2,793 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
An economy can revive without the world economy recovering. This distinction gives Wilhelm Röpke’s 1935 commentary its conditional optimism: renewed private investment offers evidence of market resilience, but national upswings remain vulnerable to monetary instability and barriers to trade. He attributes America’s acceleration to restored entrepreneurial confidence and a retreat from policy experimentation, while warning that cheap credit and gold inflows could turn recovery into another excessive boom. His international perspective also sharpens a concrete domestic criticism: protecting grain prices can harm other farmers by raising feed costs and reducing consumers’ purchasing power. The essay offers a contemporary liberal diagnosis of recovery in progress, asking how self-sustaining investment can be distinguished from state-supported activity—and why prosperity within national borders is not enough.
An economist’s published record may be a poor measure of his achievement. In this brief 1935 encyclopedia entry, Schumpeter portrays Allyn Abbott Young as a creative teacher whose ideas largely survive in the work of others, beyond reliable attribution. His assessment nevertheless gives that elusive influence a concrete intellectual shape: Young brought Marshall into conversation with Cournot and Walras and sought ways to join economic theory with statistical evidence. Schumpeter reads the scattered publications not merely as an incomplete record but as traces of sustained theoretical work, finding in the monetary writings components of a comprehensive treatise. The entry offers a compact example of one economist judging another where bibliography alone cannot settle the question of contribution.
When Frank Knight attacked the notion that time plays any distinct role in production, he struck at the core of Bohm-Bawerk's capital theory; this 1935 essay for the Zeitschrift fur Nationalokonomie mounts the defense. Strigl concedes that the older formulations were rigid and sometimes misleading, but reconstructs the essential claim through a vertically integrated autarkic trust and a new concept, Bindungszeit — the time elapsing between a unit of labor and its finished consumer good. Lengthening binding times raises output; shortening them lowers it. Capital multiplied by time thus functions as a genuine factor subject to diminishing returns, so interest can be explained as its marginal product, and every capital good, he argues, must ultimately be traced back to original factors plus these Zinskostenelemente, the cost of time itself.
Daß da ohne Rücksicht auf die Formulierung doch ein richtiger Kern gegeben sein muß, zeigt die schließlich jedem Schulkind bekannte Regel, daß man Zinsen niemals anders als mit der Formel Kapital mal Zeit mal Zinssatz berechnen kann.
English translation: “That there must nevertheless be a correct core here, regardless of the formulation, is shown by the rule known in the end to every schoolchild: that interest can never be calculated except by the formula capital times time times the rate of interest.”
What makes a bibliography trustworthy beyond the breadth of its coverage? In this 1936 review of Henry Higgs’s Bibliography of Economics, 1751–1775, Hayek welcomes an undertaking built on Foxwell’s extensive collections, then tests its reliability against particular entries. Harris’s two-part work on money receives misleading records; Raper reappears as “Roper”; a nineteenth-century edition of Prussian archival documents finds its way under 1769. These are not interchangeable complaints: they expose problems of attribution, identification and chronological scope. The brief review offers a concrete encounter with Hayek as a critical reader of scholarly reference tools, showing why admiration for a bibliography’s comprehensiveness need not entail confidence in its details.
A handsome reprint need not be the most useful one for scholars. In this brief 1936 review, Hayek welcomes the republication of W. A. Shaw’s collection of English monetary documents but questions the cost of its sumptuous production. His judgement distinguishes the bimetallic controversy that shaped Shaw’s 1896 selection from the documents’ continuing value—notably Newton’s reports as Master of the Mint, otherwise unavailable in print. The review offers a compact glimpse of Hayek as a reader of historical economic sources, attentive both to the interests governing their selection and to the practical conditions under which scholars can consult them.
A useful biography can still fail its subject as an economist. In this brief review of D. B. Copland’s two lectures on W. E. Hearn, Hayek welcomes new information about Hearn’s Australian career but finds his economic thought poorly served. Hayek values Hearn’s original observations and lucid expression; he wants them examined in relation to the teaching at Trinity College and their influence on later writers. His objection is pointed: Copland makes Hearn a vehicle for contemporary Australian economists’ views. The review offers a compact glimpse of Hayek’s judgement of Hearn—and of the distinction he draws between recovering a thinker’s contribution and recruiting him for present purposes.
For Gerhard Tintner, reliable confirmation can matter more than striking novelty. His 1936 review of Allen and Bowley’s Family Expenditure praises their use of household budgets to connect demand theory with statistical evidence, while questioning one simplifying assumption: a linear preference scale maintained throughout the investigation. Where that assumption appears to fail, he wants statistical tests, not merely a workable approximation. This brief review offers a concrete view of Tintner’s standards for econometric research: close knowledge of the data, explicit testing of theoretical assumptions, and economic interpretation of numerical results. His praise turns on what the calculations establish about household spending—not on mathematical sophistication alone.
Mahr reopens the Austrian puzzle of productive interest by asking precisely what the 'time element' contributes to it. Accepting from Jevons and Böhm-Bawerk that capitalistic production is temporally extended and present factor payments oriented toward future revenues, he defends—against Schumpeter—the persistence of an interest rate in a static economy: statics inherits the rate that development established and finds no force to remove it. His sharpest correction targets Böhm-Bawerk's 'average period of production,' whose inclusion of a capital good's whole past history breeds infinite regress and makes an old mine lengthen a present process merely by age. Distinguishing production period from use period, Mahr rebuilds the concept as the technically necessary time embodied in the portion actually consumed, and denies that more capital must always lengthen production or lower returns.
Die Einbeziehung der Nutzungsperiode der Kapitalgüter in die Berechnung der durchschnittlichen Produktionsperiode scheint mir die hauptsächliche Quelle aller Widersprüche und Ungereimtheiten darzustellen, die diesem Begriff bisher anhafteten.
English translation: “The inclusion of the period of use of capital goods in the calculation of the average period of production seems to me to constitute the principal source of all the contradictions and inconsistencies that have hitherto attached to this concept.”
Austria's 1934 constitution, and the authoritarian turn behind it, mark for Voegelin not a sudden rupture but a late episode in a state that never quite became one. Total and authoritarian, he argues, are political symbols forged in struggle rather than scientific concepts, and he assembles their elements—Carl Schmitt's total state, economic Vermachtung, mass activation, the monopoly of propaganda, the education of a people by its elite—before turning to the specifically Austrian problem: an empire of many nations that produced no unified Staatsvolk to will the republic into being. Much of the book is a sustained critique of Kelsen's pure theory of law, whose reduction of the state to a system of coercive norms Voegelin reads as an administrative evasion of political substance, and as the very formalism that made the 1933–34 transition so hard to name.
Die Machtquelle bleibt anonym.
English translation: “The source of power remains anonymous.”
A gift given, a service rendered, a wrong avenged: beneath these Thurnwald finds one impulse toward counter-performance, and here he raises reciprocity into the organizing principle of social life. Association begins in the bio-psychical complementarity of the sexes and ages—marriage as durable mutual care, parent and child bound by deferred return, the living tied to ancestors through offerings. He rejects any primitive communism of products, reads barter, kula, and potlatch as personal repayment rather than impersonal purchase, and interprets Buin shell money as a memory-sign of obligation. Stratification bends reciprocity into clientage, feudalism, serfdom, and slavery—equilibria that turn unjust once valuations shift—while law, morality, and revenge appear as its formalized demands. Cultures decline, he warns, when this balance is lost.
Jede Leistung aus der „Spezialität“ des einen Partners soll zur Erwiderung beim anderen anregen.
English translation: “Every service arising from the "specialty" of one partner is meant to prompt a reciprocal response from the other.”
Three movements organize a century and a half of Swiss constitutional history in Rappard's telling: the emancipation of the individual, the triumph of democracy, and the rise of the state. He begins with the great paradox — that the Helvetic Constitution imposed by French bayonets in 1798, with its liberty, equality, and unitary citizenship, came to shape modern Switzerland more than the old Confederation ever did — and traces the sequence through the Act of Mediation, the reactionary Pact of 1815, the liberal cantonal revolutions of 1830, the federal Constitution of 1848, and the centralizing revisions after 1874. The individual who freed himself from the aristocratic state, and then mastered it through referendum and initiative, ends by surrendering to a federal statism of tariffs, railways, insurance, and subsidies whose swelling debt Rappard reads as the measure of lost independence.
Pour triompher définitivement en Suisse, le libéralisme avait donc dû faire appel au moins libéral des arguments.
English translation: “To triumph definitively in Switzerland, liberalism had thus been obliged to resort to the least liberal of arguments.”
The Methodenstreit had hardened into a war of slogans, naturalism against Verstehen, nomothetic against idiographic, value-free against normative, and this 1936 German treatise sets out to disarm every one of them. Kaufmann offers not a doctrine but a critique of principles: methods earn their place by problem-type and research aim, never by metaphysical prestige. Physical objectivity itself rests on schemas and measurement; social science differs because its objects include alter egos, projects, and socially available meanings, so understanding is indispensable yet never sovereign. Drawing on Weber and Schütz for controlled interpretation, he recasts marginal utility theory as an analysis of purpose-rational choice within a ranked goal-order, treats ideal types as instruments of causal control, and credits Kelsen with purifying legal dogmatics while rejecting the Sein/Sollen dualism. Plurality is preserved; its inflation into pseudo-conflict is what must go.
Demgemäß ist alle Kritik in diesem Buche Prinzipienkritik.
English translation: “Accordingly, all criticism in this book is criticism of principles.”