2,793 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Along the San River the Roman Catholic Polish west met the Greek Catholic Ruthenian east, and across both stretched a peasantry that eighteenth-century jurists could equate with slavery. Mises's first book, written in Karl Grünberg's Vienna seminar, traces the lord-peasant relationship in Galicia from the Austrian annexation of 1772 to the abolition of robot in 1848. It follows the province through Joseph II's abolition of personal serfdom, the Robot Patent of 1786, the Raab colonization schemes, the massacres of the 1846 uprising, and the final Grundentlastung forced by the revolution of March 1848. Drawing on ministerial and Hofkammer archives, it argues that serfdom and corvée vanished not because they offended natural law but because they no longer fit the modern economic order.
Der polnische Privatbauer des 18. Jahrhunderts ist leibeigen.
English translation: “The Polish private peasant of the 18th century is a serf.”
The 1896 Vienna enquiry into women's labour filled seven hundred printed pages, stirred the press and public, then dispersed without producing a single practical measure. Sympathy, Schwiedland argues, was never the point: the distress of seamstresses and home workers stands in causal connection with their lack of organization, and the hardest case is the trade that is almost wholly female and dispersed across private dwellings. Marriage expectations, domestic burden, mistrust, replaceability, and dependence on a husband's wage all weaken association at the very moment they depress pay. His remedy is a hybrid of law, compulsory or state-aided representation understood as education, and the Berlin Christian-social Gewerkverein as a model in which bourgeois women initiate a union and then withdraw, culminating, where a sales cooperative bypasses the Verleger, in structural change.
Da frägt sie nur um den Auftrag, nicht mehr um dessen Preis.
English translation: “There she asks only about the commission, no longer about its price.”
Two problems frame Wieser's 1902 lecture to the Society of Austrian Economists, delivered after the finance minister confessed that the tax reform of 1896 had stopped halfway down the road. Can the personal income tax grow into Austria's principal direct tax, as it already is in Prussia, where it raises three-quarters of direct revenue while in Austria it remains a mere supplement? Not yet, he answers: assessment still misses perhaps a third of taxable income, above all agricultural income, so abolishing the old yield taxes would violently shift burdens from land to city and toward Vienna. The land tax must therefore stand until income assessment becomes honest. Turning to the antiquated Ertragsteuern — emergency war taxes bent by excessive rates into a regressive muddle — he insists on separating capital, a common productive tool, from the capitalists who draw income from it.
Alles eher als ein System von Steuern.
English translation: “Anything but a system of taxes.”
What happens to economics when its basic unit is neither goods nor value, but an enterprise comprising people and goods? In this short German review, Hermann von Schullern zu Schrattenhofen presents Alberto Zorli’s proposed reorientation while drawing attention to its terminological difficulties: even translating azienda economica requires a choice between Unternehmung and Betrieb. Schullern’s particular interest lies in the consequences for public finance. Zorli treats the state as a collective enterprise distinguished by coercion, drawing economic principles from economics and its governing norms from public law. Rather than testing this framework at length, the review isolates the connection between Zorli’s conceptual innovation and his account of state economic activity—a compact encounter with the problem of bringing private and public economies under one vocabulary.
Argentina’s currency question mattered to European grain producers as well as to those studying the destination of European emigrants. This connection frames Hermann von Schullern zu Schrattenhofen’s brief 1903 review of the first, monetary volume of Eteocle Lorini’s study of Argentina. Schullern judges the book chiefly as a source: he praises the care and objectivity of Lorini’s government-sponsored investigation and the breadth of documentation supporting its account of monetary affairs. Rather than endorsing a currency reform, the review shows what Schullern valued in economic research—local investigation, official evidence, and the placement of monetary conditions within a wider account of production, migration, and public finance.
Land improvement, insurance, hotels, and the drying of silk cocoons all fall within “industrial” enterprise in the handbook assessed by Hermann von Schullern zu Schrattenhofen. His brief 1903 review of Ferdinando Piccinelli’s work locates its chief interest for non-Italian readers in detailed descriptions of 617 joint-stock companies. Schullern distinguishes the handbook’s accessible, broadly liberal account of Italian law from the documentary value of its company survey: chronological ordering within groups offers clues to corporate development, while financial tables record the scale of capital and indebtedness. The review provides a compact contemporary judgement of a reference work whose expansive definition of industry brings agricultural and service enterprises into view alongside more familiar industrial activities.
Municipal self-government means more here than running waterworks or transport services. In this brief 1903 review of Francesco Invrea’s Il comune e la sua funzione sociale, Hermann von Schullern zu Schrattenhofen singles out worker protection for particular praise. His telling example is Brescia’s municipal labour office, charged not only with finding employment but also with promoting workers’ moral and material advancement—a broader remit than that of its German counterparts. Schullern also reports Invrea’s insistence that greater municipal autonomy requires popular oversight through the referendum. The review offers a compact glimpse of how local independence could be linked to expanded social responsibilities, with Schullern’s selective emphasis directing attention beyond public utilities to the institutions serving workers.
Does agriculture follow industry towards capitalist concentration—and what would that mean for socialist expectations? In this brief 1903 review of G. Gatti’s Le socialisme et l’agriculture, Hermann von Schullern zu Schrattenhofen singles out landownership as a decisive test of revised Marxist doctrine. Gatti expects capitalism and cooperation together to prepare socialism’s victory, yet concedes that agricultural concentration has barely begun and that transformation will take a long time. Schullern’s qualified praise turns on this restraint, not on agreement with the predicted outcome. The review offers a compact encounter between socialist confidence and economic caution: its distinctive interest lies in a reviewer’s willingness to recognize sober judgment in an author whose expectations he does not endorse.
Legal institutions and accounting emerge with unequal clarity from the archives of medieval Douai. In this brief 1903 review of Georges Espinas’s municipal financial history, Carl Menger makes that imbalance the key qualification of his favourable assessment, attributing it to the surviving evidence. He also singles out Espinas’s comparisons with northwestern German towns and his use of German historical and public-finance scholarship. The review offers a compact glimpse of Menger’s criteria for assessing archival research: attention to what the documents can support, and appreciation of comparisons that make a local history useful beyond its immediate setting.
Can family and private property change without ceasing to be the foundations of social life? In this brief 1903 review, Hermann von Schullern zu Schrattenhofen welcomes Giovanni Amadori-Virgilj’s answer: both institutions are primordial, not successors to an original communal order. Schullern draws attention to the book’s evolutionary method and scrutiny of evidence, but his strongest approval concerns its political implications—a vision of progress that preserves family and property while reconciling individual and social interests. He leaves particular theses open to disagreement, yet praises their challenge to partisan certainty. The review offers a compact encounter with Schullern’s standards of judgement, showing where methodological appreciation meets an explicitly sympathetic response to criticism of socialism.
Official trade totals need not measure the same things in comparable ways. In this brief 1903 review, Carl Menger welcomes Gustav Lippert’s scrutiny of the values assigned to international commodity transfers, stressing how inconsistent publication practices and inaccurate estimation methods compromise both comparison and reliability. His interest is practical as well as methodological: with commercial treaties being renewed and reshaped, the quality of statistical evidence matters for policy. The review offers a compact instance of Menger’s attention to the conditions under which official figures can support a sound judgment about actual trade flows.
Can clarity of exposition sustain a sweeping challenge to trade-balance theory? In this brief 1903 review, Carl Menger reports Leo Petritsch’s contention that payment surpluses and deficits are temporary and that the balance of payments is irrelevant to currency reform. Menger does not offer a detailed rebuttal: he praises the book’s clarity and diligence, then questions whether its author chose too complicated a subject for a first work. The interest lies in that measured distance between reporting an argument and endorsing it—a compact instance of Menger’s critical judgement on claims about international payments and monetary reform.