2,793 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Crusade, Reformation, Revolution: Europe's three great movements of ideas, Somary contends in this 1952 political testament, each produced results opposite to their creators' aims, and each ultimately swelled the power of the state. He denies that peoples are truly sovereign, watches modern war put a uniform on thought, food, and death alike, and charts the replacement of the measured Rechtsstaat by the boundless Machtstaat. State monopoly over money creation, he argues—abetted by Knapp's nominalism—hands governments an instrument of silent expropriation, while Jacobin primacy of politics and the doctrine of national self-determination corrode law and liberty. Against Bolshevism, which he judges to rest on power and nothing else, he sets Switzerland's organic democracy, and codifies his pessimism in twenty 'social laws of inverse proportion' explaining how tyranny thrives beneath the forms of popular sovereignty.
Je stärker die Gewalt konzentriert ist, desto geringer ist die Verantwortung.
English translation: “The more strongly power is concentrated, the smaller is responsibility.”
Value theory, Shackle charges, quietly presumes perfect knowledge — that the buyer can see every satisfaction in advance — a fiction exposed by the very existence of information, a good worth having only because its contents are not yet known. The essay accordingly shifts the object of economic choice from satisfactions to actions whose consequences remain hypothetical. Each rival hypothesis carries a face-value, the gain or loss if it proves true, and a second variable measuring its claim on the imagination; numerical probability, he demonstrates through five separate objections, cannot serve as that second variable for unique, non-seriable decisions. His replacement is potential surprise: not a lesser degree of certainty but a positive recognition of some disabling incongruity, a scale on which any number of mutually exclusive hypotheses may all sit at zero.
But the theory of consumer’s behaviour assumes that we always know what we are going to get.
Temporary tariff cuts promise a useful bargain during rearmament: more civilian goods for Americans and more dollar earnings for their allies. Karl Pribram’s 1952 article asks whether that promise survives the constraints of actual trade. Foreign factories also face military demands, scarce materials, and limited investment capital; uncertain access to the American market gives them little reason to expand. Combining attention to import composition with scrutiny of executive authority, Pribram distinguishes the case for lower tariffs from the case for continually adjustable ones. His alternative—selective, negotiated reductions of indefinite duration—makes dependable market access part of Atlantic defense cooperation. The article offers a concrete account of how an apparently flexible emergency measure can undermine the investment and international commitments needed to make it effective.
The conditions that make freedom possible can also become instruments of domination: tools impose new necessities, commerce turns means into ends, and representatives acquire interests distinct from those they govern. In this review essay, republished in 1964, Alfred Schütz examines how Santayana’s Dominations and Powers understands these reversals through humanity’s dependence on nature and social arrangements. He takes Santayana’s philosophical ambition seriously without accepting its biological foundation as an adequate explanation of social meaning. The resulting tension gives the essay its particular interest: Schütz preserves Santayana’s account of embodied, constrained agency while questioning his treatment of economic life and activities beyond subsistence. Readers can discover precisely where recognition of human dependence becomes, in Schütz’s judgement, an unwarranted reduction of human possibilities.
When the prestige of physics and biology tempts social thinkers to borrow their methods wholesale, the result, Hayek argues, is not science but scientism: a prejudiced approach that decides how to study society before examining it. This volume gathers his studies on that abuse of reason, first defending a subjectivist, compositive method in which institutions such as money, law, and markets exist only as the beliefs and purposes of those who use them, and collective terms like 'society' name patterns of individual conduct rather than agents. It then narrates the counter-revolution historically, from the École Polytechnique and Saint-Simon's engineers through Comtean sociology and its convergence with Hegel, tracing how impatience with evolved orders turned science into a model for social command. The through-line is epistemic: planning fails because dispersed knowledge exceeds any single directing mind.
So far as human actions are concerned the things are what the acting people think they are.
For the seller who feels himself one among very many, rivals are colleagues rather than threats—and it is this state of mind, not the sheer count of firms, on which Machlup rebuilds the theory of selling. He coins pliopoly for the pressure of potential newcomers, setting it beside polypoly, oligopoly, and monopoly, and defines a true monopolist by the triple absence of all three. Against businessmen who claim they price by average or full cost, he reinterprets such rules as competitive responses to expected demand elasticity, treating cartel ethics and break-even charts as evidence rather than refutation. The analysis ranges across perfect and imperfect polypoly, artificial scarcity and monopoly rents, and the kinked demand curve, always parting the economist's objective calculus from the trader's rough feel for the market.
The concept of the industry is nothing but an expedient device for ruling out negligible or too uncertain interdependence.
Positivism, by reducing science to method and ruling metaphysical questions out of bounds as mere "values," had hollowed out political science at its root — such is the charge these six Walgreen lectures level before setting out to restore the discipline. Voegelin recovers a classical and Christian concern with the order of the soul, distinguishing the constitutional sense of representation from the deeper existential sense by which a society first becomes capable of action in history. His central diagnosis of modernity is that ideological movements from progressivism to National Socialism revive gnosticism, converting Joachim of Flora's three ages into an immanentized eschatology that promises salvation within time. Hobbes and Puritanism supply his cases; the recovery of experience against method and revolutionary fantasy supplies his guarded hope.
The existence of man in political society is historical existence; and a theory of politics, if it penetrates to principles, must at the same time be a theory of history.
Critics had turned the Pigou effect into a crude prescription for curing depressions by driving wages and prices down; Haberler writes to rescue it from that caricature. Properly understood, he argues, it is not policy advice at all but a theorem about the internal consistency of the static Keynesian model. In a world of flexible competitive wages, the Keynes effect normally restores full employment through falling interest rates; the Pigou effect closes the extreme remaining cases — a liquidity trap, interest-insensitive investment — by letting rising real balances lift expenditure. This dismantles the one strict basis for a static competitive underemployment equilibrium and undercuts secular stagnation, even as Haberler concedes to Hansen and Metzler that real depressions demand monetary and fiscal action, not patient deflation.
For these two reasons it would be foolish to rely entirely on price and wage deflation to cure a depression through the Pigou effect.
Monopoly, in this account, is less a market form than an institutional problem: every arrangement by which alternatives are restricted — business combinations and buyer power, union control of labor markets, and above all government policies that shelter favored groups from competition. Machlup credits antitrust with making cartel agreements less secure, yet judges the law of monopolization, the prohibition of trusts and mergers, a dismal failure. His sharpest reversal is that monopoly is often a product of public permission, manufactured through licensing, tariffs, patents, and marketing orders. He carries the same logic into labor, rejecting the purchasing-power theory of wage increases and denying that union monopoly offsets business monopoly — their effects, he argues, are additive rather than compensatory. First published in 1952, it remains his most sustained brief for open entry.
The economic policies of government are far-flung and many-sided. On many fronts, therefore, could government fight for competition and against monopoly if it so desired. It has not seen fit to do so.
A machine’s purchase price is definite; its contribution to future profits is not. In this review essay, Alfred Amonn examines Friedrich and Vera Lutz’s The Theory of Investment of the Firm through the tension between exact investment calculation and workable business practice. Their approach evaluates durable equipment by discounting anticipated returns rather than allocating its cost through depreciation conventions. Amonn traces what this changes in decisions about replacement, financing, and valuation, while asking whether entrepreneurs can realistically perform the calculations the theory requires. Readers can discover why economic life need not coincide with technical service life, and why accounting rules may point toward different decisions from prospective-profit analysis. Amonn’s appreciation of the Lutzes’ analytical discipline remains tempered by questions about practical applicability and its contribution to broader economic theory.
Twentieth-century economics did not merely add topics to an old canon; it replaced the image of a system tending toward stable equilibrium with one shaped by uncertainty, hesitation, and breakdown. Out of that upheaval Shackle draws a map, sorting inherited doctrine by the kind of time and knowledge each theory assumes: perfect adjustment, calculable dynamics, aggregative comparative statics, and the economics of uncertain expectation. The organizing question is temporal—whether a model treats time as timeless adjustment, a dated sequence, or agents' conjectures about futures that cannot be known. Keynes straddles the categories, formally comparative statics yet substantively a theory of imagined futures. The chart doubles as a proposed curriculum and as a warning against teaching incompatible assumptions as though they belonged to one unified doctrine.
Imagined future events still form an entirely distinct category, since they do not constitute a unique series.
Ceremonial rather than argumentative, this brief closing note to a Review of Politics exchange isolates the one disagreement with Hannah Arendt that Voegelin judges decisive. The quarrel is not over the word totalitarianism but over method: how phenomena of the class 'political movements' are to be delimited and defined as theoretical units. Arendt draws her boundaries on the plane of historical fact, ready to accept complexes like totalitarianism as ultimate essential unities; Voegelin objects that the institutional and ideological self-formation of movements is not a theoretical formation. Inquiry starts from the phenomena, but must not take at face value the unities cast up in the stream of history. Once philosophical anthropology supplies the principles of interpretation, apparent enemies may share a hidden structure, and theory must refuse to let history's own groupings become its final ontology.
Es kann dann passieren, dass politische Bewegungen, die auf der Bühne der Geschichte einander bitter bekämpfen, sich auf der Wesensebene als nahe verwandt erweisen.
English translation: “It may then turn out that political movements which bitterly combat one another on the stage of history prove, on the level of essence, to be closely related.”