3,673 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Reviewing Hannah Arendt's book of the same name, Voegelin reads totalitarianism as the symptom of a putrefaction in Western culture, a cadaveric poison scattering its pathogens through the body of humanity. He praises her eye for the concrete, above all her account of the 'superfluous' human beings left when national societies disintegrate, yet he pushes her origins backward and inward. The deeper source is not imperialism or bureaucracy but the spiritual disease of agnosticism and an immanentist faith that would manufacture salvation within history. His sharpest objection targets the ambition to transform human nature, which he calls a contradiction in terms: to meddle with the nature of a thing is to destroy it. The crisis, finally, is religious, a revolt against the limits of human nature and against transcendence itself.
Die wahre Trennlinie in der gegenwärtigen Krise verläuft nicht zwischen Liberalen und Totalitären, sondern zwischen den religiösen und philosophischen Transzendentalisten auf der einen Seite und den liberalen und totalitären Immanentisten auf der anderen.
English translation: “The true dividing line in the present crisis does not run between liberals and totalitarians, but between the religious and philosophical transcendentalists on the one side and the liberal and totalitarian immanentists on the other.”
What must be assumed before an economic equation can yield a credible number? In this 1953 article, Gerhard Tintner presents econometrics through the gap between theoretical relationships and measurable effects. Demand and supply observations do not automatically disclose separate demand and supply curves; a precise estimate does not establish that its underlying model is adequate. Examples from meat and corn markets make these difficulties concrete, showing how external variables, past prices, and assumptions about error shape what can be inferred. Tintner’s perspective joins technical explanation to methodological caution: numerical estimates can test economic claims and inform choices about taxes or subsidies, but cannot determine policy goals. Readers can discover why the usefulness of an economic coefficient depends on more than its statistical precision.
Harrod’s collected essays offer Fritz Machlup an occasion to distinguish intellectual priority from continuing theoretical relevance. In this short review, Machlup identifies early contributions to imperfect competition while welcoming Harrod’s later challenges to the doctrine of excess capacity and his reconciliation of full-cost pricing with the marginal principle. His sympathy is informed by striking parallels with his own work on sellers’ competition, though it stops short of full agreement on profit theory. Readers can discover where Machlup sees established theory as open to revision—and why historical documentation matters to that judgment. His complaints about missing publication details and an absent index give the favorable assessment a practical edge: these are essays he expects economists to consult and cite.
May an economist honorably use a theory he does not fully believe? Shackle answers that the alternative would abolish the discipline, since every usable theory remains partial, contestable, and interesting precisely because it is not final knowledge. Sincerity thus becomes disciplined awareness of a theory's limits rather than abstention from theory. The essay runs a sequence of tests—on the arbitrary boundaries that wall economics off from psychology and politics, on the incompatible pictures rival abstractions paint, on equilibrium as a mechanical borrowing, on econometrics and its dangerous phrase 'incomplete information.' Because its subject matter learns, imagines, and invents, economics can never treat fitted equations as eternal truths, and its practitioners, Shackle urges, should form an open craft rather than a guarded mystery.
Economics is not physics, it is psychics, the study of men with all their capacity for learning and experimenting and inventing and imagining.
Can communication explain how a shared social world arises if communicating already requires shared signs and reciprocal understanding? This difficulty sharpens Alfred Schütz’s review of Husserl’s Ideas II, first published in 1953 and presented here in its 1970 republication. Reading from the standpoint of the social sciences, Schütz follows Husserl’s movement from bodily perception to the meaningful environments in which people act, interpret motives, and understand one another. He values the accounts of embodiment and habitual experience without smoothing over the manuscripts’ unresolved tensions. His criticism locates a precise explanatory gap: apprehending another person does not yet explain mutual understanding, and communicating individuals do not automatically constitute a collective subject. The review shows both what phenomenology offers social inquiry and where its account of social relations still needs argument.
Fear built cathedrals and greed built banking houses: across Brooks Adams's Law of Civilisation and Decay runs a single contest between the imaginative type—warrior, saint, priest—and the economic type of merchant, usurer, and financier. Engel-Janosi rescues this neglected American philosophy of history, written before Spengler and Toynbee, from the oblivion it met in optimistic America, reconstructing Adams's formation through the family inheritance, Harvard, Darwin, Spencer, and Guizot. Adams's narrative runs from Rome and Byzantium through the Crusades, Venice, the Reformation, England, and India to modern finance, everywhere charting centralization and the triumph of money power. Engel-Janosi finds the determinism crude beside Max Weber, yet preserves the severity of Adams's question: what governs civilization once belief in progress has collapsed?
Der Titel des geschichtlichen Hauptwerks von Brooks ist Beweis an sich: The Law of Civilisation and Decay.
English translation: “The title of Brooks's principal historical work is proof in itself: The Law of Civilisation and Decay.”
Broader education, stronger professional preparation, shorter degrees: Richard Kerschagl’s 1953 pamphlet asks which promises of Austrian university reform can actually coexist. Drawing on economics and experience of Austrian, British, and American universities, he insists that educational ambitions require staffing, funding, and credible qualifications. Small-group discussion and simulated ministries, businesses, and courts interest him as teaching methods—but not as cost-free improvements. Student hardship, he argues, calls for financial support rather than reduced requirements. His openness to pedagogical experiment sits alongside strict boundaries around admission and academic credentials. Particularly revealing is his treatment of degree reform: a qualification below the doctorate changes little if public employers still demand doctorates. The pamphlet makes university reform a concrete negotiation between educational purposes, institutional resources, and graduates’ occupational standing.
How much of marginal utility theory was available before nineteenth-century economists gave it systematic form? In this 1953 article, Emil Kauder traces subjective valuation from Aristotle to eighteenth-century accounts of exchange and diminishing satisfaction. His distinctive concern is the distance between possessing analytical ingredients and combining them into a theory: Galiani explains costs through value, Turgot shows how differing valuations make exchange mutually advantageous, and Bernoulli calculates the utility of additional wealth, yet crucial problems remain unresolved. Kauder argues that these resources might have supported a political economy founded on marginal utility in Adam Smith’s time. Readers can assess that provocative counterfactual while discovering why utility, scarcity, and even diminishing satisfaction do not by themselves explain the value of interchangeable units.
By the mid-1950s managed paper money, deficit spending, and Keynesian full-employment policy had convinced most observers that metallic money was a relic. Mises answers that fiat currency can never be a permanent order, because its stimulus depends on surprise and delay: once prices and wages catch up, the boom dies, and to prolong it governments must accelerate depreciation until the public flees cash for real values. The case for gold, he insists, is not reverence for metal but distrust of political discretion over purchasing power—a supply fixed by nature rather than pressure groups. He rebuts the balance-of-payments objection, recalls the Continental Currency and other inflations, and concludes that restoring gold depends less on mines or conferences than on surrendering the belief that prosperity can be printed.
Most people take it for granted that the world will never return to the gold standard.
No final classification of taxes is possible, Amonn concedes at the outset, because real tax systems are the residue of historically uneven practice. What follows is a concise study aid to the special theory of taxation, tracing each levy—land, building, trade, capital-rent, labour, income, wealth, inheritance, consumption, and turnover taxes—through its object, assessment base, and above all its Überwälzung, the shifting and incidence that determine who truly bears the burden. He distinguishes objective yield taxes from the subjective income tax geared to ability to pay, judges the old yield taxes fit as principal taxes only in economically backward countries, and extends the analysis to public credit, the structure and conversion of state debt, and the fiscal equalization between a federation and its member states.
Eine Zwangsanleihe vereinigt die Nachteile sowohl einer Anleihe wie einer Steuer, ohne die Vorteile einer Anleihe bzw. die Vorteile einer Steuer zu bieten.
English translation: “A forced loan combines the disadvantages of both a loan and a tax without offering the advantages of either a loan or a tax.”
Does Catholic social teaching require a particular economic system, or does it leave institutional choices open to investigation? In this 1953 journal article, Hans Bayer separates binding ethical ends from contestable economic remedies. His target is Johannes Meßner’s confidence in socially supervised competition: representative price committees, Bayer argues, cannot by themselves prevent misinvestment, reconcile competing interests, or coordinate the economy as a whole. Drawing on Oswald von Nell-Breuning, he makes the case for deliberate economic coordination without equating it with centralized coercion. The article offers a concrete encounter between Catholic ethics and economic analysis, showing why commitments to dignity, freedom, and justice need not settle the dispute between market arrangements and freedom-oriented socialist proposals.
Historicism reaches its fullest force precisely when it dissolves every human form into a historically conditioned object—and at that same moment exposes its own insufficiency, as life, dogma, myth, and an 'Ur'-history press beyond mere appearance. Engel-Janosi stages the argument as a sequence of confrontations: Burckhardt's contemplative culture of remembering against Nietzsche's demand for an art of forgetting; Acton and Döllinger's historical method defeated by dogmatic reasoning at the First Vatican Council; Spengler's biological determinism against Toynbee's refusal to freeze history at the present. As the scale of comparison widens, factual narration yields to myth as a mode of truth, and the overcoming of historicism becomes a search for a history behind history—an ideal eternal history in Vico's sense, closing on Burckhardt's hope of hearing the valley's dissonances as harmony.
Acton hat den Gegensatz richtig gefühlt, als er notierte: „Le dogme a vaincu l'histoire.“ Für ihn war es ein großes Unglück.
English translation: “Acton sensed the antithesis correctly when he noted: "Le dogme a vaincu l'histoire" [Dogma has vanquished history]. For him it was a great misfortune.”