2,793 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Refusing to argue for or against the vote, this 1914 newspaper article reframes women's suffrage as the political symptom of a deep economic change. Institutions, Schumpeter contends, adapt belatedly to material conditions: marriage keeps its name while its content is transformed, and the family, far from being the primordial cell of society, emerged only when settlement made the household an economic unit. His sharpest move is to explain the women's movement as a kind of structural unemployment within domestic life, since modern industry and trade have stripped middle-class women of the productive household functions that once gave their labor economic substance. Suffrage, on this reading, is neither whim nor benevolent gift but an unavoidable step, arriving because the order that excluded women from political citizenship has already been undone by economic reorganization.
But all these women who have not to go out to work now offer the most tragic case of unemployment ever witnessed, with all its effects on happiness and character.
Unemployment, on the eve of the First World War, was still widely read as pauperism or personal failing; this 1914 lecture — the first pamphlet of the Austrian Association for Combating Unemployment — insists instead that it is a socially produced market risk, unverschuldet, obliging the community to both prevention and relief. Schwiedland weighs three existing models: the Belgian or Ghent system of subsidised union funds, which he judges a mere surrogate reaching only the better-situated skilled worker; the Scandinavian public funds open to the unorganised; and the English compulsory insurance of 1911. For Austria he proposes a fourth, municipal path outside poor relief, aiding organised and unorganised alike. His deepest claim is institutional: reliable relief is impossible without a public labour-market infrastructure to test willingness to work and measure involuntary idleness.
Arbeitsnachweis ist die erste Form der Arbeitslosenfürsorge.
English translation: “Labor exchanges are the first form of unemployment relief.”
Money and credit, in Schlesinger's 1914 treatise, are not external additions to a 'real' theory of exchange but endogenous parts of a single system of mutually determined prices, quantities, interest rates, cash balances, and bank reserves. Building on Walrasian general equilibrium, Austrian marginal and capital theory, and Schumpeter's distinction of statics from dynamics, he moves from a barter benchmark through entrepreneurial profit and risk to a sophisticated quantity theory in which the demand for cash is shaped by payment habits, clearing, and velocity. Deposit banks both mediate and create purchasing power, bounded by reserves and confidence, which renders financial crises intelligible as tensions between credit expansion and the cash base that must ultimately settle it. The appendices press the claim of formal determinacy by counting equations against unknowns.
Eine wesentliche Folge dessen, daß die Wirklichkeit mit dieser Voraussetzung nicht übereinstimmt, ist das Geld.
English translation: “An essential consequence of the fact that reality does not conform to this assumption is money.”
After more than thirty years of trade surpluses, Austria-Hungary's balance turned sharply passive after 1907, sinking to 822.9 million crowns in the red by 1912 — a reversal this newspaper essay sets out to explain. Böhm-Bawerk brushes aside the easy culprits of bad harvests and blocked exports and draws a finer distinction: a passive balance can mark a rich creditor nation paid in goods, or a poor country financing itself through foreign borrowing. The monarchy, he argues, is the latter, and not from productive industrialization but from feeble domestic saving and profligate state, provincial, and municipal spending that drains scarce capital. Reading the trade figures through the wider balance of payments, he insists that goods must ultimately be settled by goods, and that the deficit will dissolve only once lax public budgets are consolidated.
Die Zahlungsbilanz befiehlt, die Handelsbilanz gehorcht, nicht umgekehrt.
English translation: “The balance of payments commands, the trade balance obeys, not the other way around.”
Why does social science, unlike physics, offer no obvious course of study? Because it is young, institutionally unsettled, and forever invaded by the untrained, whose practical certainties blur its beginnings. Adapted from a 1910 Czernowitz lecture, this guide treats the discipline as a craft to be learned by handling facts, abstracting, clarifying concepts, and restraining political desire. Its four raw materials, everyday experience, history, ethnology, and statistics, yield nothing on their own, for the unanalyzed fact is mute; only theory, by decomposing phenomena into elements and tracing their tendencies, makes causality thinkable. Schumpeter warns against textbooks that leap from elementary theory to policy, urging students instead to reconstruct arguments and test concepts on concrete cases, taking Mill's education, Menger's Grundsätze, and Böhm-Bawerk's Kapital und Kapitalzins as models, and always keeping knowing and wishing apart.
Nach kurzer Übung tut man das alles unbewußt und sicher. Und dann ist man in den Sinn der Theorie eingedrungen. Dann kennt man die ganze Anlage ihres Gebäudes und weiß, was sie bieten kann und wo sie versagt.
English translation: “After a little practice one does all this unconsciously and with confidence. And then one has penetrated to the sense of the theory. Then one knows the whole layout of its structure and knows what it can offer and where it fails.”
Stronger trade unions do not necessarily mean greater workers’ control. This tension shapes Emil Lederer’s 1915 review of Adolf Braun’s account of union development and struggles. Respecting Braun’s practical knowledge of the German socialist unions, Lederer questions the political conclusions drawn from their organizational growth. Elected officials of working-class origin may still concentrate power over finances and strikes; industrial modernization may strengthen national loyalties rather than dissolve them. His distinctive concern is the gap between explaining why institutions develop and establishing where they ought to lead. The review offers a pointed encounter between confidence in union organization and the unresolved demands of democracy, socialism, and national attachment—without dismissing the practical achievements that give Braun’s work its value.
What makes a statistical compilation useful when its underlying records are already available? In this short 1915 review of Georg Neuhaus’s volume on agriculture and industry, Emil Lederer locates the answer in selection and arrangement. Drawing on the German censuses of 1882, 1895, and 1907, Neuhaus makes changes in farm size, tenancy, industrial employment, and mechanization accessible through organized tables. Lederer’s praise preserves a clear distinction: a practical reference can meet many readers’ needs without replacing official sources. The review offers a compact view of his standards for presenting economic evidence—comprehensive coverage, navigable data, and public accessibility, tempered by recognition of what statistics can establish.
Political opponents can share the same intellectual weakness. In this 1915 review of Hans Gehrig’s study of social reform, Emil Lederer argues that German free traders and their reformist adversaries both substitute advocacy of a preferred economic order for theoretical explanation. He distinguishes classical British economics from its later German successors, resisting the identification of Smith and Ricardo with a simple defence of ruling-class interests. His praise for Gehrig’s documentary research is correspondingly qualified: tracing the sources of reformist convictions does not settle their conceptual justification. This short review offers a pointed distinction between the history of economic commitments and the theoretical work needed to assess them.
Aber die methodologische Grundlage der Sozialreformer ist mit der der Freihändler identisch.
English translation: “But the methodological foundation of the social reformers is identical with that of the free traders.”
An association’s records can document its activities without explaining what it stands for. In this short review, Emil Lederer credits Hermann Schuon’s history of the Deutschnationale Handlungsgehilfenverband with making extensive documentary material accessible, but asks what its detail leaves unresolved: how did this commercial employees’ association understand class, strikes, and the conflict between employers and employees? Its claim to be a trade union on a national basis does not, for Lederer, answer those questions. His pointed objection concerns Schuon’s neglect of the association’s periodical, whose responsiveness to members’ attitudes makes it a crucial source. The review offers a compact distinction between recording an organization’s work and interpreting its principles and place within a divided movement.
Official trade-union records can document a movement without explaining its politics. That distinction drives Emil Lederer’s brief review of Paul Louis’s survey of European trade unionism outside France. Louis, whom Lederer identifies as an orthodox Marxist, aims to establish class struggle as the decisive social fact of the present. Lederer finds instead a reproduction of union federations’ official material, with little examination of programmes, tactics or problems of development. This compact criticism offers a precise point of comparison between an author’s explanatory ambition and what his handling of sources actually delivers.
A common customs frontier need not imply a common economic state. In this 1915 review of Rudolf Sieghart’s Zolltrennung und Zolleinheit, Felix Somary tests Hungarian demands for tariff separation against the economic conditions that had once justified them. He endorses Sieghart’s historical case against restoring internal barriers, emphasizing Hungarian industry’s development within the union and agriculture’s access to Austrian consumers. His distinctive contribution lies in a question extending beyond that verdict: how much institutional uniformity does customs unity actually require? Common consumption taxes and monopolies coexisted with different direct taxes, railway tariffs, and economic laws—even discriminatory public procurement. This short review distinguishes the case for retaining a customs union from the still-open problem of determining which institutions its members must share.
Can a history of labour organizations remain neutral by withholding judgement? In this 1915 review of volumes 4–6 of the first division of W. Kulemann’s Die Berufsvereine, Emil Lederer praises the documentary achievement while questioning its separation of organizational events from the ideas and conflicts that give them meaning. His objection becomes concrete when associations’ own reports serve as evidence: membership figures cannot by themselves establish practical influence, nor can official declarations settle whether a union is dependent on employers. Lederer asks for explicit concepts and scrutiny of competing testimony, not less exacting research. The review offers a focused encounter with the difficulty of comparative labour history: deciding when national differences explain organizational conduct, and when relations among workers, employers, and the state provide a stronger explanation.