2,793 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
What becomes of economic self-interest when prestige depends on giving valuables away? In this 1923 review of Malinowski’s Argonauts of the Western Pacific, Eugen Peter Schwiedland treats Kula exchange as a challenge to textbook accounts of early economic life. He emphasizes how custom, ceremony, and public recognition organize exchange without eliminating the desire for gain. His distinctive concern is what economists can learn from ethnographic observation: generosity and acquisitiveness need not be opposing explanations, and practical usefulness cannot alone account for value. The review offers a compact encounter between fieldwork and economic theory, while Schwiedland’s bourgeois-versus-Bolshevik comparison exposes the contemporary political categories he brings to Malinowski’s findings.
External supervision can enforce economies, but can it make a depressed economy yield the revenues a balanced budget requires? In this 1923 article, Moriz Dub examines Austria’s financial reconstruction under League of Nations oversight, supporting fiscal discipline while testing its practical limits. Dismissals bring severance costs and the loss of experienced officials; higher tobacco prices and railway tariffs risk reducing consumption and traffic rather than increasing receipts. His commercial scrutiny of state enterprises does not lead to an automatic case for privatization: sales backed by government guarantees would leave public risk intact. The article offers a concrete account of the tension between administrative resolve and economic capacity, showing why a sharply reduced projected deficit is not yet a secure financial recovery.
By 1923 the German banking world was consumed, as Hahn puts it, from morning to night with a single anxiety, the preservation of its capital substance, yet the third edition of Adolf Weber's textbook still fought the prewar battle against the great credit banks. Reviewing it, Hahn dismantles three inherited doctrines: Weber's moralized contrast between English deposit banks and German speculation banks, his loose account of liquidity, and his theory of credit and capital. Genuine risk, he insists, sits with merchants and manufacturers, not with bankers. Liquidity, in a clearing economy, means access to central-bank money rather than idle cash. And the only thing that matters about any credit is whether it enlarges the purchasing power already circulating. Inflation, on this reading, came from state finance, not from weak reserves.
Das Kontokorrentgeschäft aber ist zweifellos das unspekulativste Geschäft, das überhaupt möglich ist, denn seine Gewinnchancen sind in den bedungenen Zinsen und Provisionen von vornherein festgelegt.
English translation: “The current-account business, however, is undoubtedly the least speculative business that is possible at all, for its profit prospects are fixed in advance by the stipulated interest and commissions.”
Protection against inflation appears here not as social relief but as a “curious monopoly” enjoyed by wage-earners and salaried employees. That reversal captures the standpoint of Eugen Peter Schwiedland’s 1923 review of Siegfried Strakosch’s book on Austria’s economic crisis. Strongly endorsing Strakosch’s practical and scientific authority, Schwiedland argues that socialist labour protections weakened production and burdened business. He also acknowledges the destructive effects of the peace settlement, new frontiers, trade barriers and currency instability. The interest of this short review lies in how these explanations are weighted: readers can see an economic indictment of labour policy taking shape around business uncertainty and middle-class losses, even while the reviewer describes pressures extending far beyond domestic legislation.
A reading society founded by Viennese jurists and officials in 1840 becomes, in this early study, a delicate instrument for registering the political pressures of the Austrian Vormärz. Engel-Janosi reconstructs the associational law of pre-1848 Austria, the natural-law background, the police suspicion of reading circles, the concession system, and shows how elite patrons such as Sommaruga shielded the club while Sedlnitzky, Kolowrat, and Metternich eyed it warily. Its history, he argues, is largely the chronicle of its skirmishes with the censorship: the struggle to obtain foreign political newspapers, to hold lectures, and to maintain a library under constant supervision and confiscation. Though the society never acted as a revolutionary body in March 1848, Engel-Janosi reads in its restrained conduct a loyal, sorrowful opposition to the imperial order.
Es liegt viel Schwäche darin, gewiß, aber auch Trauer und Treue.
English translation: “There is much weakness in it, to be sure, but also sorrow and fidelity.”
Once the public stops believing that the inflation will halt, Mises contends, a paper currency financed by the note press is doomed to sudden collapse rather than to endless gradual decline—as the American continentals and the French mandats collapsed before it. The first step of any reform is therefore to shut down the printing press; the second is to bind the mark again to gold, whose quantity answers to mining profitability rather than to state decree. He refutes the balance-of-payments theory of the exchanges, insisting that inflation, not poverty or trade deficits, drives foreign-exchange rates upward, and proposes a monetary constitution forbidding any note issue not covered by gold or foreign exchange. The disorder, he closes, is at root ideological.
An die Stelle des Schlagwortes „Los vom Golde“ muß die Lösung treten: „Los von der staatlichen Beeinflussung des Geldwertes“.
English translation: “In place of the slogan "Away from gold" must be substituted the solution: "Away from state influence on the value of money.”
Contributed to the memorial volume for Max Weber, this essay refuses the abstract rational homo oeconomicus and grounds economy instead in the biological balance of intake and expenditure that humans share with organisms and animals. Economic life, for Thurnwald, emerges from instinct through intelligence, invention, and organization, driven as much by prestige, magic, luxury, and group feeling as by calculation. He distinguishes constant psycho-physiological factors from local geographic ones and from the progressive accumulation of technique, tracing production and exchange values from clan sharing to tribute, primitive money, and finally the coal-and-machine economy that shifts power from land toward finance, industry, and labor. The gathering of prestige objects, he cautions, is not yet capital formation. Economy is treated throughout as a life function shaped by biology, psychology, environment, technique, and politics.
Das Verhältnis der Menschen zum Boden bildet zu allen Zeiten ein Grundproblem der Wirtschaft und der Politik.
English translation: “The relationship of human beings to the soil constitutes at all times a fundamental problem of economy and politics.”
Does a stronger need explain an economic choice, or do we call the need stronger because that choice was made? This tension gives Felix Kaufmann’s 1923 study its critical edge. Drawing on Husserl’s distinction between material and formal concepts, Kaufmann asks what makes conduct economic, rather than what circumstances cause it. He challenges definitions grounded in scarcity or ranked purposes and treats marginal utility as a useful guide to empirical inquiry, not an independent psychological explanation. His alternative centres on behaviour that establishes an order of selection among goods, understood as relations to external things. The discussion of money sharpens the stakes: ranking goods does not yet mean measuring their values. Readers can discover where apparently explanatory economic concepts may merely redescribe the conduct they are meant to explain.
Formally reciprocal rules can distribute burdens very unequally. In this review of Arthur Nussbaum’s study of the Versailles clearing procedure, Helene Lieser foregrounds the costs to Germany of settling cross-border debts as the mark depreciates. Her comparison with Austria makes the issue concrete: should the state absorb exchange-related losses, or should private debtors bear them according to their means? She also endorses Nussbaum’s criticism that the Mixed Arbitral Tribunals favor Allied claimants through selective treaty interpretation. The review’s interest lies in Lieser’s connection of legal machinery to financial incentives—and in her insistence that decisions admitting no appeal nonetheless demand scholarly scrutiny.
Political defeat need not settle the question of public merit. In this 1923 obituary, Richard Reisch defends Ernst Plener’s pursuit of national accommodation and constitutional government while locating his more durable achievements in currency and tax reform. Reisch writes not only as an admirer but as a former young finance-ministry official who witnessed the painstaking deliberations behind personal-tax legislation. His recollections give concrete substance to the tribute: revenue needs, provincial interests, and parliamentary demands had to be negotiated, not simply resolved by technical expertise. Read as a sympathetic assessment rather than a neutral biography, the obituary shows how Reisch measured a statesman’s achievement—and why he contrasted the patient legislative work of the 1890s with the haste of his own time.
A stronger currency need not mean a more prosperous economy. In this 1923 article, Alfred Amonn weighs appreciation against stabilization, chiefly through the difficulties facing Czechoslovakia. His distinction between foreign exchange value and domestic purchasing power exposes the limits of apparent gains: cheaper imports can accompany damaged exports, while lower prices increase the burden of domestic debts. Yet he also identifies a concrete case for appreciation. Where political resistance keeps housing rents below levels compatible with building costs, lowering other prices might restore a workable relationship. The article’s interest lies in this uneasy comparison of adjustment paths: Amonn acknowledges the risks of business failures and unemployment without assuming that stabilization can resolve every inherited imbalance.
The solidarity that enables people to act together can also prevent them from abandoning a disastrous cause. In Machtpsychologie, Friedrich von Wieser traces this tension to the reciprocal expectations binding leaders and followers. His distinctive starting point is an analogy with economic value: just as a common price does not imply identical personal valuations, social power need not imply a separate collective mind. Military discipline shows how fear can give way to honor, pride, and duty—making cooperation more purposeful while deepening dependence. Against crowd psychology’s emphasis on volatility, Wieser stresses the rigidity of organized groups. His account offers a way to distinguish power’s capacity to sustain itself from its capacity to serve the people whose coordinated wills make it possible.