3,673 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Combining economic models cannot produce a unified economics if those models distort the social relations they seek to explain. In this 1958 article, Hans Bayer makes synthesis depend on a more contentious requirement: knowledge of what economic activity is for. Against the exclusion of ultimate ends from scientific inquiry, he argues that consumer sovereignty and production maximization already conceal value judgments. His alternative treats material provision as a means to personal development, not an end in itself. Advertising sharpens the distinction: profitable demand creation need not answer human needs. The article offers a concrete encounter with Bayer’s attempt to join explanation and normative criticism—and with its demanding philosophical premise that economic purposes can be objectively known, though they cannot by themselves dictate policy.
A central bank can leave its net holdings of government securities unchanged yet alter the economy’s liquidity by exchanging securities of different maturities. Josef Herbert Fürth singles out this implication of G. A. Kessler’s analysis as a warning to those concerned only with interest rates. His 1959 review weighs the Netherlands Bank’s broader concept of liquidity against the Federal Reserve’s flow-of-funds approach: liquidity accounts reveal changing positions, but not the flows behind them. Fürth’s judgement turns on the difference between possessing an analytical tool and putting it to work. While regarding American data as potentially superior, he credits Dutch economists with stronger theoretical and policy applications. This compact review offers a concrete perspective on what monetary statistics can explain—and what their users must supply.
What must the state do to sustain competition without directing everyday business? Walter Fröhlich’s 1959 review of the tenth volume of Ordo locates this tension at the heart of German neoliberalism. Writing for readers beyond its German setting, he examines how the yearbook’s shared commitment to a competitive order encounters difficult questions of European integration, monetary policy, economic justice, and Catholic teaching. His judgment is favorable but discriminating: the contributions are uneven, and warnings about the Common Market remain untested. The review offers a concise view of an intellectual circle that treats markets as dependent on legal and ethical arrangements, while revealing Fröhlich’s own preference for confronting fundamental questions rather than refining technical answers to potentially less consequential ones.
For Gerhard Tintner, the test of an introduction to linear programming is not how thoroughly it teaches calculation, but how clearly it explains economic decisions. His 1959 review of Martin J. Beckmann’s Lineare Planungsrechnung locates its strength in the short-run production and cost problems of competitive firms, illustrated through ice-cream production and a fictitious furniture factory. Tintner distinguishes Beckmann’s emphasis on neoclassical partial equilibrium from Dorfman, Samuelson and Solow’s general-equilibrium approach. His endorsement is qualified by reservations about compressed mathematics and brief treatments of consumption and Leontief models. This compact review offers a precise account of what Tintner valued in mathematical economics: methods that illuminate familiar economic problems without making advanced mathematics a prerequisite.
Praising a colleague whose ideas have become inseparable from his own, Hayek offers a personal account of what distinguished Wilhelm Röpke: not only economic expertise, but the judgment to bring abstract principles to bear on public problems. This 2013 English translation of his 1959 congratulatory address, originally contributed to an edited collection, connects their shared beginnings in monetary theory with Röpke’s broader vocation as a social philosopher. Its sharpest test of intellectual independence is the willingness to disappoint one’s own admirers. Through recollections of theoretical enthusiasm, exile, and principled dissent, readers encounter Hayek’s view of political economy as a field requiring both rigorous knowledge and moral courage.
But Röpke realised at an early stage, perhaps earlier than most of his contemporaries, that an economist who is nothing but an economist cannot be a good economist.
Can phenomenology clarify our experience of others without deriving their existence from the transcendental ego? In this response to the Royaumont discussion, presented in the German original printed in 1971, Alfred Schütz separates his criticism of Husserl’s account of intersubjectivity from any rejection of phenomenology itself. His exchange with Eugen Fink gives the problem concrete form: speaker and listener share an unfolding present, while another person’s death ends a worldly relationship in a way one’s own death cannot be experienced. These cases test what transcendental explanation can establish. The response offers a concise view of Schütz’s methodological redirection: taking the social world as given, then investigating how its meaning becomes intelligible—a distinction with direct consequences for the philosophical foundations of social science.
How could monetary expansion remain an implausible explanation of the mark’s depreciation to economists witnessing it? In this 1959 essay, Mises locates the roots of Germany’s 1923 currency catastrophe in an intellectual culture that made ethical intentions, national loyalty, and confidence in state authority tests of economic truth. His distinctive evidence is a surviving 1914 memorandum of objections raised against Böhm-Bawerk and himself: interest theory became a defence of unearned income, while monetary institutions were judged by their usefulness for war. Explicit about the limits of his recollections and missing notes, Mises offers a participant’s account of how rival explanations were excluded from debate. The essay’s particular interest lies in this connection between scholarly judgement and policy: arguments could lose a hearing not because they had been refuted, but because their presumed purposes were condemned.
Die Ideen, die die Politik der Völker leiten, fallen nicht vom Himmel.
English translation: “The ideas which guide the policies of nations do not fall from heaven.”
Every political conflict of the age, Mises insists, is at bottom economic, which makes economic theory a civic necessity rather than a specialist's luxury. This short review-essay uses the new complete English translation of Bohm-Bawerk's Capital and Interest to redefine the general reader as a citizen whose political judgment depends on theoretical literacy: whoever debates inflation, unions, taxation, or socialism without grasping economic fundamentals merely parrots what he has picked up from others no better informed. Mises supplies a reading order, beginning with the second volume on saving, capital, value, and price, then the critical history of interest theories in the first, and singles out the refutation of Marx's labor theory of value as the politically decisive chapter. Abstract theory, he argues, is the West's sharpest weapon against Soviet destructionism.
There is no doubt that Böhm-Bawerk's book is the most eminent contribution to modern economic theory.
Coal piled up in 1958, yet Hans Bayer argued that the industry still needed long-term investment. This apparent contradiction anchors his 1959 article on what enterprises can—and cannot—do about economic change. A firm may cut costs, adopt new technology, or dismiss workers rationally while worsening instability beyond its own accounts. Applying this distinction to the German coal crisis, Bayer weighs oil competition and immediate oversupply against the immense costs and long lead times of modern mines. His answer is coordinated energy policy, with cooperation extending beyond management to workers’ participation. The article makes concrete the gap between corporate resilience and economic stability, while reserving the choice between cheap energy and secure supply for political judgement rather than economic science.
When household budgets grow, does consumption expand in quantity, shift towards dearer varieties, or move into different goods altogether? Gerhard Tintner examines these alternatives through Austria’s 1954/55 urban consumption survey, distinguishing expenditure responses from changes in quantities and average prices paid. His estimates show why a simple contrast between necessities and luxuries is insufficient: rent protection and social insurance can weaken the connection between spending and household resources, while a food’s classification as “inferior” may depend on the social group examined. The report’s distinctive interest lies in its scrutiny of what such estimates warrant. Statistical uncertainty qualifies apparent differences, and forecasts depend on assumptions linking comparisons between households to changes over time. Readers can discover both concrete patterns of Austrian consumption and the limits of using household budgets to anticipate demand.
Although Husserl never engaged the concrete problems of the social sciences, his analyses of intersubjectivity, inner time-consciousness, appresentation, and typification supply, on Schütz's account, exactly the tools those sciences lack. The essay first clears away hasty appropriations, Edith Stein, Gerda Walther, and the early Scheler among them, and reads Ortega y Gasset's insistence on the ego's radical solitude as exposing the unresolved circularity in Husserl's constitution of the alter ego. The decisive move is to relocate Husserl's importance from transcendental theory to the natural attitude, the pregiven world taken as self-evident until called into question. Linking Husserl to Weber's problem of meaningful action, Schütz sketches a program, sedimented stocks of knowledge, relevance, reciprocity of perspectives, signs and symbols, and concludes that social science belongs to a constitutive phenomenology of the natural attitude, not a transcendental one.
Max Weber hat gezeigt, daß alle Phänomene der soziokulturellen Welt in sozialem Handeln gründen und auf soziales Handeln zurückverwiesen werden können.
English translation: “Max Weber has shown that all phenomena of the socio-cultural world are grounded in social action and can be traced back to social action.”
The classical gold standard is often imagined as a self-regulating machine; this dense National Bureau study replaces that image with a practical arrangement of tolerable deviations and institutional adaptation. Comparing monthly interest rates, exchange rates, gold points, arbitrage, and central-bank discount policy across the United States, Britain, France, and Germany for roughly 1870–1914 and 1925–1938, Morgenstern shows that mint par was rarely touched, that gold points depended on shipping costs and market practice, and that money markets displayed a bounded 'solidarity' rather than exact convergence. A new quantitative measure of inter-market 'effort' or stress runs through the analysis. World War I emerges as the great structural break, shattering a prewar coherence the interwar gold-exchange standard never restored — and throughout, he insists that fragile statistics cannot bear more theory than their quality allows.
Economic statistics are—in the overwhelming majority of cases—not scientific observations.