4,249 works (including 483 books, 3,406 articles and 357 historical documents), 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable.
A firm cannot control every variable that determines its payoff: its rivals also act, anticipate, and combine. In this 1959 foreword to Martin Shubik’s Strategy and Market Structure, Oskar Morgenstern argues that this dependence calls for more than refinements to conventional maximization. It requires a different starting point for economic theory. His case for game theory turns especially on coalitions: even large markets can reproduce small-number bargaining when participants gain by cooperating. Morgenstern’s appraisal of Shubik also draws a sharp distinction between genuinely reformulating economic problems and merely translating familiar claims into game-theoretical vocabulary. This brief contribution clarifies what Morgenstern expected a strategic economics to explain—and why assets, entry barriers, and costly information belong within its models rather than at their margins.
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.
Delivered as three lectures in Cairo against the postwar tide of import substitution, the Singer-Prebisch thesis, and Myrdal's backwash pessimism, these essays defend trade as an engine of development while conceding narrowly bounded exceptions. Haberler refuses to equate development with industrialization, Switzerland and Denmark being advanced without it, and reframes comparative advantage as a dynamic channel supplying capital goods, technical knowledge, foreign investment, and competitive discipline. He denies that classical theory ever promised income convergence, and dismantles the claim that primary exporters face a secular deterioration in their terms of trade, faulting its reliance on British price series, freight costs, and quality bias. Disguised unemployment he treats as low productivity, not a free resource; infant-industry protection he allows only as a costly, temporary investment, preferring education, health, and infrastructure to trade restriction.
The underdeveloped countries are not exempt from the general law of scarcity—they least of all, unfortunately.
Two biologists can agree on experimental findings yet disagree about what those findings warrant. For Felix Kaufmann, this gap exposes a tension in John Dewey’s account of inquiry: can the development of successful habits explain their authority as standards of judgement? This article defends Dewey’s effort to bring logic into contact with scientific practice while questioning its grounding in the genesis of habits. Kaufmann locates the stronger foundation in the explicit criteria scientists presuppose when submitting results and methods to criticism. His reconstruction shows how inquiry can reach definite conclusions without granting any conclusion immunity from revision—and why explaining how scientists behave is different from clarifying what justifies their inferences.
To state that no scientific result is indubitably established is not to declare that scientific problems cannot be solved.
On the centenary of On Liberty, the liberal problem is deliberately displaced: from the legal freedom of discussion to the harder matter of readiness to discuss. Mill's defense, Voegelin argues, rests on an anthropology of 'improvement' that treats liberty not as a metaphysical right but as an instrument of social order, and so cannot secure the very goods it protects. To recover what rights cannot supply, the essay turns to Plato's Protagoras, where prolixity of speech becomes the model technique for preventing rational inquiry, and where virtue proves teachable only when rooted in episteme, a knowledge of the order of life rather than a stock of rules. Its refusal, Voegelin insists, is amathia, folly; and modern ideological culture has confined reason to weak but genuine enclaves in a jungle of unreason.
Rationale Diskussion der Ordnung in der Existenz des Menschen und der Gesellschaft ist nur möglich unter der Bedingung des Wissens um transzendente Erfüllung.
English translation: “Rational discussion of the order in the existence of man and society is possible only under the condition of knowledge of transcendent fulfillment.”
Political liberalism, in this encyclopedia article, names something narrower and older than democracy or progress: the Anglo-Dutch and above all Whig tradition of limiting and binding state power. Hayek condenses its classical form into three interlocking principles — freedom of opinion, the rule of law, and private property with its competitive economy — and traces the idea from post-Glorious-Revolution England through its rationalist French mutation, its late and failing German career under Bismarck, to its revival after totalitarianism. The French turn is his pivot: confidence in free social development gives way to confidence in a plan, shifting the question from limiting power to seizing it. His sharpest warning is that political and economic liberalism cannot be prised apart, contra Croce; replace competition with direction and the rule of law is hollowed out even where basic rights remain.
Tatsächlich hängt die Eigentums- und Vertragsfreiheit auf das innigste mit der Herrschaft des Gesetzes zusammen: die eine ist ohne die andere nicht möglich.
English translation: “In fact, freedom of property and contract is most intimately connected with the rule of law: the one is not possible without the other.”
Ownership gives entrepreneurs control over production—but, in Mises’s account, consumers continually put that control to the test. This encyclopedia entry from the Handwörterbuch der Sozialwissenschaften presents the market as a process in which purchases, profits, and losses redirect productive resources under conditions of uncertainty. Its central tension lies between private command over wealth and dependence on buyers’ choices. Mises sharpens the argument by distinguishing monopoly ownership from the ability to profit by restricting supply, and by explaining entrepreneurial profit as a temporary result of anticipating change rather than a permanent reward for possession. Readers can trace how consumer sovereignty becomes not only his explanation of market coordination but also his standard for defending inequality and criticizing redistribution.
What can an economist’s marked books tell us that his published arguments leave unsettled? In this article, Emil Kauder examines Carl Menger’s library at Hitotsubashi University, using marginal comments, acquisition dates, and uncut pages to distinguish intellectual influence from mere ownership. He argues for an Aristotelian foundation to Menger’s economics: the ordering of human purposes, beginning with life and health, matters more than an undifferentiated calculus of pleasure. The same evidence brings a neglected predecessor, Joseph von Kudler, into view and complicates allegations of plagiarism. Kauder’s Menger also resists easy identification with unrestricted competition. This preliminary investigation offers a concrete encounter with the evidence behind intellectual history, showing how private reading can revise an interpretation without supplying a complete intellectual biography.
Can an economy gain from foreign trade without changing its domestic institutions? In this review-essay on Ernst Heuss’s Wirtschaftssysteme und internationaler Handel, Alfred Amonn examines trade policy through the economic arrangements it sustains. His sympathetic exposition brings out the stakes of Heuss’s approach: exchange controls may undermine market coordination, while tariffs may protect not simply producers but a particular distribution of income. The tension becomes especially concrete when a centrally planned economy bargains as a single buyer and seller against dispersed market participants. By following Amonn’s presentation, readers can distinguish restrictions that Heuss regards as necessary to preserve an economic system from measures that may instead transform it—a different test from asking whether a policy merely increases trade.
Time, in G. L. S. Shackle's De Vries Lectures, is not a neutral point on a calendar axis but the setting where imagination, decision, and expectation occur—his 'moment-in-being' destroying any easy analogy between economics and mechanics. Lachmann accepts the attack on homogeneous naturalistic time yet resists its solipsistic edge: if every present were wholly self-contained, learning and plan revision would become unintelligible. His repair distinguishes the discontinuity of ends from the relative continuity of knowledge about means, adding to subjective utility a subjectivism of interpretation. Where Shackle's dynamics stays close to the isolated individual, Lachmann extends it to forward markets, which give plans a socially observable form and coordinate expectations without predicting them. Economics forgoes positive forecasting but keeps negative prediction and the interpretive reconstruction of purposes.
As soon as we permit time to elapse we must permit knowledge to change, and knowledge cannot be regarded as a function of anything else.
Can growing wealth bring declining returns on capital—and does Ricardo treat that decline as temporary or lasting? In this review of G. S. L. Tucker’s history of British economic thought, Emil Kauder challenges Tucker’s reading of Ricardo by restoring diminishing agricultural productivity to the centre of the explanation: costlier food raises money wages and squeezes profits. He also welcomes Tucker’s recovery of John Lalor, whose distinction between money saving and profitable investment opportunities offers a closer anticipation of Keynes than Malthus’s account of excessive accumulation. Kauder’s concise assessment shows why apparent similarities between economic theories require careful scrutiny of their mechanisms and timescales, while separating Tucker’s substantive discoveries from the book’s weaknesses in organization and historical context.