2,793 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Austria’s proposed 1925 budget could show a deficit while concealing an operating surplus—and still fall short of lasting recovery. Writing in 1924, Moriz Dub examines this tension by separating investment from current expenditure and treasury gains from their economic costs. His provisional assessment challenges the apparent success of retrenchment: unexpectedly strong revenues, rather than promised spending cuts, had driven fiscal improvement, while premature retirements increased pension obligations. Inflation likewise lightened public debt by destroying creditors’ claims. The article offers a concrete way to test the meaning of stabilization under League of Nations supervision: not merely whether the accounts balance, but whether productive investment and a recovering economy can sustain them.
A balanced state budget, Schumpeter insists, is necessary but nowhere near sufficient for a stable Austrian economy. Writing in Die Börse amid the League of Nations' examination of Austria's stabilization, he judges the projected requirement of 600 million gold crowns heavy but bearable against prewar fiscal capacity - a problem of poor tax distribution, not impending collapse. The graver menace is external: a trade deficit he estimates near a billion gold crowns, rooted in weak sales organization, feeble export propaganda, and backward agriculture. Inflation is inadmissible as a remedy, and without another path adjustment would come through impoverishment and a crisis beside which the present industrial slump would be mere child's play. Only foreign capital, presented as bridge rather than charity, can finance the transition - making stabilization a sequencing problem in which fiscal solvency must rest on productive and credit foundations.
Denn leider sind die Wurzeln der Passivität unserer Zahlungsbilanz so tief im österreichischen Wesen verankert, daß kaum gehofft werden darf, sie ohne den harten Zwang einer solchen Krise in kurzer Zeit beseitigen zu können.
English translation: “For unfortunately the roots of the passivity of our balance of payments are so deeply anchored in the Austrian character that one can scarcely hope to eliminate them in a short time without the harsh compulsion of such a crisis.”
Even a parliament composed of capable leaders needs someone to direct its business. From this organizational problem, Friedrich von Wieser develops an account of leadership that reaches beyond rulers to inventors, teachers, and the unnamed innovators whose practices become language or money. This 1924 article, supplied in a 1968 republication, asks how individual initiative becomes collective power. Wieser treats followers not simply as obedient material but as participants whose sustained adoption determines whether an initiative endures. His account makes elections consequential without treating them as unmediated popular judgment, and exposes authority beneath the contractual equality of private enterprise. Yet his recognition of mass agency coexists with hereditary and racialized justifications of hierarchy—a tension that sharpens the question of when his explanation of power becomes a defence of privilege.
Legal concepts, Kaufmann argues, become intelligible only once the pure formal structure of law is stripped of everything empirical, psychological, sociological, and political clinging to it. Extending his earlier Logik und Rechtswissenschaft, this German study grounds jurisprudence in a general logic of science: the dualism of factual and essential knowledge, and a principle of compatibility spheres governing which predicates may belong to which domains. Against theories that define law by force, recognition, or fear of sanctions, Kaufmann insists that law is a totality of sanctioned norms, a double norm binding conduct to consequence, and that the juridical person is no metaphysical substance but a rule-governed unit of imputation. Fusing Husserlian phenomenology with Kelsen's pure theory, he traces legal validity to the Grundnorm and rejects natural law, since value-judgments admit no theoretical proof.
Recht ist ein Inbegriff sanktionierter Normen über menschliches Verhalten.
English translation: “Law is a totality of sanctioned norms concerning human conduct.”
When the Czechoslovak crown came into existence in late February 1919, old Austro-Hungarian notes overstamped and declared sole legal tender, a successor state set out to build a currency from a wartime paper inheritance. Amonn traces that reconstruction to the stabilization debates of 1924 through note circulation, Lombard credit, discount policy, foreign-exchange reserves, and the wealth levy. His governing distinction separates elastic money, born of discounting genuine commercial bills and adjusting automatically to trade, from inelastic money created by Lombard advances and devisen purchases. On that basis he rejects the loose charge of deflation: Czechoslovak policy aimed at exchange-rate stability and real reserve backing, not deliberate contraction, and the crown's 1922 appreciation owed more to intervention and speculative capital flows than to any shrinking of the money stock.
Die neue Währung stellt sich hiernach formell als eine „Staatsnoten“währung, materiell aber als eine Banknotenwährung dar.
English translation: “Formally, the new currency presents itself as a "state-note" currency, but materially as a banknote currency.”
How can taxation be justified economically when the benefits of security, justice, or disease prevention cannot be divided into personal shares? In this 1924 article, Emil Sax revises his earlier account of collective needs to confront that difficulty. He argues that public spending and the distribution of tax burdens must be judged together: who pays determines which private satisfactions are surrendered, and thus how much collective provision is warranted. Against treating taxes as prices for individually measurable benefits, Sax develops an account of collective appraisal and subjectively equivalent contributions. His disputes with Wicksell and Lindahl expose the difficulty of extending value theory beyond market exchange, while his qualified case for progression shows why that extension supplies neither an exact measure of equal burdens nor a universal tax schedule.
Can equal incomes explain prices if incomes themselves depend on prices? This is the central difficulty Alfred Amonn finds in Franz Oppenheimer’s reconstruction of objective value theory in the second edition of Wert und Kapitalprofit. In this 1924 critical article, Amonn grants his opponent’s premises provisionally, then tests what the equations actually explain. His objections turn on concrete distinctions: equally capable workers may demand different pay for unpleasant work; a bundle of consumption goods is not interchangeable with its monetary price or subjective worth. Neither dismissing classical theory wholesale nor accepting its reconstruction, Amonn asks what makes an economic explanation more than a restatement of interdependence. His analysis also shows why unchanged equilibrium prices need not demonstrate that demand has ceased to matter.
Restricting domestic credit and building foreign-exchange reserves might seem complementary tasks for a new monetary authority. In this 1924 article, Alfred Amonn shows why they initially worked against each other at the Czechoslovak Bank Office. His assessment of its first five years measures policy against inherited assets, available lending instruments, and the delayed response of trade—not merely against legislative intentions or note-bank doctrine. Lending against securities weakened monetary control, yet, he argues, helped sustain postwar recovery when commercial bills were scarce. Exchange-rate appreciation likewise demanded attention to inventories, production costs, and the financing of raw-material imports. The article offers a concrete account of how monetary authority was acquired through practice, and why reserve losses or departures from orthodox banking rules did not by themselves establish policy failure.
Schönfeld-Illy asks what marginal utility is once it is placed inside the real procedure of economic choice, and answers that it is not a measurable quantum of pleasure but a functional shortcut. Economic agents, he observes, do not measure utility; for one use to be greater than another means only that it holds economic precedence. Grounding subjective welfare in the Gesamtwirtschaftsnutzen — the total utility of an actor's whole stock of goods — he treats calculation as a maximum problem solved not by summing utilities but by weighing performance against counter-performance through successive partial decisions. Marginal utility, he concludes, belongs to the abbreviated procedure agents actually use, distinct from the theoretical utility-orderings behind it. Kurt Leube's preface to this 1924 treatise places its neglected author, a pupil of Böhm-Bawerk and Wieser, between Mises and the generation of Hayek and Machlup.
Die beim Wirtschaften über die Güter zu treffenden Verfügungen werden von dem subjektiven konkreten Nutzen dieser Güter regiert.
English translation: “The dispositions to be made in economic action over goods are governed by the subjective concrete utility of these goods.”
Ricardo both founded theoretical economics and led it astray, so runs the double verdict of this centenary study. He founded it, Amonn argues, by isolating its true problem: not the justice of class shares but the formal mechanism by which rent, profit, wages, and prices arise in exchange. He misled it by taking the labor-value principle as an unexamined axiom, confusing a mere indicator of value with its cause. Across chapters on heterogeneous labor, capital durability, profit, and rent, Amonn shows the principle breaking down, rent springs from the scarcity of land relative to demand, not from cultivating inferior soil. In its place he rebuilds value on relative scarcity, joining Cassel's equilibrium equations to marginal utility, and reads modern theory as the recovery of an insight Ricardo glimpsed and abandoned.
Der Wert der Güter „hängt“ nicht und niemals „ab“ von der zu ihrer Produktion erforderlichen Arbeitsmenge.
English translation: “The value of goods does not, and never does, "depend" on the quantity of labor required for their production.”
Before an elite Vienna audience of officials, bankers, and industrialists gathered on 29 January 1924 to debate Spitzmüller's lecture, Schumpeter rose to defend Austria's post-inflation Sanierung as a single architecture rather than a bundle of contestable details. What matters, he argues, is grasping the broad lines of the restoration policy and rallying to them. Holding the krone at its given value - resisting the popular temptation to raise it - is the only possible course, since that stability was built into the National Bank's very construction. The Geneva loan he relocates to the margin: a welcome incident that eases sacrifice but does not touch the essence, which lies in the prior domestic acts of stopping the printing press and balancing the budget. His closing appeal is to elites: sustain confidence when austerity turns politically hardest.
Will man diese Mittel nicht – man braucht sie nicht zu wollen – dann verzichte man auf die Sanierung.
English translation: “If one does not want these means—one need not want them—then let one renounce the restoration.”
Renaissance Italy dazzles, yet beneath the dazzle, this study insists, ran the same social and economic anxieties that burden any age: sovereign defaults, collapsing banks, fortunes tied to the unstable Florentine Monte. Rather than construct another causal theory after Weber or Sombart, Engel-Janosi sets out to describe how different circles judged wealth, acquisition, and vocation. He reads the Church's penitential summae and its preachers, Antoninus of Florence, Bernardino of Siena, Aquinas, on just price, usury, and the God-given ordo; the poverty ideals of heretical sects; Savonarola's prophetic politics; the pedagogy of Alberti and the humanists Salutati, Poggio, and Valla; Petrarch's Stoic withdrawal; and finally Machiavelli, in whom the Renaissance worship of human power collapses into a confession of its meaninglessness. Issued as a supplement to the Vierteljahrsschrift für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte.
Die Epoche, die ihr Kennzeichen von der Verehrung für menschliche Kraft erhalten durfte, schließt mit dem Bekenntnis der Sinnlosigkeit eines menschlichen Erfolges.
English translation: “The epoch which took its distinguishing mark from the veneration of human power closes with the confession of the meaninglessness of any human success.”