2,793 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
An imaginary land called Utopien is the stage for the rise and ruin of a revolutionary who abolishes private property, inheritance, marriage and the family in the name of a 'Sun State.' Jean Marot, a stable hand turned self-taught intellectual, seizes power under the slogan 'bread and work' and forces the king to proclaim collective ownership and state-reared children, only to watch his order breed shortages, informers, and a new kind of crime in which theft merely imitates official expropriation. The chancellor Reinhart's counterrevolution, an adulterous entanglement with Queen Regine, and a mob that turns on its liberator drive Jean to the scaffold. Gans-Ludassy dramatizes, years before the socialist calculation debate, why a collectivism imposed on egoists devours itself.
Der Staat ist mit Vernunft erfunden für Vernünftige. Auf Stimmungen des Herzens und auf Empfindsamkeiten des Gemüt's kann er nicht Rücksicht nehmen! Laßt mich gehen!
English translation: “The state is devised by reason for the reasonable. It cannot take account of moods of the heart and sensitivities of the temperament! Let me go!”
A strike in Vienna's men's ready-made clothing trade in January 1903 becomes, in Ettinger's hands, a test case for the whole problem of home work and social reform. Starvation wages, tuberculosis, and overcrowded workrooms are read not as an isolated moral scandal but as symptoms of a structurally irrational market — a chain running from Konfektionäre through Stückmeister to dispersed Heimarbeiter, squeezed by export decline, customs burdens, and destructive underbidding. Against this he sets the enforceable minimum-wage tariff, backed by wage books, control commissions, and arbitration, citing Australia's statutory compulsion as the model that works. He defines home work economically rather than legally — labor done for another's account and risk, far below the general wage — and closes with a program of organized employers, organized workers, and public policy: not communism, not anarchism, but rationally organized individualism.
Von einer gelungenen Operation kann man nur sprechen, wenn der Patient bei derselben nicht stirbt.
English translation: “One can speak of a successful operation only if the patient does not die in the course of it.”
Who should support factory workers when they can no longer work—the industrial town that employed them or a distant municipality to which they legally belong? In this short 1904 article, Ludwig von Mises approaches Austrian old-age provision through the fiscal consequences of municipal settlement law. Drawing on nineteenth-century proposals for factory taxes and workers’ support funds, he argues that shifting relief obligations to workers’ home municipalities concealed a problem industrialization had already exposed. The 1896 restoration of residence-based settlement claims made dedicated insurance newly pressing. The article offers a concrete account of delayed reform: legal rules did not remove the costs of dependency, but determined which communities had to confront them.
Can an economist’s idealism be dismissed in the name of facts whose full reality remains unknown? In this 1905 comparative review, Hermann von Schullern zu Schrattenhofen turns his assessment of Achille Loria’s and Maffeo Pantaleoni’s essay collections into a pointed reflection on scholarly judgement. He acknowledges that Loria’s pursuit of social justice can outrun historical realism, yet questions whether appeals to facts are necessarily less circular than appeals to ideals. Pantaleoni offers a contrasting stance: logical precision coupled with scientific tolerance and a rejection of economic schools. Schullern values both without dissolving their differences. This brief review shows how disagreement with an economist’s premises can become a reason for sustained attention rather than dismissal.
How much theoretical precision should an accessible economics textbook sacrifice to clarity? Hermann von Schullern zu Schrattenhofen’s brief 1905 review of Camillo Supino’s Principi di Economia politica makes that tension concrete. He welcomes Supino’s willingness to draw across schools and national traditions while retaining a classical framework, but finds the treatment of value insufficiently deep and potentially troublesome in its terminology. Rather than press these objections, Schullern judges the book by its explanatory purpose, singling out its comparison of collectivism and individualism for praise. The review offers a compact instance of critical restraint: conceptual reservations remain explicit, yet accessibility and the author’s freedom to select among competing explanations carry the final judgement.
Abolishing feudalism need not abolish dependence: this is the tension Hermann von Schullern zu Schrattenhofen foregrounds in his short 1905 review of Filippo Lo Vetere’s Il movimento agricolo Siciliano. He welcomes Lo Vetere’s challenge to celebrated reforms, reporting that the removal of customary restraints helped consolidate large estates rather than relieve Sicilian agrarian distress. His sympathetic appraisal connects this criticism with a concrete alternative: agricultural self-help organized through the Consorzio agrario siciliano and local credit cooperatives. The review offers a compact view of Schullern’s receptiveness to an uncomfortable argument about reform, while showing why, for Lo Vetere, access to credit and cooperative organization mattered more to agricultural recovery than legal emancipation alone.
Italy’s agricultural difficulties appear here as a warning to its trading partners: successful reform could make the country a more formidable economic competitor. In this short 1905 review of Italo Giglioli’s Malessere agrario ed alimentare in Italia, Hermann von Schullern zu Schrattenhofen commends the Italian agricultural expert’s report to readers following trade-treaty negotiations. He takes up Giglioli’s diagnosis of cultural backwardness in parts of the population, but stresses the possibility of extending northern Italy’s agricultural advances across the country. Rather than assessing the book’s detailed evidence, Schullern reveals what he finds politically consequential in it: the prospect that national self-criticism, natural resources and agricultural expertise might alter Italy’s economic relations with Austria-Hungary, Germany and France.
A tax can alter prices not only through the payments it imposes, but through the exchanges it prevents. Robert Meyer’s 1905 review of Leo Petritsch’s study of tax shifting singles out this change of perspective: a land transfer may cease to be worthwhile when the tax exceeds the difference between buyer’s and seller’s valuations. Meyer welcomes Petritsch’s account of the wider price effects of such blocked transactions, yet stops short of endorsing his sweeping rejection of taxes on transactions in movable property. This brief review draws a useful distinction between an explanatory advance and the policy conclusions claimed for it. Its critical edge also turns inward: Meyer openly acknowledges his personal stake when protesting Petritsch’s omission of his own research.
Economic theory must begin not from an abstract calculator but from the acting person, whose bodily, instinctual, and affective constitution shapes conduct in advance. Dedicated to the psychiatrist August Forel, this essay builds a layered anthropology, reflex, instinct, character, habit, suggestion, and traces economic behaviour to instinctual complexes of nutrition, protection, possession, power, and vanity that differ sharply in urgency. Schwiedland's sharpest tool is a distinction economics had blurred: Begier, desire, generates its own activity and seeks heightened pleasure, while Bedürfnis, need, is provoked by deprivation and drives toward its removal. The essence of economy, he insists, lies not in consuming but in procuring goods for future satisfaction. Culture is the refinement of striving; luxury is ambiguous, capable of both waste and invention; and economic reform, he concludes, must include the education of wants.
Die soziale Therapie besteht ja zum besten Teil in einer Beeinflussung des inneren Menschen.
English translation: “Social therapy consists for the most part in influencing the inner man.”
Modern competition, Ettinger contends, throws up the very associations meant to restrain it. Cartels are neither an invention of academic economists nor a creature of legislation, but practical answers to ruinous price wars, overproduction, and unstable relations among firms. With a foreword by Carl Menger, this legal-economic study refuses both a naive faith in laissez-faire and the reflex of treating every combination as criminal conspiracy. If private associations already regulate prices, output, and risk across whole branches, the state cannot pose as a neutral onlooker; it must decide how such power is supervised and where stabilizing coordination shades into private domination. Ettinger works through cartel forms as stages in an industry's self-organization — from loose price agreements, vulnerable to evasion, toward integrated cooperatives that turn rivalry into collective calculation — and supplies model statutes for the promoters and lawyers who would build them.
Dem Kartellprobleme kann und darf der Staat nicht länger als stiller Beobachter gegenüberstehen.
English translation: “The state can and must no longer stand before the cartel problem as a silent observer.”
A tariff reduction need not mean the destruction of a domestic industry. In this 1905 review of Richard Schüller’s Schutzzoll und Freihandel, Carl Menger examines the differences among firms that make reciprocal trade concessions possible. Producers with unequal costs can coexist, while even the strongest enterprises face limits to profitable expansion. On Schüller’s account, carefully measured concessions may therefore contract less competitive production without eliminating an entire branch of industry. Menger’s qualified appreciation centres on the connection between these production conditions and practical treaty negotiation. His review offers a concrete alternative to treating protection and free trade as all-or-nothing choices: assessing which producers bear the losses, where export opportunities arise, and under what conditions both negotiating countries can benefit.
Neither doctrinaire free trade nor blanket protection survives Schüller's scrutiny, which rests a rational tariff policy on a fact both camps overlook: within a single country the same good is produced at widely unequal costs, in layers reaching from the most favorable conditions to the marginal ones that fix the price. From this — and from the marginal-utility line that runs through Menger, Wieser, and Zuckerkandl — he derives when imports enrich a nation and when they merely displace home production and depress wages and rents. He weighs foreign 'superiority' against real export capacity, defends measured grain tariffs against Brentano's objections, takes apart Germany's and Russia's excessive duties, and treats commercial treaties as the arena where an import harmful in isolation may be admitted for compensating export concessions. The work carries a dedication to Carl Menger.
Der größte Irrtum jedoch besteht darin, daß die Exportfähigkeit als gleichbedeutend mit der Überlegenheit aufgefaßt wird, während es für die Exportfähigkeit ebenso sehr auf die in der Regel ganz übersehenen Konsumverhältnisse als auf die Produktion ankommt.
English translation: “The greatest error, however, consists in the fact that export capacity is regarded as synonymous with superiority, whereas export capacity depends just as much on consumption conditions—which are usually entirely overlooked—as on production.”