2,793 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Catastrophic unemployment, rather than labour scarcity, frames the opening months of war in Emil Lederer’s brief review of W. Stieda’s lecture on war and social policy. Lederer singles out centralized employment placement as the most important response: relief required creating work and making better use of existing opportunities. His judgement of the lecture is carefully qualified. By 1915, other concerns had come to the fore, yet Stieda’s account still documented early efforts to keep insurance and welfare institutions functioning while adapting them to wartime needs. This short notice offers a precise glimpse of what Lederer considered worth preserving in an account already overtaken by events.
When monetary expansion is called economic progress, who actually gains? In this 1915 review of Ernst Wagemann’s study of Chile, Hermann Schwarzwald insists on identifying the beneficiaries before accepting the claim. He credits Wagemann’s use of sources but attacks explanations that turn private advantage into public benefit. His concrete examples give the dispute its edge: state notes used to purchase mortgage bonds while wages lost purchasing power, and nitrate workers paid in company tokens. The latter, he argues, amount to interest-free loans extracted from workers, not a saving for society. This compact, polemical review offers a pointed encounter with Schwarzwald’s distributive approach to monetary history—and with his suspicion of theories that obscure transfers of wealth behind the language of national prosperity.
Careful documentation is not yet social explanation: this distinction shapes Emil Lederer’s brief review of J. Buelens’s study of German salaried employees. Writing in 1915, Lederer sees German employment-contract law and employee-specific social policy as resources for emerging French debates, and expects Buelens’s account to encourage employees to organize around their interests. He credits its careful use of official records, organizational publications, and scholarship, yet closes by noting its marked restraint in interpreting social relationships. The review offers a compact instance of Lederer’s critical judgement: practical usefulness and documentary breadth earn recognition without being mistaken for sociological understanding.
A bank is not first a lender but an institution whose purpose is to take credit, and from that inversion Somary builds an entire doctrine of banking policy. This revised German edition, expanded from the 1915 original after war and inflation, shifts attention from the asset side of the balance sheet to the liability side, where a bank's size and survival hang on public confidence: banks are servants, not masters, of trust. He rejects theories that make banks autonomous creators of credit and classifies lending by economic liquidity rather than legal form, defining investment credit by whether it exceeds the borrower's liquid assets, at which point it becomes a participation in entrepreneurial risk in the form of credit. Banking crises, he insists, spring less from isolated bad loans than from mismatches among confidence, liquidity, maturity, and institutional form.
Der Industrielle wie der Kaufmann dürfen aus einem Glas trinken, das ihnen nicht gehört; aber es wird ihnen nicht selten gerade in dem Augenblick fortgenommen, in dem sie den stärksten Durst verspüren.
English translation: “The industrialist, like the merchant, may drink from a glass that does not belong to him; but it is not seldom taken from him at the very moment when he feels the strongest thirst.”
Trade, defined here as 'the acquisition of goods for the purpose of their resale,' is distinguished from the social type of the merchant and reconceived as an economic function: spatial and temporal distribution between producers and consumers. In this fourth edition of 1918, Schwiedland tracks that function from armed caravans and colonial companies — long-distance exchange long dependent on protection and force — to the modern apparatus of railways, banks, exchanges, brokers, and standardized samples that detach commercial dealing from the physical presence of goods and make markets comparable across distance. His fullest analysis is of retail's revolution: the branch system, mail-order house, consumer cooperative, and above all the department store, emblem of rationalized distribution running on mass purchasing, rapid turnover, and narrow margins. Every commercial layer, he warns, imposes its own cost on the consumer.
Der Handel und der Frachtverkehr haben nun das Bestreben, die Welt zu einem einzigen weiten Markte zu gestalten.
English translation: “Trade and freight transport now strive to fashion the world into a single wide market.”
Reverse the lecture's title, Landesberger begins, the national economy and the war, not the war and the national economy, and the 1914 catastrophe appears less as military politics than as the collision of an economy with the forces bent on halting it. Britain, he argues, entered not over Belgian neutrality but because Germany's industrial ascent threatened its world position: German firms served customers better, the 'made in Germany' origin law backfired into a mark of quality, and bank-financed science outpaced English routine in chemicals, machinery, and munitions. Turning to the financial shock, he weighs moratoria, Darlehenskassen, and Reichsbank note issue, the closure of the exchanges, the blockade's threat to the food supply, and the war loans on which monetary normalization depends. Whatever windfalls war brings a lucky few, for the national economy as a whole it is no boom.
Die Kerze wird von zwei Seiten angezündet.
English translation: “The candle is being lit from both ends.”
Busy factories, rising wages, and profitable military contracts can coexist with a country’s material impoverishment. In this 1915 article, Emil Lederer explains that paradox by separating monetary claims from the goods and productive capacity that sustain them. The modern state, he argues, does more than finance war: it mobilizes the economy’s material substance, preserving private profits while subordinating production to military success. War loans postpone demands on goods but cannot replace depleted livestock, worn machinery, or consumed supplies. This distinction gives his account of wartime prosperity a concrete edge: readers can trace how apparent enrichment creates obligations that peace production must eventually meet, and why reconstruction requires coordination rather than merely a return to ordinary business.
How does an account of banks, schools, and social insurance become a justification for war? In this substantial 1915 review of the collective volume Deutschland und der Weltkrieg, Eugen von Philippovich approvingly connects German institutional achievement with the defense of German power. His attention to economic organization gives the review a concrete texture: large banks, industrial cartels, and technical education become evidence for the virtues of coordinated national action. Yet the argument moves from productive capacity to contested claims of strategic necessity, including a defense of Germany’s invasion of Belgium. Read as Philippovich’s own political intervention, rather than merely a report on the volume, the review exposes the tension between its endorsement of military necessity and its promise of international equality, renewed legal restraints, and freedom of the seas.
Written in the first year of the war as the opening fascicle of the series Flugschriften für Österreich-Ungarns Erwachen, this pamphlet reads military catastrophe as national awakening. War destroys external goods, Wieser argues, but discloses inward powers—discipline, sacrifice, political consciousness—and Austria-Hungary's endurance proves the monarchy still possesses a living historical vocation. Refusing to blame the war on any single diplomat or dynasty, he explains its origins through the law of the small number and the law of historical paths, reading Russia's drive toward Constantinople, England's naval empire and manufactured opinion, French revanche, and Italian betrayal as cases where organized minorities steered vast populations. The closing lesson turns from power to justice: wartime hatred is manufactured, and the multinational monarchy might yet become a school of national accommodation.
Wir müssen stark sein und gerecht. Das Recht, das den Schwachen stark macht, macht den Starken stärker.
English translation: “We must be strong and just. The right that makes the weak strong makes the strong stronger.”
A ceiling on bread prices does not ensure that grain reaches those who need it—or that supplies last until the next harvest. In this 1915 article, Emil Lederer examines Germany’s wartime food administration as a problem of interdependent markets and unequal needs. Missing imported fodder makes livestock compete with people for food; bread rationing shifts demand toward potatoes; identical allowances impose different sacrifices on households. Drawing on regulations, stock estimates, and consumption studies, he argues that securing nutrition requires coordinated control of supplies and distribution, not isolated price decrees. His distinction between emergency administration and socialism sharpens the analysis: state allocation can preserve a capitalist economy without transforming production. The article shows how apparently technical provisioning decisions determine whose consumption is protected and whose is cut.
Solidarity begins as a term of Roman law—liability in solidum, where co-debtors are bound one for all and all for one—and Feilbogen follows its migration through Say, Bastiat, Spencer, and Comte into the social philosophy of Léon Bourgeois. Written for Wilhelm Jerusalem's sixtieth-birthday Festschrift, this essay reconstructs Bourgeois's attempt to found moral obligation without religious sanction: the advantaged individual owes a social debt for the language, tools, and inherited civilization he receives, an obligation recast not as Rousseau's literal contract but as a quasi-contract among co-heirs. Feilbogen stages the French Academy's rebuttal—d'Eichthal, Leroy-Beaulieu, Tarde, Boutroux—that the debt is legally indeterminate and might license the plundering of the capable, then replies by bounding the claim to genuine helplessness and surplus capacity.
Der individualistische Sozialist und der sozialistische Individualist fühlen, daß nur noch eine Wand »dünn wie Papier« sie trennt.
English translation: “The individualist socialist and the socialist individualist feel that only a wall "thin as paper" still separates them.”
Emergency powers could compel deliveries and suspend debts, but could they secure food or keep businesses solvent? In this 1915 article, Emil Perels examines Austria’s improvised economic response to mobilization through mid-November 1914. His sharpest example is the delayed suspension of grain duties: by the time the barrier fell, much of the available foreign supply had already been bought. He links this failure to Hungarian agrarian influence, exposing the limits of executive authority within the monarchy’s divided administration. His perspective combines criticism of such delays with sympathy for measures protecting livelihoods, including moratoria that troubled creditors. The article offers a concrete view of the gap between issuing emergency legislation and making it effective—and of Perels’s hope that wartime coordination, especially in employment services, might yield institutions worth preserving.