2,793 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Does distinguishing human dependence on nature from dependence on other people justify a separate economic discipline? In this brief 1921 review of Max Schmidt’s two-volume Grundriß der ethnologischen Volkswirtschaftslehre, Eugen Peter Schwiedland tests that claim against the books’ contribution to economic theory. He outlines Schmidt’s distinction between material and social economic inquiry, but finds the theoretical yield surprisingly meagre. The review offers a pointed instance of disciplinary scepticism: for Schwiedland, organizing economic activity around social relations does not, on the evidence of these volumes, establish the need for an independent field.
A household’s economic independence need not mean freedom from domination. In this brief English-language review, Eugen Peter Schwiedland presents Richard Thurnwald’s account of state and family formation, in which families gain autonomy from the clan while producers become subject to landlords, soldiers and priests. Schwiedland’s emphasis falls on the connections between political scale, social hierarchy and exchange: collective work can coexist with individual ownership, just as centralized taxation can coexist with private commerce. He conveys Thurnwald’s developmental scheme largely without criticism, adopting its hierarchical classification of peoples. The review offers a compact view of how this scheme links the widening reach of political organization to changes in household dependence, occupational specialization and trade.
Three questions of the moment frame this 1921 newspaper interview: how to value securities as the krone depreciates, whether industrial finance bills are inflationary, and whether a reversal of the business cycle threatens. The finance secretary reframes the fashionable talk of Substanzwert against Ertragswert, since 'substance' names only assets whose prices have lagged behind depreciation, defensible so long as future earning capacity is plausible, for an unviable enterprise has neither. He concedes that a finance bill unmatched by new goods is, in principle, as inflationary as state note issue, yet distinguishes credit to industry from direct state emission. Against England's deflationary example, he pleads for stabilization without liquidationism: ample but high-interest central-bank credit as a bridge until world recovery arrives, plus relief from the taxes and controls that stifle private adaptation.
Ein lebensunfähiges Unternehmen hat weder einen Ertrags-, noch einen Substanzwert, denn ein produktiver Apparat, mit dem man nichts machen kann, ist überhaupt wertlos.
English translation: “An unviable enterprise has neither an earnings value nor an intrinsic asset value, for a productive apparatus with which nothing can be done is wholly worthless.”
Because money satisfies no need directly, a buyer's maximum bid can only be the wealth left once more urgent wants are secured—never the monetary measure of a good's value. From this psychological foundation, drawn from Franz Brentano by way of Marty and Kraus, Engländer rebuilds price theory around ranked preferences, the 'price-willingness paradox' by which the bid per unit can fall faster than quantity rises, and prices that settle below a buyer's maximum. Competition among unequal buyers, he shows, fixes only upper and lower limits set by marginal and excluded strata, never a unique price; the missing determinant comes from the seller side and the cost law, in which labor stands as the terminal factor whose own price rests on the quantity actually employed.
Der Käufer hat keine Möglichkeit einer unmittelbaren Schätzung des Geldes in der Art, wie er eine unmittelbare Schätzung eines Gutes erster Ordnung nach der von diesem Gute abhängigen Bedürfnisbefriedigung vornimmt.
English translation: “The buyer has no possibility of directly appraising money in the way in which he directly appraises a first-order good according to the satisfaction of needs that depends on that good.”
The greatness of a life's work, this 1921 obituary proposes, can be tested by whether one decisive achievement alone would suffice to secure it, and Carl Menger passes. That achievement was the refounding of economic theory on subjective value and marginal utility, worked out in the 1871 Grundsaetze alongside the independent discoveries of Jevons and Walras. Menger did not attack the classical school from outside; he overcame Ricardo on his own analytical terrain by grounding price formation in the laws of human need and scarcity, redefining economics as a theory of prices. Schumpeter sets his originality above mere precursors like Gossen, credits the Methodenstreit writings as a defense of exact theory, and traces how Boehm-Bawerk and Wieser extended the work into the Austrian school that carried Menger's ideas into international science.
Menger gehörte zu den Denkern, denen eine solche Leistung von entscheidender, für die Wissenschaft historischer Bedeutung gelungen ist.
English translation: “Menger belonged to those thinkers who succeeded in an achievement of decisive, historically significant importance for science.”
John Bates Clark had claimed that wages, interest, and rent alike could be settled by a single marginal-productivity principle, the product neatly exhausted by its factors. Strigl’s compact intervention in Austrian distribution theory dismantles that equation as an unproven technical hypothesis rather than a law of value, then rebuilds interest on other ground. Reserving marginal-productivity pricing for the “primary” factors of labor and land, and following Böhm-Bawerk in treating capital as the wage-and-rent fund that finances time-consuming roundabout production, he shows that once workers and landowners are paid what added units would yield elsewhere, a surplus must remain. Competition cannot erase it where it appears in every capitalist enterprise; it becomes a residual rent attributable to the fund that makes waiting possible — and this residual, Strigl argues, is capital interest itself.
Trotzdem bleibt die statische Kapitalzinstheorie von grundlegender Bedeutung, da ihr Gesetz den Ruhepunkt definiert, dem auch die dynamische Wirtschaft jederzeit zustrebt, wobei nur immer neue Störungen die völlige Ausgleichung hindern.
English translation: “Nevertheless the static theory of capital interest remains of fundamental significance, since its law defines the resting point toward which the dynamic economy at all times strives, while only ever-new disturbances prevent complete equalization.”
Nationalism appears here not as Europe’s permanent inheritance but as a historically conditioned form of social life—and one that might face new competitors. In this brief English-language review of Waldemar Mitscherlich’s book, Eugen Peter Schwiedland welcomes the fresh perspective offered by a sociological “pluralism” that treats institutions as arising under distinct conditions rather than through continuous organic evolution. His compressed account connects nationalism with the modern state and growing individualism. Its most pointed turn concerns “State-Unionism”: associations intended to secure economic self-sufficiency while preserving member states’ sovereignty. Schwiedland’s comparison with Keynes gives the review a concrete tension: how might states meet pressures for economic cooperation without surrendering their political independence?
Two conceptions of money contend across this history of monetary theory: individualism, which treats money as an autarkic commodity carrying intrinsic value, and universalism, which sees it arising from the social division of labour and functioning only within an organic economic whole. Kerschagl reads Ricardo, Adam Müller, Knapp, Wieser, Gesell and Bendixen through this lens—faulting Ricardo's quantity theory for abstracting from income and property, crediting Müller as the first consistent universalist, and praising Wieser's account of the economy as a Zahlungsgemeinschaft, a payment community. Along the way he weighs Gesell's demurrage scheme, under which money would lose roughly five percent a year to discourage hoarding. The decline of absolute value theory, he concludes, leaves the socially embedded, universalist view of money the more plausible.
Das gänzlich unabhängige Geld mit Eigenwert erscheint dem Individualismus als das Ideal.
English translation: “Wholly independent money possessing intrinsic value appears to individualism as the ideal.”
Austria’s postwar unions grew stronger as institutions while inflation eroded both their funds and their members’ livelihoods. This paradox anchors Emil Lederer’s 1921 study of a society negotiating economic disintegration. He treats wage bargaining not simply as conflict over labour’s share of production, but as a defensive struggle over who must bear the losses caused by depreciation and disrupted trade. Workers’ unions, salaried employees’ associations, and civil servants’ organizations emerge as both competing claimants and supports of a fragile social order. By connecting their changing functions to public deficits, import dependence, and Vienna’s emerging commercial role, Lederer shows why organizational strength could help contain disorder without securing living standards—and why apparent recovery could coexist with deepening insecurity.
How could reforms born amid revolutionary unrest help preserve the economic order they seemed to threaten? In this 1921 study of social policy in republican Austria, Karl Pribram argues that organized labour’s gains largely extended established trade-union demands rather than displaced capitalism. Having helped draft many of the measures he examines, he brings an administrator’s attention to the distance between legislation and practical effect. Unemployment entitlement becomes a question of who can bear unpredictable risks; works councils test the boundary between worker protection and managerial authority. Inflation exposes another limit: higher money wages cannot restore missing goods. Readers can discover how public guarantees and collective bargaining strengthened workers’ position while, in Pribram’s judgement, making unions agents of economic stabilization.
Could the successor states of Austria-Hungary restore stable monetary relations without surrendering their newly acquired sovereignty? In this 1921 article, Alfred Amonn separates the case for predictable exchange rates from the demand for a single currency. His proposal is concrete: revive the old gold crown as a shared standard while allowing national currencies and names to remain distinct. Gold accounting, he argues, would also expose what nominal wage and dividend increases conceal about purchasing power. The article offers a revealing distinction between recovering an economic mechanism and restoring an imperial political order. Its editorial reservations sharpen the practical tension: Amonn’s gradual programme depends on fiscal restraint precisely where budget difficulties and renewed note issuance threaten to undermine it.
Friedrich von Wieser praises a critic who rejected his own explanation of interest—and explicitly refuses to retract that explanation. This tension gives his brief 1921 foreword to the fourth edition of Böhm-Bawerk’s Geschichte und Kritik der Kapitalzinstheorien its particular interest. Defending the decision to leave the text unchanged after its author’s death, Wieser distinguishes a history of theoretical problems from a chronicle of recent publications. He values Böhm-Bawerk’s criticism for reaching beyond misleading verbal formulations to the facts an explanation must confront. His closing reservation shows precisely where admiration stops short of assent: Wieser credits Böhm-Bawerk with clarifying the problem while maintaining that certain facts escaped his judgement.