2,793 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
When Wilhelm Roscher died in 1894, revered as the leader of the German historical school, Menger used the obituary to redraw the battle lines of the Methodenstreit. He honors Roscher generously—as the teacher who gave German economics its historical discipline and much of its prestige—while separating the man from his imitators, whose intolerant historism, not Roscher himself, provoked the Austrian revolt. The dispute, Menger argues, was never simply induction against deduction, since both schools rely on experience and on both modes of reasoning. The true quarrel concerned the aims of the science: whether political economy should merely collect historical parallelisms and describe, or whether it must also build exact theory from individual motives and psychological causes. The result is a measured act of boundary-drawing—honoring a great German while denying his method any monopoly.
Im Kreise der Gelehrtenwelt hat W. Roscher durch seine Auffassung der methodologischen Probleme eine tiefgehende Einwirkung geübt und den Ruhm eines Begründers der historischen Schule der deutschen National-Oekonomie gewonnen.
English translation: “Within scholarly circles, W. Roscher exerted a profound influence through his conception of methodological problems and gained the renown of a founder of the historical school of German political economy.”
A decade after the Methodenstreit, Feilbogen registers a shift: abstract theory, so often declared dead by the historical school, is undergoing a renaissance in the value and price work of Gossen, Jevons, Menger, Walras, and Clark. This sketch situates the historical school itself historically, as a necessary phase whose anti-theoretical reflexes are now spent, and argues for the mutual control of induction and deduction rather than the victory of either. It weighs the growing use of mathematics while warning against false precision in measuring pleasure and value, defends marginal utility against Lexis, and faults Jevons for neglecting entrepreneurial profit—an omission, Feilbogen suggests, that left theoretical openings for socialist doctrines of surplus value and crisis.
Auf die Thatsache der Werthschätzung allein kann nur eine Statik, nie eine Dynamik der Volkswirthschaft gegründet werden.
English translation: “Upon the fact of valuation alone only a statics, never a dynamics, of the national economy can be founded.”
A skilled artisan earns four florins for relatively agreeable work; an ordinary laborer earns two for twice the hardship. In this 1894 reply to Auspitz, Böhm-Bawerk uses that contrast to separate two explanations too easily treated as one: prices tending toward monetary production costs, and wages compensating workers for subjective sacrifice. He accepts that labor’s disutility can influence prices, but disputes its universal operation when workers cannot freely adjust their hours. His distinctive emphasis falls on the value of money to the worker: utility enters the supply side as well as demand. The exchange offers a precise way to distinguish an observable cost-price relationship from the subjective mechanism proposed to explain it.
Agreement on marginal utility does not settle what capital is or why interest arises. In this 1895 review of Georg Sulzer, Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk examines a fellow marginalist’s attempt to organize economics around equilibrium. He admires Sulzer’s disciplined construction but questions whether its elaborate vocabulary identifies new economic quantities or merely renames familiar ones. The decisive disagreement concerns time: does the premium on present goods reflect psychological discounting alone, or must technical conditions of production also enter the explanation? Writing as a theorist whose own concepts Sulzer adopts and alters, Böhm-Bawerk makes these differences concrete through the treatment of savings, intermediate goods, and longer production periods. The review shows how shared foundations can sustain sharply different accounts of capital and interest.
An intended opponent can arrive independently at the theory he seeks to displace. That is Böhm-Bawerk’s verdict on Moriz Naumann’s account of value in this short 1895 review. He credits Naumann with genuine originality of reasoning even where his conclusions reproduce marginal-value theory—a distinction that makes the praise more than a reward for agreement. The limit comes at the relationship between costs and value: Böhm-Bawerk finds Naumann’s concept of “cost value” ambiguous and his criticism insufficiently grounded in his opponents’ actual arguments. The review offers a compact example of theoretical judgement that separates independent thought, novel results and accurate polemic, without allowing a serious objection to erase a work’s merits.
How much may someone consume from an asset without consuming the asset itself? In this 1895 review of the first volume of Leo von Petrażycki’s theory of income, Robert Meyer shows why that economic question matters to civil-law disputes over usufruct, possession, and the fruits of property. He welcomes Petrażycki’s treatment of income as a rule of conduct rather than merely a category of receipts, while claiming that his own earlier work had advanced substantially the same conception. His praise also stops short of endorsing a separate science of legislative policy. This compact review offers a pointed encounter between legal doctrine and economic reasoning: rules must be judged not only by the cases they resolve, but by the conduct they encourage.
Do more recorded baptisms of boys mean more boys were born—or that girls went unrecorded? This uncertainty sharpens Karl Theodor von Inama-Sternegg’s short study of Pirano’s baptismal register, which he identifies as Austria’s oldest surviving example. Correcting its reported starting date to 1457, he examines how retrospective entries, changes of priest and damaged leaves affect its statistical value. His selected series of 2,032 baptisms offers evidence for late-medieval population history without resolving every apparent pattern. The article’s particular interest lies in watching manuscript criticism constrain numerical inference: a low annual total need not signal population decline, and the month of baptism need not be the month of birth.
Interest is not the wage of the capitalist's pain. Replying to J. B. Clark - here in the German translation of the 1895 English essay "The Origin of Interest" - Böhm-Bawerk rejects the reading of his theory as a disguised abstinence doctrine and grounds interest instead in the objective superiority of present goods, given that fruitful methods of production are time-consuming. He defends the claim that interest can persist in a stationary economy, untied to fresh capital formation, and answers Clark's regress objection by distinguishing capital's absolute historical lineage from the average interval between original inputs and finished consumption goods. Turning Clark's water-mill and steam-mill example around, he shows that an equal financial return over a longer investment period implies greater technical productivity, confirming rather than refuting his analysis.
Professor Clark scheint ferner meine Zinstheorie für eine Art Abstinenztheorie zu halten.
English translation: “Professor Clark further seems to regard my theory of interest as a kind of abstinence theory.”
How did economists once attacked as dangerous innovators come to be dismissed as bourgeois reactionaries? This unsigned 1895 review, attributed to Carl Menger, finds the reversal revealing of the classics’ critics rather than the classics themselves. Praising Richard Schüller’s book of the same title, the reviewer defends Smith, Malthus, Say, and Ricardo in his practical essays as evidence-minded reformers who challenged privilege while counselling prudence. Against German historical and social-policy schools, he argues that their writings anticipated contemporary demands for social reform despite the limits of their historical experience. This brief polemic offers a pointed distinction between acknowledging those limits and accepting inherited caricatures of classical economics.
Amid the Methodenstreit, with the German historical school pressing its case against abstract theory, Schüller — in a study dedicated to Carl Menger — mounts a point-by-point defense of the classical economists his contemporaries claimed to have surpassed. Brentano's charge that Smith, Say, Ricardo, and Malthus abstracted from culture, class, and locality, that they reduced human motive to naked egoism, that they preached a merely negative laissez-faire: each, Schüller shows by going back to the texts, is a misreading. He rereads the butcher-brewer-baker passage and the invisible hand in their qualifying context, and argues that the historicists, mistaking analytical abstraction for a denial of particulars, lack the theoretical power for genuine analysis and even muddle what the classics had already secured.
Es gilt die Klassiker — Smith, Say, Ricardo, Malthus — gerade in jenen Punkten, in denen sie Gegenstand der heftigsten, und, wie sich herausstellen wird, ganz unberechtigten Angriffe seitens der historischen Schule geworden sind, selbst wieder zum Worte kommen zu lassen.
English translation: “It is important to let the classical economists—Smith, Say, Ricardo, Malthus—speak for themselves once again, precisely on those points on which they have been subjected to the most vehement, and, as will become apparent, wholly unjustified attacks from the historical school.”
Against J. B. Clark's notion of a "true capital"—a permanent fund of productive wealth standing behind the changing machines and materials that compose it—Böhm-Bawerk mounts the first of his replies to American critics of the Positive Theory. He grants Clark much on abstinence and the trade-off between present and future enjoyment, but attacks the abstraction as a mystical double of real things: capital, he insists, has no causal existence apart from the concrete goods it comprises. He defends his phrase "goods of the same kind and number" as a logical control on time-preference, dismantles Clark's claim that true capital abolishes the production period—the tanner's leather is the true fruit of his labor, not the shoes he trades for—and warns that where words come to rule things, scientific clarity is irretrievably lost.
Nun, ich kenne kein anderes Kapital als die konkreten Güter, die dasselbe zusammensetzen, und ich glaube: auch die Welt der Tatsachen kennt kein anderes.
English translation: “Now, I know of no capital other than the concrete goods that compose it, and I believe that the world of facts likewise knows of no other.”
When General Francis A. Walker charged that the Austrian history of interest theories had been ungenerous and pedantic, Böhm-Bawerk answered with a four-part rejoinder that turned the attack back on productivity doctrine itself. Across questions of historical criticism, capital as a factor of production, the sources of interest, and the relation of production to value, he insists that noticing a surplus - a machine costing fifty dollars that yields fifty-three - is not yet explaining it. The decisive puzzle is why competition fails to bid up the instrument's value or bid down the product's price. Walker's appeal to scarcity and high demand, he argues, names conditions without supplying the mechanism, and interest can be grasped only through the premium present goods command over future ones. Time, not production, proves the more fundamental category.
Und die berühmte und weit verbreitete Abstinenztheorie ist ebenfalls nur eine Erfindung meiner kritischen Phantasie.
English translation: “And the famous and widely disseminated abstinence theory is likewise only an invention of my critical fancy.”