2,793 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
A strengthening currency can make monetary reform more urgent, not less. In this 1907 article, Ludwig von Mises argues that appreciation of the gulden helped drive Austria-Hungary’s currency reform of 1892: exporters received less while taxes and mortgage obligations remained unchanged. His account follows the interests behind the turn toward gold, distinguishing Hungarian agricultural producers, banks anticipating profitable transactions, and creditors who stood to benefit from continued appreciation. These divisions give concrete substance to his central distinction between a temporarily advantageous exchange-rate movement and lasting monetary stability. Readers can discover why former beneficiaries of depreciation supported reform—and why, in Mises’s judgement, neither a favorable conversion rate nor discretionary monetary expansion could secure producers a permanent competitive advantage.
Praise does not suspend criticism in Carl Menger’s obituary of Emil Steinbach. Menger honours Steinbach’s resistance to exploitation and his insistence on the duties of property and office, yet asks where justified reform ends and indiscriminate hostility to economic freedom begins. His account also faults liberal economists: by excusing abuses rather than defining the legitimate scope of freedom and capital, they helped foster the distrust Steinbach shared. Written as a provisional assessment after Steinbach’s death, this short piece distinguishes practical achievement in civil-law reform from systematic legal scholarship. It offers a sharply focused encounter with Menger’s criteria of judgement: moral purpose and effective intervention deserve recognition, but neither settles the question of reform’s proper limits.
The loss of Silesia to Prussia stripped the Habsburg monarchy of its linen heartland and forced the question that drives this archival history: how to rebuild industry across the remaining hereditary lands. Drawing on three years in the Viennese central archives, Pribram reconstructs Austrian trade policy from 1740 to 1798 out of a mosaic of countless individual decrees. He traces Maria Theresa's mercantilist machinery of commerce authorities, guild reform and factory privileges; the distinction between local 'police trades' and export-oriented 'commercial trades'; Joseph II's physiocratic turn toward internal free competition and his losing war against the bread and meat price schedules; and the fearful post-Josephinian reaction, when security-police anxieties about an urban proletariat and Jacobin contagion smothered reform. This is the first volume, closing in 1798.
Des Kaisers Wille war gebrochen; überzeugt war er nicht.
English translation: “The Emperor's will was broken; he was not convinced.”
Philippovich treats modern economic policy not as occasional intervention but as the very medium through which markets operate: transport, trade, banking, insurance, and poor relief all shape the formation and distribution of income, so the boundary between economic and social policy is porous from the start. The transport books argue that railway technology becomes economic power only once organized — duplicated lines waste capital, competition tends toward fusion and monopoly, and the railway is thus a public-monopolistic institution even in private hands, its rates poised between own-cost and value-of-service. Trade, banks, and the bourse extend the theme of organized concentration and ineradicable speculation. The final book grounds an independent income policy in labor exchanges, unemployment relief, and compulsory social insurance, converting aid from charity into enforceable right.
In diesen Vereinheitlichungsbestrebungen zeigt sich deutlich, daß das Lebensprinzip aller Verkehrsanstalten die Zentralisation ist.
English translation: “In these efforts at unification it becomes plainly evident that the vital principle of all transport enterprises is centralization.”
When an international agricultural congress gathered in Vienna in 1907, Inama-Sternegg seized the occasion to argue that farming could no longer be governed as a merely local or national estate economy. Trade, credit, migrant labor, futures markets, harvest statistics, tariffs, and above all soil fertility had become transnational problems demanding coordinated institutions. He defends grain futures not as speculation but as an apparatus for distributing world supplies and equalizing prices, resists moralizing bans on the Blankotermingeschäft, and dismantles the agrarians' high-protection program as a national rent strategy rather than genuine policy. The essay culminates in the question of Bodenerschöpfung, soil exhaustion, framed through Ricardo and Liebig, insisting that preserving the nation's nutrient capital, not forcing up prices, is agriculture's true international task.
Und darum lassen sich auch die Schäden der Landwirtschaft nicht mehr mit alten Hausmitteln kurieren.
English translation: “And so the ailments of agriculture can no longer be cured with old household remedies.”
Can sociology become an exact science without first reducing social life to biology? In this short English review of Waxweiler’s Esquisse d’une Sociologie, Schumpeter defends sociology’s independent field of inquiry while endorsing an approach that starts from individual action and reaction. His praise rests on concrete research possibilities: aggression, acquisition, friendship and cooperation offer material for careful description before sweeping laws become credible. Economics provides a revealing comparison, with value serving as an example of the foundational concept sociology still needs. The review shows Schumpeter weighing scientific ambition against premature system-building—and finding more promise in precise accounts of everyday conduct than in claims to a finished theory.
Inama-Sternegg's review of A. E. F. Schäffle's posthumous Abriss der Soziologie widens into a reckoning with sociology's claim to be a unified science. His verdict is admiring but severe: Schäffle's Bau und Leben des sozialen Körpers was rejected less for its social observations than for the biological and psychological analogies that framed them, and the later stripping-away of those analogies drained the very vitality that had made the work compelling. The essay separates a fruitful insight, that human life is genuinely social and its phenomena collective facts rather than sums of individuals, from the premature leap to an all-embracing system. Anthropology, ethnology, law, economics, statistics, geography, and psychology all bear on society, and no single mind can master them. Sociology may yet find its laws, but only through specialized research and repeatedly observed regularities, not through grand schemes built too soon.
Man verzeihe das harte Wort, aber die bisherige Entwicklung der „Soziologie“ als einheitlicher Wissenschaft berechtigt einigermaßen dazu.
English translation: “May the harsh word be forgiven, but the development of “sociology” as a unified science up to now to some extent justifies it.”
Explaining why rent exists does not establish why landlords should receive it. This distinction drives Joseph A. Schumpeter’s 1907 review of J. W. Schiele’s account of the natural origins of rent, interest, and wages. Schumpeter welcomes exact economic theory while insisting that deduction cannot certify the applicability of its own premises. His criticism is concrete: Schiele’s labor-value axiom remains unsupported, and the failure of his proposed formula for distribution leaves interest and wages without a defensible dividing line. The review offers a compact encounter with Schumpeter’s critical method—defending abstraction while demanding empirical verification, and separating the explanation of income categories from the justification of their allocation under existing property arrangements.
When John Bates Clark defended a "true capital" — a permanent fund persisting intact while its concrete goods are used up and replaced — he handed his critic a target too tempting to refuse. Across four tightly argued questions, Böhm-Bawerk answers that capital and capital goods are identical at every instant, so no second material entity remains to do the work Clark assigns to his abstraction. He presses the difference between noticing that a net return exists and explaining why, rejects Clark's attempt to confine distribution theory to present production, and denies that capital "synchronizes" labor and its fruits: today's coat was made by past shepherds and weavers, not by workers now beginning another. Throughout, he demands that capital theory keep heterogeneous goods, time-structured production, and honest imputation distinct from mere verbal continuity.
What the labor of the instant secures is not a present provision of completed commodities, but the continuance of provision at some time in the future.
One half of a Tyrolean farm passed through sixteen owners between 1600 and 1738—a striking complication of the image of settled peasant property. In this 1907 article, Hermann von Schullern zu Schrattenhofen explores the Verfachbücher, registers preserving legal documents, through the fortunes of a predominantly peasant lineage. Sales, remarriages, inheritances and long-lived debts reveal how holdings changed hands and wealth accumulated or dispersed. His distinctive concern is what such records permit historians to count—and what they do not. A sale price may conceal assumed debts; a child’s disappearance may indicate migration rather than death. The article offers both concrete evidence of rural mobility and a disciplined account of why family histories, however richly documented, cannot yet stand as population statistics.
Georg von Mayr's renewed defense of a separate moral statistics provokes this sharp rebuttal on the boundaries of a science. Inama-Sternegg does not deny that suicide, divorce, illegitimacy, or prostitution can be studied statistically; he denies that moral categories may organize the discipline itself, forcing heterogeneous facts into a scheme fixed by prior valuation. Notions of the normal and the typical, he argues, obscure the structure of social masses, and the inner motives behind a crime or a suicide cannot be reconstructed as reliable mass data. In place of a moral-statistical chapter he proposes a social statistics of fundamental institutions — marriage and family above all — so that divorce or adultery keeps the legal and confessional context that alone makes its meaning intelligible.
Zunächst sind Symptome nur Hypothesen, nicht Tatsachen.
English translation: “To begin with, symptoms are only hypotheses, not facts.”
A single word—Bedürfnis—had, on Cuhel's diagnosis, thrown the foundations of value theory into confusion, bundling together at least eight distinct concepts under one popular name. Written on the borderland of economics and psychology, this 1907 treatise pries them apart, distinguishing welfare-, use-, and disposal-needs and making the 'use-desire' the first fundamental concept of economic science. Cuhel rejects the hedonism of Bentham and Gossen, argues that the desire-intensity he calls Egenz can be compared but never truly measured—anticipating the later turn to ordinal utility—and reworks Gossen's law of diminishing enjoyment into precise statements about marginal use-egenz. Along the way he criticizes Böhm-Bawerk, Wieser, Menger, and Sax, and treats the discounting of future needs not as a direct effect of time but as a matter of practical probability.
Diesen Vorgang kann man somit nicht Messen nennen; für ihn dürfte die Benennung Skalieren eher passen.
English translation: “This procedure, then, cannot be called measuring; the term scaling would be more appropriate for it.”