3,673 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Market freedom, for Wilhelm Röpke, requires more than removing state restrictions—and defending it need not mean accepting the factory, the metropolis, or concentrated ownership as desirable forms of life. In this 1948 article, he joins an argument for competitive markets to a critique of industrial society. His proposed “decentralism” seeks dispersed property and humane communities while preserving prices as a means of coordinating consumer wishes. The tension lies in deciding which public interventions sustain that order and which replace it with administrative command, particularly in investment and full-employment policy. Readers can discover why Röpke rejects both laissez-faire complacency and collectivist remedies, and where his willingness to accommodate intervention meets a stringent boundary against economic planning.
American aid could keep Europe supplied—but what would enable Europe to pay its way again? In this 1948 article, William Emmanuel Rappard examines the Marshall Plan through the distinction between unequal wealth and an imbalance that makes exchange unsustainable. Reading the European recovery programme as both economic evidence and an appeal to Congress, he questions its optimistic forecasts and its evasions over repayment. His perspective places obligations on both sides of the Atlantic: European modernization and less fragmented markets require American willingness to admit imports. The article shows why food, fuel, machinery, monetary stability, and trade barriers belong to the same recovery problem—and why aid justified by political aims cannot by itself establish durable economic relations.
Removing tariffs is not the same as creating the conditions for beneficial trade. In this two-installment journal extract from his Genoa congress lecture, Hans Bayer asks how war-damaged European economies can liberalize without sacrificing employment, essential imports, or recovery. His case for “directed free trade” turns on concrete failures of automatic adjustment: displaced workers may find no new jobs, rising exports may reflect falling domestic consumption, and national monopolies may become international ones rather than disappear. Yet Bayer argues for European economic union, not permanent protection. Coordinated planning and transitional safeguards are, in his account, means of making integration possible. The article offers a pointed distinction between expanding trade and improving welfare—and shows why a commitment to freer exchange can entail enforceable international institutions.
What divides this presentation from Stackelberg's popular textbook is method, not subject matter: modern theory, Amonn insists, must be learned as a mode of reasoning rather than gathered as a heap of results. He builds from supply and demand as functional relations through equilibrium and market price to monopoly, duopoly, and the imperfect competition of Joan Robinson and Chamberlin, grounding demand in marginal utility and supply in subjective cost. He rejects the marginal-productivity theory of factor values as circular, substituting his own principle that product prices must be differentiated by the quantities of factors each good requires, and derives wage, interest, and rent from it. The argument runs on through money and the quantity theory, business cycles, and comparative costs to a welfare doctrine that weighs competition's productive power against the inequality it breeds.
Der Preis keines Gutes ist unabhängig von denen der anderen bestimmt, sondern alle sind zugleich, «simultan» bestimmt.
English translation: “The price of no good is determined independently of the others; rather, all are determined at once, "simultaneously.”
A demand curve, in ordinary teaching, is a path along which buyers slide as prices change. That picture is the error Morgenstern sets out to dismantle. The curve, he argues, is first a schedule of mutually exclusive intentions at a single moment — alternative maximum bids, not a record of successive purchases. Once a buyer actually transacts, expenditure and possession change, and the remaining points no longer mean what they did; a one-variable curve is valid for exactly one transaction unless it is reconstructed through a fresh reaction function. Elasticity, price discrimination, monopolistic competition, and the cobweb theorem all inherit the flaw. What begins as immanent critique of Marshall and Schultz becomes a bridge toward a game-theoretic view of markets as strategic situations that shift with every trade.
Eine individuelle Nachfragekurve einer Variablen ist dann, ganz gleich, welches ihre Form ist, gültig nur für eine einzige Verwendung, d. h. für eine Transaktion.
English translation: “An individual demand curve of a single variable is then, whatever its shape, valid only for one single use, that is, for one transaction.”
Competition need not belong to capitalism: this is the premise Hans Bayer develops in his 1948 journal article on competitive socialism. Drawing on Lange and Lerner, he asks how prices and decentralized decisions might serve publicly determined goals without requiring comprehensive administrative control. His proposed safeguard is selective public ownership, especially of basic industries, where he locates the most dangerous investment disturbances. Postwar Britain gives this sympathetic theoretical account a practical test: economic budgets, flexible planning, and employer–worker cooperation promise coordination compatible with individual freedom. The article’s revealing tension lies in Bayer’s confidence that planning can contain competition’s harmful effects while retaining its advantages—a confidence set against the still-preliminary results and material constraints of British reconstruction.
Can the history of an institution establish that it ought to endure? In this review of Harold G. Fox’s Monopolies and Patents, Fritz Machlup challenges the passage from historical origins to permanent justification. Fox’s defense of English monopoly grants rests, Machlup argues, too heavily on benevolent intentions and too little on economic effects. Against the claim that opposition to invention patents is recent, he recalls nineteenth-century controversy and the Dutch repeal of patent law in 1869. Yet he separates these objections from his appreciation of Fox’s detailed documentation. The review offers a compact example of how to distinguish a useful institutional history from the economic claims made on its behalf.
Each trader may seek the greatest possible gain, yet a market transaction need not be a straightforward maximization problem: its outcome depends on other independent wills. In this 1948 conference paper, Oskar Morgenstern makes that distinction the basis of his case for game theory in economics. His qualitative exposition moves beyond firms’ conjectures about competitors to the coalitions participants can form—and the payments that can hold those coalitions together. Cartels, labor unions, and buyers combining against a monopolist expose the limitations of treating competition or monopoly as fixed arrangements. Readers can discover why Morgenstern locates stability not in a uniquely optimal price or income distribution, but in sets of alternatives whose availability sustains the outcome actually adopted.
Clearly, free competition will not continue to prevail when people can gain by combining.
Being caught looking through a keyhole and taking part in a conversation pose different problems for a theory of other people. In this essay, Alfred Schütz uses that difference to test Sartre’s account of the Other. He takes seriously Sartre’s descriptions of the gaze, shame, and the body, yet asks whether a relation defined by objectifying or being objectified can explain mutual understanding. Speaking and listening, Schütz argues, require participants to follow and co-perform meaningful activity—not merely encounter an alien perspective that limits their freedom. His critique identifies what Sartre’s analysis already presupposes: our ability to understand another person as acting within a situation. The essay offers a concrete point of entry into the tension between Sartre’s account of interpersonal conflict and Schütz’s concern with the conditions of ordinary social interaction.
Can an international trade charter promote freer exchange when its exceptions leave governments ample room to restrict it? In this 1948 article, Richard Schüller argues that the Havana charter’s problem is not rigid liberalization but the possibility that exemptions will overwhelm its commitments. Balance-of-payments difficulties, development needs, and national planning all qualify its rules. Drawing on twelve years in the League of Nations Economic Committee, he locates its promise in the proposed International Trade Organization’s ability to scrutinize restrictions and organize reciprocal concessions. His assessment of the Geneva tariff agreements distinguishes substantial negotiated commitments from their uncertain practical effects. The article offers a concrete account of the tension between national discretion and international supervision, written while the institutions and agreements remained promises awaiting implementation.
Perfect competition, as the textbooks model it, assumes away nearly everything ordinary language means by competing: with homogeneous goods, complete knowledge, and prices already adjusted, there is nothing left to discover. Hayek's reversal is to treat rivalry as a dynamic process rather than a static end-state—the very means by which costs, consumer wants, and better substitutes come to be known. Advertising, undercutting, product differentiation, and reputation, dismissed by theory as imperfections, are for him the substance of competition and the ways buyers economize on ignorance. The right test of a market is therefore not its distance from an unattainable ideal but whether it improves on what would exist if competition were blocked by licensing or price-fixing. Competition, he concludes, is a process for forming opinion and spreading dispersed knowledge.
The practical lesson of all this, I think, is that we should worry much less about whether competition in a given case is perfect and worry much more whether there is competition at all.
Whether freedom or totalitarianism prevails, Mises writes in this 1948 memorandum to Leonard Read, will be settled in the democratic nations at the polls—but votes follow conviction, and conviction is formed long before any ballot. Anti-communism collapses, he warns, once its own spokesmen have absorbed socialist premises. The deeper obstacle is Marxian polylogism, the trick of judging an argument by the speaker's class instead of answering it, so that a defense of capitalism can be waved away as merely bourgeois. Economic education must therefore work first on intellectuals, whose ideas reach the masses only in simplified form. The essay ends by cataloguing ten dogmas of 'Progressivism'—abundance blocked by capitalism, depressions as inherent market failures, wealth endlessly taxable—that sound instruction has to unmask.
What matters is not to change the ideology of the masses, but to change first the ideology of the intellectual strata, the "highbrows," whose mentality determines the content of the simplifications which are held by the "lowbrows."