3,673 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Knowing an economic doctrine is not the same as knowing how to use it. In this unfinished lecture draft, published posthumously in 1982, Schumpeter locates economics’ apparent “crisis” less in defective theory than in inadequate analytical training and the intrusion of political judgments into scientific disputes. His reconstruction of Ricardo makes the distinction concrete: wages, rent, and profits are not separate doctrines to endorse or reject, but interdependent elements of a system whose assumptions perform specific tasks. Readers can discover why criticism of an assumption must also confront its structural role—and why, for Schumpeter, mathematics clarifies reasoning without replacing theoretical judgment. His confidence that competent economists largely agree also raises a pointed question: how much disagreement can legitimately be dismissed as failure to master the tools?
What one ought to learn is how to work with such theories, how to analyze concrete situations and how to solve problems with them.
Not refutation but neglect scattered the Austrian economics that Mises and Hayek had led around 1930; exile, the Anschluss, and the rise of Keynesian thought did the rest. Ludwig Lachmann treats the later revival as a rescue: because the earlier concepts were forgotten or linguistically transformed, they must now be actively retrieved. He reopens Hans Mayer's causal-genetic account of how real market prices actually form, Hayek's problem of knowledge at once dispersed and diffusable, and the Knight-Austrian capital controversy, arguing that capital theory must be rebuilt from individual decision-making rather than from social aggregates that presuppose one evaluating mind. Offered as a birthday tribute to Terence Hutchison, the essay makes technical knowledge itself a weapon in competition.
Where the storage of ideas failed we must at least make an attempt at their salvage.
A physical account of the mind need not promise that the mind can fully explain itself. In this retrospective conference essay, Hayek revisits the neural theory of The Sensory Order, clarifying how sensory qualities emerge from relations among impulses rather than properties carried by individual nerves. His emphasis on “dispositions” presents an organism already active before a stimulus arrives, continually reorganizing its possibilities for interpretation and action. The distinctive tension lies between explaining this organization in principle and predicting its particular operations. A mechanical rat makes the distinction concrete: knowing its construction would not mean knowing everything its learning and environment lead it to do. Readers encounter both Hayek’s clarification of his earlier theory and his candid reservation about the adequacy of his proof that the brain cannot fully explain itself.
The fratricidal European war of 1914 ended a liberal international order of free trade, gold, open migration, and passport-free travel, and, in this survey prepared for the Antonio Feltrinelli Prize, becomes the starting point for sixty years of upheaval in the world economy, macroeconomic theory, and policy. Haberler reads the interwar catastrophe as the product of monetary destruction, delayed devaluations, and protectionism rather than any inherent flaw of capitalism; the postwar great surprise of prosperity he credits to sound finance, GATT liberalization, and Marshall Plan aid. Tracing the Keynesian revolution and the monetarist counterrevolution, he arrives at the stagflation of the 1970s, arguing that inflation is no permanent cure for unemployment and that monetary restraint must be joined to fiscal discipline and competitive, deregulated markets.
We now know that money had a lot to do with the Great Depression.
The American "money question" runs from Civil War greenbacks and Bryan's Cross of Gold to the Federal Reserve, and Reed's 1982 essay revives it with a radical claim: money must be divorced from politics and returned to the market. He builds on Carl Menger's account of money as an emergent product of exchange rather than a state invention, arising as traders seek a widely marketable medium to escape the limits of barter. Precious metals prevailed through durability, divisibility, and stability; paper began as a redeemable substitute before political privilege turned it into unbacked fiat. Against reforms that leave the state monopoly intact, Reed insists the framework of thought must change first, likening faith in managed money to obsolete superstition and modest fixes to rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.
Monetary history records no instance of a people voluntarily choosing in the marketplace to use unbacked fiat paper as their money!
What does an economic model conceal when it calls information “given”? In this 1982 article, reprinted in the supplied 2022 edition, Hayek returns to Oskar Lange’s proposed answer to the socialist calculation problem and challenges its decisive assumption: knowledge dispersed among producers is not thereby available to a planning authority. His objection concerns more than computational power. The changing capacities of particular plants, materials and workers must be discovered, while technical feasibility alone cannot show which use of resources is economical. Hayek’s close, polemical reading makes a distinction worth examining even beyond this controversy: describing the information needed for rational allocation is not the same as explaining how anyone acquires it. Readers can trace why he regards equilibrium equations and managerial accounting as answers to different questions.
For the real problem is the impossibility of concentrating all the information required in the hands of any single agency.
How can psychology explain a mind that cannot fully comprehend its own workings? In this 1982 conference discussion, Hayek and Weimer distinguish understanding an organizing principle from predicting every particular event. Questions from psychologists and audience members press Hayek to clarify what remains essential in The Sensory Order when its provisional physiological mechanisms and associationist vocabulary are set aside. The exchange also brings his psychology into contact with economics: neurons and market participants contribute to coordinated orders without possessing all the knowledge those orders use. Readers can discover both the reach and the limits of this comparison—especially why Hayek values mathematics for describing patterns while resisting promises of exhaustive numerical prediction. The dialogue preserves qualifications and unresolved questions that a systematic exposition might smooth away.
From Thomas Aquinas to Keynes, this posthumously published synthesis argues that the deepest disputes in economics never turned on economics alone but on rival patterns of Western reasoning—nominalist, universalist, organismic, and dialectic. Schooled in Viennese marginalism and hardened by his quarrel with the German historical school, Pribram traces economic doctrine as it emerges from Thomistic moral theology through mercantilism, Cartesian Physiocracy, and Ricardian mechanics into the marginalist, Marxian, and institutionalist controversies of the nineteenth century, and onward to fascist, Bolshevist, and Keynesian economics. Incompatible doctrines coexisted in the same universities, he contends, because their roots lay outside the discipline, in broader habits of thought. The labour of nearly half a century, it reads the history of economic analysis as a chapter in the history of thought.
The Ricardian economists had centered their analysis on problems of distribution; in the theories of their successors, problems connected with the allocation of resources occupied a primary rank.
'Autonomous' and 'induced' name positions in a causal story, not fixed labels stamped on the current account, the capital account, or official reserves. Against the habit of reading causation straight off the balance-of-payments table, Machlup insists that double-entry identities guarantee offsetting balances but explain nothing: a trade surplus is itself a capital export, and a current-account deficit is the logical correlative of a capital-account surplus rather than its cause. Using an oil-price shock to show that an importing country may cut consumption, raise exports, borrow, or draw down reserves, he weighs five rival doctrines of autonomy and ties each to a specific exchange-rate regime. His verdict is disciplinary: which flow dominates an episode must be established by historical and theoretical argument, never inferred from account headings alone.
Economists are prone to consider assumptions as almost perfect substitutes for knowledge, or perfect antidotes for ignorance.
Hayek's title is itself the thesis: reason is overestimated whenever it is credited as the source of civilization rather than its late and partial product. Inherited instincts were shaped for small face-to-face bands, and the extended society of strangers became possible only through culturally transmitted rules, property, honesty, promise-keeping, that suppressed or redirected those instincts and spread because the groups adopting them multiplied. Between instinct and reason he inserts a third term, custom and tradition, holding that people learned to behave before they understood why and that morality evolved through group selection, not design. Ranging through Hume, Ferguson, Smith, and Menger, he rejects Hegelian and Marxian laws of development and, in an oral supplement, defends religion's guardianship of property and family while dismissing Malthusian panic with Julian Simon's population data.
Die erste Alternative zu Instinkt ist nicht Vernunft, sondern Brauch und Tradition, die nicht Menschenwerk sind, sondern ein Erbe und das Ergebnis der Entwicklung.
English translation: “The first alternative to instinct is not reason, but custom and tradition, which are not the work of man but an inheritance and the outcome of evolution.”
Grant a single ruler complete command of monetary and fiscal policy, insulated from parliaments and pressure groups: what would a credible cure for stagflation actually require? Haberler's benevolent and enlightened dictator is a methodological fiction, benevolent in respecting consumer sovereignty, enlightened in trusting competition and private property over the central planning of Lange and Dickinson. The prescription that follows binds monetary restraint, with money growth cut to potential real GNP growth, to fiscal discipline, tax reform against bracket creep and phantom profits, and above all the withdrawal of the privileges that keep wages and prices rigid: farm supports, the Davis-Bacon Act, minimum-wage laws, closed shops. Freer trade, he argues, is the most powerful discipline on domestic monopoly, and inflation the fons et origo of the whole malaise.
A 2 per cent reduction in real GNP is a shock, but it is not a crushing burden.
Property, family, and religion endured, Hayek argues, not because anyone grasped their function but because the groups that observed them could sustain larger and more complex cooperation, the thread of this 1983 Zurich lecture, a compressed prospectus for what would become The Fatal Conceit. He shifts moral philosophy from justification to genealogy, asking how our morality arose and what it has done for us, and inserts inherited tradition as a third source between instinct and deliberate reason. Religion, on this view, carried 'symbolic truths' that guarded rules whose social utility stayed opaque. Rejecting Hegelian and Marxian laws of development and Malthusian alarm alike, he closes by returning to the market as a knowledge system that sets dispersed facts to work through prices no planner could ever compute.
Die Entwicklung der Moral ist ein Anpassungsprozeß und nicht, wie die rationalistischen Theoretiker glauben, ein Ergebnis bewußter menschlicher Entscheidung.
English translation: “The development of morality is a process of adaptation and not, as rationalist theorists believe, the result of conscious human decision.”