: this is the reversal Walter Froehlich traces in Central European retailing. His 1940 article asks why small shopkeepers, despite commanding the overwhelming majority of sales, sought restrictions on department stores, chains, cooperatives, and new entrants. Comparing Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Germany, he shows how measures intended to secure merchants’ livelihoods could prevent them from changing stock, relocating, or responding to demand. Austrian milk regulation supplies a pointed example: guaranteed margins did not remedy falling turnover, while transferable sales permits encouraged concentration. Froehlich’s distinctive concern is the political machinery these demands helped build. He argues that under Fascism, protection gave way to coercive price controls and centralized distribution, subordinating the independent merchants whose support had helped establish economic control.
Do the so-called primitive peoples truly lack logical and causal thought? Thurnwald, drawing on first-contact encounters in New Guinea, the Solomons, and Africa and citing Jung on the limits of the psyche, answers no. Hunting, planting, house-building, and trapping all proceed by sound causal reasoning; magic enters only where causal relations turn opaque, as when a Buin man's festering arm is traced to coconuts stolen from a tabooed palm and healed through payment, rite, and appeal to the demon Orómrui. He reads headhunting, name magic, tjurunga stones, omens, and totemism as internally coherent theories of where life-force resides, and holds that all knowing is interpretation, modern minds included. Primitive thought, diffuse and unexact, survives in the fatigued and the neurotic today.
Doch beurteilen wir die Gedanken und Riten nur zu oft von unserem Standpunkt am Schreibtisch und im geheizten Zimmer mit hochgezogenen Augenbrauen und überlegenem Lächeln.
English translation: “Yet all too often we judge these ideas and rites from our vantage point at the desk in a heated room, with raised eyebrows and a superior smile.”
Modern dictatorship is not rule by a clique, a bureaucracy, or a defensive capitalist class; it arises, Lederer argues, when a society loses the classes, parties, associations, and publics through which individuals become politically articulate. What remains is an amorphous mass, available for emotional mobilization, crystallized around a leader and held together by propaganda that mimics argument while severing it from truth. Tracing d'Annunzio at Fiume, Italian Fascism, and the SA's conquest of the German street, he presents fascism as the destruction of society itself rather than its capture. His warning against the classless society defends not hierarchy but stratification, the plural conflict on which freedom depends. Written in American exile and read here in Angela Kornberger's German rendering of the 1940 English original, State of the Masses, it stands among the first emigre theories of totalitarianism.
Der totalitäre Staat ist der Staat der Massen.
English translation: “The totalitarian state is the state of the masses.”
In the years before Sedan, three courts negotiated in secret over an alliance that never came, and over Rome, the one prize Italy would risk everything to seize. This tightly documented study reconstructs the Franco-Austro-Italian talks of 1869-70, in which Beust maneuvered to restore Austria's German standing, Napoleon III bargained from illness and decline, and Victor Emmanuel's envoys tied every commitment to the evacuation of the Papal States. Engel-Janosi shows Italy willing to stake Trentino, Nizza, and the Isonzo frontier on that single question, while French troops still guarded Pius IX and Antonelli's Vatican refused all compromise. When war and the fall of the Empire dissolved the last ambiguous promises, Italian troops entered Rome in September 1870, and Europe, he notes, remained strikingly unmoved by so momentous a rupture.
Die römische Frage aufzuwerfen hatten weder Paris noch Wien ein Interesse.
English translation: “Neither Paris nor Vienna had any interest in raising the Roman question.”
Man, unlike the instinct-bound animal, provides for life through willed and creative action, and so, this treatise contends, economics must take a teleological rather than a merely causal form. First published under German occupation in 1940, pointedly without the ideological genuflections the Reich required, and presented here in Ivo Moravcik's English translation of the Czech Národní hospodářství, it builds outward from the principle of economising through households and enterprises, the three markets of goods, capital and labour, money and international exchange, to a searching comparison of individualist, cooperative and solidarist systems. Pure solidarism, Engliš holds, degenerates when self-interested men give little and take much; nations therefore settle for a partial solidarism that corrects capitalism through taxation, social policy and, at its outer limit, the controlled economy.
The practical man acts purposively, and we therefore comprehend his actions in terms of the relationship of finality (teleologically).
Wartime scarcity brings Hayek and Keynes into agreement—but leaves a pointed disagreement about what should follow peace. In this 1940 review of Keynes’s How to Pay for the War, Hayek endorses compulsory deferred pay: workers would surrender purchasing power now while retaining claims on future income, rather than losing it through inflation. His defence turns on who bears an unavoidable sacrifice and whether that sacrifice earns compensation. Yet he resists Keynes’s proposed cash repayment after the war, preferring to give holders of deferred balances ownership of productive capital. This short review offers a precise encounter between fiscal necessity, protection of poorer households, and conflicting expectations about postwar spending, showing where Hayek’s substantial support for Keynes’s scheme ends.
The only choice we have is whether or not the inevitable sacrifice of the poor shall at least give them a share in our future income.
Can wartime sacrifice be explained openly, rather than imposed through financial mechanisms the public scarcely notices? In this short 1940 review of Geoffrey Crowther’s Ways and Means of War, republished in 1997, Hayek praises an account of Britain’s economic choices that makes scarcity a matter of competing priorities: nearly anything may be attainable, but not everything at once. His approval sharpens into disagreement when Crowther suggests that reductions in private consumption cannot be openly faced. Hayek argues that citizens who understood the choice between taxation and inflation would prefer honest, explicit burdens. The review offers a compact encounter with his confidence in public understanding—and his insistence that economic leadership must explain the material cost of victory, not merely promise it.
How should a history of economic theory compare doctrines that changed in response to their critics? In this 1940 review of Gaëtan Pirou’s lectures on marginal utility, Oskar Morgenstern praises exact exposition while questioning comparisons that set early formulations against later objections. His scrutiny is concrete: Austrian attention to monopoly helps explain the challenge to classical value theory, while Pirou’s grouping of Fetter with Seligman risks confusing distinct accounts of welfare and social value. Morgenstern also asks why Carver receives more attention than Fisher. The review offers a compact encounter with his standards for intellectual history: distinguish neighboring concepts, question inherited reputations, and keep the chronology of controversy visible.
Can Dewey’s account of scientific inquiry stand without the naturalism and pragmatism that accompany it? In this review of John Dewey’s Logic—The Theory of Inquiry, Felix Kaufmann makes that question the basis of a discriminating endorsement. He accepts the interdependence of meanings within inquiry, but argues that naturalistic explanations rest on presuppositions requiring further analysis, and that theoretical goals remain distinguishable from practical ends. His distinctive contribution is to locate common ground between Dewey and philosophical traditions often treated as opponents, including Marburg neo-Kantianism and Husserl’s phenomenology. The review offers readers a precise way to distinguish the methodological force of Dewey’s logic from its broader philosophical commitments, without dismissing either in advance.