3,673 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
A seminar’s survival becomes a personal worry in Felix Kaufmann’s farewell song for Mises: Geneva cannot accommodate everyone, and Vienna’s departing scholars leave more than empty chairs behind. Presented in Arlene Oost-Zinner’s 2010 English translation and folk-song arrangement, the four stanzas mingle affectionate tribute with nervous humour. Drumming fingers and a recurring Latin lament sit alongside opposition to import taxes—a pointed reminder that friendship and economic conviction bound this circle together. The song offers a compact, intimate view of scholarly allegiance under the pressure of separation: its speaker honours the teacher’s new appointment while wondering what will become of the shared life he leaves behind.
A tax on written agreements can discourage people from recording their rights at all. This perverse consequence gives a concrete edge to Friedrich von Wieser’s 1906 examination of Austrian fee legislation. Beneath the statutory label of “fees,” he identifies a system dominated by transaction taxes and asks whether its charges correspond to actual capacity to pay. His economic perspective cuts across legal categories: frequent business turnover differs from durable investment, gross property value from genuine enrichment, and nominal liability from the burden ultimately borne by borrowers or sellers. Readers can discover how documentation, holding periods, liquidity, and collection procedures alter a tax’s effects—and why Wieser couples his defence of the law’s basic fiscal principles with demands for simpler rules and relief from unequal burdens.
Though its printed text is nothing but formula, this thank-you card with autograph signature is a compact witness to a political career. It acknowledges congratulations on Gustav Gross's election as president of the Austrian Reichsrat's Abgeordnetenhaus in 1917, but the catalogue record around it opens outward: Gross had sat since 1899 as deputy for the Moravian town of Iglau and ranked among the leading politicians of the German-national camp, a chairman of German protective associations. The card fuses private courtesy with institutional self-presentation, turning a personal exchange into a sign of parliamentary status. Together with its envelope addressed to Oskar Berl, it preserves in miniature the office, associational leadership, and ceremonial language through which late Habsburg politics marked its occasions.
Er war Präsident und Obmann der deutschen Schutzvereine "Südmark" und "Deutscher Schulverein" sowie Vorsitzender des "Deutschen Nationalvereins".
English translation: “He was president and chairman of the German protective associations "Südmark" and "Deutscher Schulverein," as well as chairman of the "Deutscher Nationalverein.”
Neither List’s protectionism nor free trade supplied Carl von Hock with a ready-made customs policy: he sought duties calibrated to production costs and the prospects of particular Austrian industries in world competition. This practical middle ground anchors Friedrich von Wieser’s brief dictionary portrait of the financial writer and Austrian official. Wieser’s emphasis falls on the conjunction of scholarship, administrative skill and integrity, crediting Hock with improving the conduct of officials under his direction. A further detail complicates the portrait: Hock’s strong Catholic convictions did not stop him supporting state control of elementary education. The entry offers a compact account of how economic inquiry and political independence could inform the work of a senior administrator.
Housing needed for armament workers and housing stimulated by rising wartime incomes pose different policy problems. In this December 1941 article, Karl Pribram argues for supporting the first while restraining the second—not only to conserve scarce materials, but to preserve demand that could sustain employment when defense spending declines. His perspective joins the timing of durable-goods production to the risks of mortgage and building cycles. The practical difficulty is distributional: tighter credit can exclude poorer households, while limits on construction can raise tenants’ rents. By weighing mortgage restrictions against building-permit limits and accompanying tenant protection, Pribram shows why restraining a boom requires more than reducing construction totals: it requires deciding which needs to meet now and which purchases can safely wait.
Defending an institution because it exists is not the same as defending it because it is just. In this 1957 comment on Samuel P. Huntington’s account of conservatism, Murray N. Rothbard presses that distinction against the proposal that American liberals set aside ideological argument to resist communism. If attachment to established institutions is sufficient, he asks, why should it not also vindicate defenders of Soviet rule? Rothbard argues instead for answering rival principles with reasoned principles—and changing institutions where liberal commitments require it. His treatment of the New Conservatives sharpens the point: their shared opposition conceals incompatible political ideals. This brief polemic offers a concrete test of political labels by separating what movements resist from what they believe deserves preservation.
The proper answer to the radical challenge of a new ideology is to adopt not conservatism but a contrasting radicalism, to oppose reason with reason.
Can an editor disclaim responsibility for a translation published under his name? In this brief reply to Kerschagl, Alfred Amonn insists that dividing the labour does not divide accountability. He contrasts Kerschagl’s defence with the editors’ own declaration of joint work on the German translation of Walras’s Theory of Money. His objections to expressions about metallic parity and stabilization sharpen a second distinction: grammatical correctness and intelligibility are not merely matters of stylistic taste. This is not an exposition of Walras’s monetary theory, but a pointed dispute over the standards required to transmit it. Readers can follow how Amonn tests claims of scholarly collaboration against the wording and public presentation of the resulting work.
Could Switzerland honour its international railway commitments without binding its entire network to perpetual foreign privileges? In this 1911 article, Siegmund Feilbogen defends rejection of the proposed Saint-Gothard convention while resisting both financial retaliation and disruption of European transit. His distinction is precise: material concessions may be negotiable, but permanent limits on political independence are not. Reading the earlier treaties against demands for repayment of foreign subsidies, he argues that state acquisition need not extinguish existing guarantees—or enlarge them into rights over all Swiss railways. The article offers a concrete encounter with treaty interpretation under unequal diplomatic pressure, showing how an ambiguous provision about railway mergers could, in Feilbogen’s view, turn a limited infrastructure obligation into an indefinite constraint on national autonomy.
Industrial growth need not eclipse agriculture, nor commercial expansion displace concern for national independence: these are the balances Siegmund Feilbogen values in his short review of A. de Navay de Földeak’s study of Hungary’s economic role. He praises the author’s statistical precision and restraint, drawing on Levasseur’s preface to place industrial gains alongside the country’s continuing dependence on the land. His strongest endorsement, however, goes to the connection between material development and the preservation of national rights. Five French-backed industrial enterprises give concrete support to his approval of Földeak’s appeal to French merchants. The review shows how Feilbogen’s judgement of an economic survey joins measured assessment of development to sympathy for Hungarian autonomy and Franco-Hungarian trade.
Written from New York in November 1961 to thank Alfred Müller-Armack for birthday wishes, this short letter turns quickly to a correction Mises wanted on record: he had been misunderstood as rejecting all political compromise. Theory and program, he insists, must be built consistently and without contradiction, yet the politician who cannot move the majority to adopt them must settle for whatever the given circumstances make attainable. The concession costs him nothing doctrinally—he restates his standing verdict that middle-of-the-road interventionism, in every variety, necessarily ends in full socialism. Writing as a European rather than American liberal, he closes by praising Müller-Armack and Ludwig Erhard for the postwar German recovery, a liberal achievement he can admire without endorsing its every interventionist remnant.
In der praktischen Politik kann man nur selten das Vollkommene erreichen. Man muss sich in der Regel damit begnügen, das kleinere Übel zu wählen.
English translation: “In practical politics one can only rarely attain the perfect. As a rule one must be content to choose the lesser evil.”
Ranking satisfactions is not the same as measuring them. This distinction drives Alfred Amonn’s critique of the first volume of Robert Liefmann’s Grundsätze der Volkswirtschaftslehre, which promises to rebuild economics on psychological foundations. Amonn tests that promise against definitions of utility and cost and numerical examples of choice: can subjective feelings legitimately be added, subtracted, or expressed as ratios? His defence of marginal-utility theory is qualified by a willingness to challenge its practitioners when they use the same questionable arithmetic. He also develops a concrete alternative to treating cost as pain: cost is the benefit forgone when resources are used elsewhere. The review offers a focused encounter with the limits of numerical representations of preference—and with the distinction between a genuinely new explanation and a change of theoretical vocabulary.
A tax assessed on yesterday’s prosperity may fall due in a year of hardship. Such practical difficulties give substance to Siegmund Feilbogen’s portrait of Robert Meyer, the Austrian finance administrator and scholar commemorated in this July 1914 obituary, introduced by Yves Guyot. Feilbogen connects Meyer’s conceptual precision with his concern for fair treatment of taxpayers, while acknowledging his inability to overcome privileges enjoyed by great landowners. Particularly striking is Meyer’s argument, as presented here, that progressive taxation rests primarily on fiscal productivity rather than justice. The tribute offers a compact encounter with the uncertain boundaries of taxable income—and with Feilbogen’s understanding of conscientious public service, where sound definitions matter but political constraints remain.