4,366 works (including 487 books, 3,476 articles and 400 historical documents), 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable.
The separation of powers, the founders' chosen guard for liberty, has failed, hollowed out, Hayek argues, once law came to mean whatever a legislature enacts rather than a particular kind of rule. First published in Il Politico, this essay locates the deeper error in the doctrine of sovereignty: the assumption that ultimate power must be unlimited because power can be checked only by another power. Against Rousseau, legal positivism, and unlimited majority rule, he revives the distinction between law as an abstract rule of just conduct and command aimed at chosen outcomes. His remedy splits the assembly in two, a partisan governmental chamber for services and budgets, a nonparty lawmaking chamber for universal rules, and, illustrating the design through taxation, names the result demarchy.
In the last resort it rests on the misconception that the ultimate ‘sovereign’ power must be unlimited, because, it is thought, power can be checked only by another power.
Between the natural and the artificial, Hayek argues, lies a third and decisive category that Western thought has persistently missed: the institutions and rules that are the result of human action but not of human design. Markets, customs, language and law belong there, neither given by nature nor invented by any mind. Tracing the insight through Mandeville, Montesquieu, Hume, Ferguson and Smith to its revival in Carl Menger, he turns it against legal positivism, which mistakes law for the mere command of a legislator and so severs it from justice. Law, he counters, is older than legislation; justice is discovered by testing rules for compatibility within an inherited order, never deduced from pure reason nor invented by sovereign will.
There never has been and there never can be a ‘gap-less’ (lückenlos) system of formulated rules.
Machlup’s presidential address returns to the 1946 American Economic Review battlefield twenty years on, asking not which theory of the firm is realistic but what each is built to explain. The governing distinction is between the firm as an analytical construct and the firm as an actual organization: competitive price theory uses a deliberately simplified agent to infer how prices and outputs move when wages or taxes change, and treating that fiction as a miniature General Motors commits the “fallacy of misplaced concreteness.” Behavioral and managerial models — Baumol’s sales maximization, Williamson’s expense preference — are not refutations but tools for different problems, above all monopoly and oligopoly, where discretion widens. His verdict is a disciplined pluralism that matches each model to the question it was designed to answer.
Thus, instead of a heated contest between marginalism and managerialism in the theory of the firm, a marriage between the two has come about.
What is lost when immortality becomes a proposition to defend or disprove? In this essay, presented in its 2010 German translation, Eric Voegelin turns from arguments about an afterlife to the experiences that give such language meaning. His central example is the Egyptian Dialogue of a Man with His Soul: a man’s despair at social corruption becomes, in Voegelin’s reading, an articulation of divine order and hoped-for participation in it. Bringing this encounter into conversation with Plato, Aristotle, and Christianity, Voegelin challenges both literal belief and skeptical dismissal when they sever symbols from experience. The essay offers a demanding distinction: older images may cease to persuade without the reality they sought to express having disappeared.
Wir sprechen deshalb von einer Wahrheit der Erfahrung und nicht von einer Wahrheit der Symbole.
English translation: “We therefore speak of a truth of experience and not of a truth of symbols.”
A central bank can be charged with protecting purchasing power while lacking authority over the wages, taxes, and public spending that help determine it. This mismatch drives Richard Kerschagl’s 1967 article. He treats interest rates and reserve requirements not as reliable levers but as instruments whose effects depend on business financing, confidence, and government policy: higher rates may even increase production costs. His proposed remedy is strikingly political—cabinet participation with veto rights over economic decisions and decisive influence on wage-price policy. Giving currency stability priority over full employment, Kerschagl nevertheless resists turning central banking into comprehensive economic planning. The article exposes the tension within that position: how much power over the wider economy can a guardian of monetary stability acquire without compromising the market order it seeks to preserve?
A sugar magnate and a banker occupy an unusual place in Gerhard Tintner’s account of early Austrian economics: mathematical innovators whose work found a stronger following outside their own school. This concise encyclopedia entry reassesses Rudolf Auspitz and Richard Lieben through their 1889 study of price theory. Tintner highlights their independent development of indifference curves and their treatment of markets between free competition and monopoly, while contrasting Menger’s hostility with their influence on Pareto, Edgeworth, and Fisher. Their exchange with Walras brings a precise methodological question into view: what can partial-equilibrium analysis explain, and where do its limits lie? The entry offers a compact route into the distinction between belonging to an economic school and contributing to its analytical development.
Why should present goods command a premium over otherwise identical future goods? In this encyclopedia article, Emil Kauder places Böhm-Bawerk’s answer within his larger attempt to connect consumer valuation, time-consuming production, wages, and interest. Capital emerges not as a permanent productive substance but as goods that must continually be replaced while workers are sustained through unfinished production. Kauder offers a qualified reassessment: he finds Böhm-Bawerk overrated in his lifetime yet insufficiently appreciated afterward, and distinguishes his analytical contributions from their disputed assumptions. His attention to Austrian Aristotelianism and administrative paternalism also complicates a simple identification of Austrian economics with unrestricted competition. Readers can discover both the appeal of Böhm-Bawerk’s economic synthesis and the precise points at which its explanations of production and interest remain contested.
A law can be precisely written yet offer little lasting certainty if legislators can readily replace it. In this memorial address for Bruno Leoni, reprinted in 2013, Hayek explains why his friend’s account of law challenged his own thinking. He reads Leoni’s Freedom and the Law not as a simple demand to abolish legislation, but as an inquiry into qualities that judge-made and jurist-developed rules may preserve better: long-term stability and restraints that protect individual domains. Personal recollections and an explicitly limited knowledge of Leoni’s writings give the tribute its particular perspective. Readers encounter both an intellectual friendship and an unfinished question: how can law prevent injustice without becoming an instrument for directing people towards prescribed ends?
As to many other profound thinkers the task of the law was to him not so much to create justice as to prevent injustice.
Textbook models of perfect competition assume away the very thing real markets accomplish: because they presuppose that all relevant facts are already known, they make rivalry look wasteful and pointless. Hayek turns the objection around, arguing that competition earns its keep precisely as a discovery procedure, a way of eliciting information about scarcities, uses, and capacities that no participant or planner holds in advance. He reframes the market not as an economy governed by a single ranking of ends but as a catallaxy, a self-correcting order steered by negative feedback and price signals, whose value can be judged only by comparing societies rather than by predicting particular outcomes. Along the way he defends pattern prediction, rejects the language of equilibrium, and warns that incomes policy freezes adjustment exactly when circumstances demand movement.
But which goods are scarce goods, or which things are goods, and how scarce or valuable they are – these are precisely the things which competition has to discover.
Scholarly prestige, curial trust, and diplomatic office fused in a single man when the impoverished Austrian republic sent Ludwig von Pastor, the famous historian of the popes, as its envoy to the Holy See. Engel-Janosi's study of that 1920–28 mission argues that Pastor's fame gave a weakened state a Roman voice out of all proportion to its power: Cardinal Gasparri spoke to him with a freedom rarely extended to other heads of mission, making his dispatches a privileged source for Vatican thinking. Through them the interwar Curia appears anti-Versailles, conservative, intensely political, and suspicious of the postwar order, tempted by "providential" strongmen yet unwilling to surrender ecclesial independence. The narrative runs through the Roman Question, Fascism, South Tyrol, the Anima dispute, and the still-unsettled question of Anschluss.
Der Österreicher betont die Vorsicht und die Selbständigkeit dieses Papstes, auf den niemand, selbst kaum sein Staatssekretär Einfluß auszuüben scheint.
English translation: “The Austrian emphasizes the caution and the independence of this Pope, upon whom no one, scarcely even his Secretary of State, appears to exert influence.”
Inherited words—order, law, economy, democracy—make spontaneous social orders look like purposive organizations, and this 1968 essay in political semantics sets out to break their spell through a series of paired corrections: Kosmos against Taxis, spontaneous order against made arrangement; Nomos against Thesis, the universal rule of just conduct against the organizational command; Katallaxie against Wirtschaft, the market as a discovery procedure against the household writ large; and finally Demarchie against Demokratie. Only a Kosmos, Hayek insists, can sustain an open society among strangers who share no concrete ends, so 'social' or distributive justice—the justice of an organization—loses all meaning where no one distributes the results. The tract anticipates Law, Legislation and Liberty, turning the reform of language into a servant of liberal constitutionalism.
Wir wünschen die Meinung der Mehrheit als letzte Autorität, aber wir wollen nicht dulden, daß die nackte Gewalt der Mehrheit den einzelnen regellos Gewalt antut.
English translation: “We desire the opinion of the majority as the ultimate authority, but we do not want to tolerate that the naked power of the majority does violence to the individual in a rule-less manner.”
How can strangers who share no common purpose live together in peace? Not, this short lecture answers, by organizing them around shared aims, but only when they obey the same abstract rules while pursuing different ends. Hayek traces the passage from tribal closure, bound by common purposes, to the open Great Society, whose achievement is to generate order spontaneously and merely to furnish each individual with opportunities rather than prescribe his goals; Roman law and Christianity figure as forces that turned tribal rules into universal ones. The rules such a society needs are mainly negative, delimiting coercion rather than commanding ends—and the same principle, extended outward, is for Hayek the only real foundation of international peace, which no multiplication of international bodies can supply.
Die große Errungenschaft der offenen Großgesellschaft besteht darin, daß sie spontan Ordnung hervorbringen kann, dadurch daß die Individuen abstrakten Regeln gehorchen, das heißt, daß sie eine sich selbst bildende Ordnung ist.
English translation: “The great achievement of the open Great Society consists in its being able to bring forth order spontaneously through the fact that individuals obey abstract rules—that is, that it is a self-forming order.”