3,673 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Formally reciprocal rules can distribute burdens very unequally. In this review of Arthur Nussbaum’s study of the Versailles clearing procedure, Helene Lieser foregrounds the costs to Germany of settling cross-border debts as the mark depreciates. Her comparison with Austria makes the issue concrete: should the state absorb exchange-related losses, or should private debtors bear them according to their means? She also endorses Nussbaum’s criticism that the Mixed Arbitral Tribunals favor Allied claimants through selective treaty interpretation. The review’s interest lies in Lieser’s connection of legal machinery to financial incentives—and in her insistence that decisions admitting no appeal nonetheless demand scholarly scrutiny.
Political defeat need not settle the question of public merit. In this 1923 obituary, Richard Reisch defends Ernst Plener’s pursuit of national accommodation and constitutional government while locating his more durable achievements in currency and tax reform. Reisch writes not only as an admirer but as a former young finance-ministry official who witnessed the painstaking deliberations behind personal-tax legislation. His recollections give concrete substance to the tribute: revenue needs, provincial interests, and parliamentary demands had to be negotiated, not simply resolved by technical expertise. Read as a sympathetic assessment rather than a neutral biography, the obituary shows how Reisch measured a statesman’s achievement—and why he contrasted the patient legislative work of the 1890s with the haste of his own time.
A stronger currency need not mean a more prosperous economy. In this 1923 article, Alfred Amonn weighs appreciation against stabilization, chiefly through the difficulties facing Czechoslovakia. His distinction between foreign exchange value and domestic purchasing power exposes the limits of apparent gains: cheaper imports can accompany damaged exports, while lower prices increase the burden of domestic debts. Yet he also identifies a concrete case for appreciation. Where political resistance keeps housing rents below levels compatible with building costs, lowering other prices might restore a workable relationship. The article’s interest lies in this uneasy comparison of adjustment paths: Amonn acknowledges the risks of business failures and unemployment without assuming that stabilization can resolve every inherited imbalance.
Satisfying a need is not necessarily consuming a good: this distinction anchors Hans Mayer’s 1923 encyclopedia entry on consumption. By defining consumption as the depletion of goods in immediate use, Mayer explains why even an economy with unchanged needs must continually produce replacements—and why present enjoyment can erode future productive capacity. His account brings household choice into contact with the material limits of production, while refusing to treat market demand as a transparent measure of human need. Wealthier households can command resources for less urgent wants while poorer households lack necessities. Readers can discover how this precise definition changes the interpretation of expenditure, overconsumption, and consumption statistics: neither money spent nor goods purchased straightforwardly measures how well a population’s needs are met.
What can a single state secure by adopting Walras’s monetary proposals—and what requires international coordination? This technical dispute anchors Richard Kerschagl’s rejoinder to Alfred Amonn’s criticism of the German Walras edition. Defending his introduction and bibliographical annotations, not Raditz’s translation, Kerschagl concedes printing errors while rejecting the charge of economic confusion. He argues that national adoption of Walrasian bimetallism cannot by itself guarantee international metallic parity, and distinguishes maintaining a fixed metallic exchange rate from pursuing changing purchasing-power parities. These distinctions give readers a concrete way to examine what monetary “stability” means. The rejoinder also exposes a tension in scholarly self-defence: Kerschagl demands a boundary between substantive criticism and personal disparagement while answering his critic in sharply accusatory terms.
The solidarity that enables people to act together can also prevent them from abandoning a disastrous cause. In Machtpsychologie, Friedrich von Wieser traces this tension to the reciprocal expectations binding leaders and followers. His distinctive starting point is an analogy with economic value: just as a common price does not imply identical personal valuations, social power need not imply a separate collective mind. Military discipline shows how fear can give way to honor, pride, and duty—making cooperation more purposeful while deepening dependence. Against crowd psychology’s emphasis on volatility, Wieser stresses the rigidity of organized groups. His account offers a way to distinguish power’s capacity to sustain itself from its capacity to serve the people whose coordinated wills make it possible.
Demand becomes a precise economic concept, in this compact encyclopedia entry for the Handwörterbuch der Staatswissenschaften, only once money mediates exchange and separates the buyer’s side from the seller’s. Strigl’s decisive move is to distinguish mere desire from kaufkräftige Nachfrage — demand backed by the ability and willingness to pay — and to show that price is the device that selects which wants become effective. Because wants outrun the scarce stock, the ranking of demand turns not on urgency of need alone but on wealth and the subjective valuation of money, so price theory explains allocation, not moral desert. He follows the argument to legal maximum prices, where a ceiling below the market-clearing level produces excess demand rationed by queues or cards, and to the Grenzkäufer whose bid guides production itself.
Nur ein Teil der Nachfrage kann jeweils mit dem begrenzten Gütervorrate befriedigt werden.
English translation: “Only a portion of demand can, in any given case, be satisfied out of the limited stock of goods.”
Every socialist scheme founders on the same rock, the impossibility of economic calculation, and this sequel to the 1920 essay takes up the objections against that thesis one by one. Mises works through Arthur Wolfgang Cohn's revival of Schäffle's administratively fixed Sozialtaxe, Karl Polányi's guild-socialist functionalism, and Eduard Heimann's cost-based pricing, showing that each must collapse either into central planning, where calculation admittedly fails, or into syndicalism, where associations trade as owners and socialism dissolves. He then turns on the Soviet and Marxist replies of Tschajanow, Strumilin, Varga, and Kautsky, arguing that inherited capitalist prices, labor-time reckoning, and the reduction of heterogeneous labor all break down against scarce natural factors. No socialist, he concludes, has yet produced a workable method of calculation.
Man durfte den Sozialismus preisen, man durfte jedoch über ihn nicht nachdenken.
English translation: “One was permitted to extol socialism, but one was not permitted to think about it.”
Can a diagnosis of cultural decline be useful when its claim to inevitability is rejected? In this 1923 review essay on Spengler’s second volume, Siegmund Feilbogen separates historical warning from political fatalism. He challenges the elastic chronology behind Spengler’s cultural life cycles and exposes a tension in his admiration for aristocratic instinct and military action: if creative culture makes a people an agent of history, what of the thinkers, poets, scholars, and inventors who produce it? Writing in defence of democracy, Feilbogen nevertheless credits Spengler with making symptoms of decay visible. This compact critique shows how a reader can take those warnings seriously without accepting either inevitable collapse or the authoritarian remedies Feilbogen finds in Spengler’s politics.
A balanced state budget need not mean a stable currency. In this 1923 article, Emil Lederer tests the promise behind proposed financial supervision of Austria and Germany against the responses of borrowers, businesses, workers, and foreign investors. His distinctive concern is what fiscal accounts leave out: private credit can replace public money creation, taxes can be shifted onto weaker groups, and monetary tightening can damage the production on which recovery depends. Inflation, in his account, collects an unequal tax rather than distributing sacrifice evenly. The article offers a concrete way to distinguish accounting success from economic stabilization—and explains why Lederer regards European political pacification, not budgetary discipline alone, as a prerequisite for lasting currency recovery.
Kerschagl refuses to be filed under either metallism or chartalism, and builds instead a systematic theory of money as a functional concept embedded in an organic, divided-labour economy. Money value is purchasing power: an internal value measured through prices and index numbers, and an external value that is, strictly, not a value but a price. From these foundations he works outward through quantity theory—dissolved, he argues, into many income quantities—money creation tied to commodity bills, cashless payment, inflation as a pathological overissue of monetary tokens, currency stabilisation, centralized foreign-exchange management, and the postwar debates over gold at Genoa. Austria and Hungary after 1918 furnish his central case of inflation joined to a passive balance of payments. Monetary theory, he holds, is the test of any general economic doctrine.
Wir sehen somit, daß der sogenannte Kurswert eigentlich kein Wert ist, sondern ein Preis.
English translation: “We thus see that the so-called exchange-rate value is in fact not a value at all, but a price.”
A cheaper ticket need not produce another journey. In this 1923 article, Oskar Engländer makes the purposes and constraints of travel—not distance alone—the starting point for explaining passenger fares. A family visit, a holiday, a business transaction, and a daily commute generate different responses to price: spare income, available time, or access to housing may matter more than the fare itself. He then asks how transport operators can price services when they cannot directly observe passengers’ willingness to pay. Carriage classes, excursion trains, and restricted concessions become practical instruments for distinguishing demand. By separating additional traffic costs from allocated common expenses, Engländer also clarifies a persistent public-policy tension: fuller use of transport facilities may justify cheaper fares without settling who should finance the shortfall.