3,673 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
What happens to socialism when its promise reaches people exhausted by war and preoccupied with land, food, and survival? In this 1919 article, Emil Lederer interprets Bolshevism as the adaptation of socialist ideas to social disintegration, distinguishing demands for immediate redistribution from the solidarity a new order would require. His analysis links economic scarcity to political resentment and military coercion to soldiers’ revolt: the power-state, he argues, produces the forces that undermine its own authority. Yet destruction is not reconstruction. Lederer sees the masses’ experience of political power as a lasting change in their sense of possibility, without treating it as proof that socialism has arrived. The article offers a pointed distinction between winning power and creating the social relations needed to sustain a different order.
Can an isolated revolution create the international conditions that socialism needs, or must those conditions precede its success? In this 1919 article, Emil Lederer examines Bolshevism through the pressures of war, scarcity, and conflict with a capitalist world. He interprets coercion and economic rupture as consequences of revolutionary isolation rather than necessary features of socialism, while distinguishing the redistribution of scarce consumption goods from the transformation of production. Yet his explanation does not dissolve the disagreement over revolutionary methods: forcing the pace of change remains, for him, a question of principle. The article offers a precise way to distinguish building socialist institutions from seizing power in the hope that international transformation will follow.
Der Bolschewismus ist ein radikaler Sozialismus in Isolierung, im Kampf.
English translation: “Bolshevism is a radical socialism in isolation, in struggle.”
Before the Budget Committee in July 1919, Staatssekretär Schumpeter reported on a fiscal crisis he refused to reduce to numbers—the deficit itself hung on an unsettled territorial map. Finance, in his account, is inseparable from social order, yet must not be rescued by the printing press: he opposed further note-stamping and favored an independent bank of issue that would do no business with the state. Against an interpellation, he denied that hundreds of millions had already been earmarked for nationalization, conceding only that a Sozialisierungsbank was under discussion—an institution meant to prepare the wealth levy, manage compensation bonds, and extend industrial credit. Socialization, in this design, is subordinated to solvency, banking technique, and monetary restraint rather than launched as an expropriation campaign.
Der Staatssekretär mahnte zur Sparsamkeit, erklärte, daß der Staatsbankrott auch eine soziale Katastrophe herbeiführen würde und daß mit dem gegenwärtigen Zustande der Arbeitslosigkeit so rasch als möglich ein Ende gemacht werden müsse.
English translation: “The State Secretary urged economy, declared that state bankruptcy would also bring about a social catastrophe, and that the present state of unemployment must be brought to an end as quickly as possible.”
Could prosperity under protective tariffs prove that protection worked—or might freer trade have produced more? In this 1919 scholarly article, Marianne Herzfeld reconstructs Karl Zinzendorf’s answer from his largely unpublished writings, especially his 1771 treatise on customs duties. She locates his case for free trade at the intersection of Austrian administrative experience and engagement with English economic thought. Affordable, good-quality goods for consumers, rather than privileges for producers or an accumulating stock of money, emerge as his measure of successful commercial policy. Herzfeld also traces the limits of that position: luxury duties, agricultural preferences, and concessions to administrative feasibility. Her account distinguishes a sustained theoretical challenge to commercial restrictions from both practical opposition among officials and the more systematic achievement of Adam Smith.
The proclamation of a Soviet republic in Budapest threatened German-Austrian shareholders, banks, and creditors with ruin—and this April 1919 newspaper intervention by Schumpeter, then State Secretary for Finance, sets out to calm the panic while fixing the minimum Austria must demand. He separates non-interference in Hungary's internal revolution from firm defense of Austrian claims: securities must be returned, obligations paid, bank accounts opened, expropriated owners compensated. The conceptual pivot is a theory of revolutionary creditworthiness—default would render Budapest incapable of credit and make reconstruction impossible, so even a revolutionary government must submit to the discipline of international obligation. Austrian capital held in Hungary is treated not as private property but as a highly valuable asset of the national economy, one the fragile successor state cannot renounce without collapsing.
Auch eine Sowjetrepublik kann nach außen hin ein guter Kaufmann und verläßlicher Geschäftsmann sein, trotzdem sie sich im Innern von kapitalistischen Methoden abwendet.
English translation: “Even a Soviet republic can, outwardly, be a good merchant and reliable businessman, even though internally it turns away from capitalist methods.”
As the Habsburg monarchy dissolved into rival successor states, the new German-Austria faced a fiscal wreckage that Reisch likens to an earthquake-damaged building whose foundations — state credit and currency — must still bear the load. Financial policy, he insists, reaches far beyond the levying of taxes: honoring the war-loan Lombard promises would have calmed the panic, whereas the bank's passive resistance turned consolidated war debt back into dangerous floating note debt. He attacks the exaggerated fiscalism and 'tax-security psychosis' of the hour — the twelve percent default interest, the controls on correspondence and postal transfers — while conceding that some devaluation is unavoidable and that a fair one-time capital levy should wait until borders and currency are settled. His remedy is conservative surgery, not amputation.
Finanzpolitik darf sich keineswegs in Steuerpolitik erschöpfen.
English translation: “Financial policy must by no means exhaust itself in tax policy.”
Does overwhelming war debt expose the limits of taxation itself, or the failure of particular fiscal policies? In this 1919 review essay, Alfred Amonn examines Schumpeter’s answer with German-Austria’s prospects in view. He endorses a distinction with practical consequences: the war’s real losses have already occurred, while monetary claims still require adjustment. A one-time wealth levy intended to cancel debt is therefore not the same project as transferring productive property into state management. Amonn’s emphasis falls on the distance between economic possibility and political execution: reconstruction may be feasible, yet incompetent taxation can destroy the activity on which revenue depends. The essay also preserves a qualification in Schumpeter’s position—defending private enterprise for immediate recovery need not mean treating capitalism as a permanent social order.
Political will cannot supply missing coal, restore severed industrial connections, or make poor soils fertile. In this 1919 article, Emil Lederer tests the prospects of socialization against the sharply different economic conditions of Germany and German Austria. Committed to socialist transformation, he nevertheless argues that collective ownership cannot erase inequalities of geography and resources. Germany’s organized industries offer opportunities for socialization; Austria’s fragmented economy first needs reconstruction, export markets, and foreign capital. The comparison exposes a tension within socialist politics: the upheaval that makes transformation urgent also makes its execution precarious. Lederer’s account lets readers distinguish caution intended to preserve socialism’s prospects from opposition to socialism itself—and see why ownership, productive capacity, and international dependence cannot be treated as separate questions.
America is neither wholly alien nor reducible to economic power, Schumpeter told a Viennese audience in 1919: it is a European-derived society enlarged by space, wealth, and its own institutions. His anti-exotic premise—that nothing absolutely new is to be sought there—organizes a compressed sociology of the United States. Its culture he reads as decisively Anglo-Saxon, held together by English assimilation rather than biological homogeneity; its political types by regional life-forms rather than mere ancestry; its constitution by the swelling of presidential power into the central fact of modern American life. Most against the grain of Central European opinion, he denies that economic interest drove American entry into the war: intervention was a kind of crusade, a moral conviction, with Wilson acting as the mouthpiece of world morality.
Das Präsidentenamt stand im Vordergrunde des Kampfes und seine Machtfülle erreichte eine solche Höhe, daß man heute wirklich sagen kann, der mächtigste Monarch der Welt sei der Präsident der Vereinigten Staaten.
English translation: “The office of the presidency stood at the forefront of the struggle, and the fullness of its power reached such a height that today one may truly say that the mightiest monarch in the world is the President of the United States.”
Despair, however understandable, is politically dangerous—that is Schumpeter's counter to the collapse-mood gripping postwar Austria, whose fate, he insists, depends less on destiny than on whether policy preserves credit and restarts production. Reconstruction begins with public finance: ordered finances secure creditworthiness, and creditworthiness secures food imports and industrial recovery, so that a fiscal collapse would drag social collapse behind it. Three prerequisites follow—no unpayable war indemnity; a fair division of war burdens among the Habsburg successor states; and a swift, forceful capital levy. Total socialization he rejects as impossible: the state should name at once the branches it means to socialize and free the rest of economic life from fiscal harassment, bureaucratic tutelage, and the wartime coercive forms that are strangling enterprise.
Eine Kriegsentschädigung können wir nicht zahlen, sie stürzt uns notwendig in Verwirrungen und vielleicht in den Bolschewismus hinein.
English translation: “We cannot pay a war indemnity; it would necessarily plunge us into confusion and perhaps into Bolshevism.”
Preferring one good to another does not yet explain why a buyer offers a definite sum of money for it. This gap drives Oskar Engländer’s two-part article, Fragen des Preises (1919). Challenging the identification of monetary bids with measurable subjective value, he asks what demand diagrams actually represent—and whether competition determines a unique price or merely bounds a range of possible prices. These distinctions acquire practical force in his treatment of wartime scarcity: Engländer argues that some price ceilings can restrain sellers without leaving effective demand unsatisfied, while others foster clandestine trade or arbitrary allocation. The article offers a critical route from the foundations of valuation to the conditions for price controls and rationing, without claiming to have completed the positive theory it demands.
For Emil Lederer, Germany’s answer to the Versailles peace terms cannot be another war—but neither need it be resignation. This 1919 article makes economic reconstruction the hinge between national survival and international socialist politics. Its distinctive perspective emerges in the returning soldier: uprooted from civilian work, organized, accustomed to violence, and receptive to promises that the exhausted economy cannot fulfil. Lederer connects this volatile social condition to a missed revolutionary opportunity. Socializing coal, electricity, and iron production, he argues, could demonstrate socialism’s practical viability to workers beyond Germany and alter the political conditions sustaining the punitive settlement. The article offers a sharply situated account of how demobilization, class conflict, and productive recovery might turn defeat toward social transformation rather than nationalist reaction.