2,793 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Against W. H. R. Rivers, who held that the structure of a society could be reconstructed from its kinship terminology alone, Thurnwald enters a careful demurral. Kinship terms, he grants, offer valuable indications of social organization, but Kroeber's objections—that psychological association, linguistic borrowing, and semantic drift also shape them—must be honored. Drawing parallels between Indo-European words like Ahne and Enkel and Melanesian usage, and tracing how European cousin-terms shift through borrowing, he argues that so-called classificatory systems answer to no single pattern: they encode belonging, marriage prohibition, and protection rather than mere degree of descent. Peaceful eras elaborate such orders while war simplifies them, and similar circumstances may generate similar systems independently. Kinship names, treated as layered historical products, become guides toward earlier forms of human life.
Aber ebenso unzweifelhaft übertrieben erscheint die Exaktheit, mit der Rivers seine Folgerungen zieht.
English translation: “But equally unquestionably exaggerated is the exactness with which Rivers draws his conclusions.”
Not goods and wealth but human qualities and relationships form the true subject of economics: so runs the governing thesis of this first volume of a revised three-volume course, rewritten after 1918 for readers who now demanded critical reflection on inherited institutions. The old sweep remains, the competition of states from Italy to England, the passage from feudal order to industrial capitalism, but the postwar edition weighs capitalism and socialism at length, dissecting Marxism, syndicalism, guild socialism, and Bolshevism, and refusing historical materialism's reduction of culture to the mode of production. Value is grounded in marginal utility, capitalism defined as both purposive organization and a pervading spirit, and the whole framed by a demand for realism about grown conditions joined to idealism of aims.
Mit Freiheit allein ist dem einzelnen nicht gedient, es bedarf auch der Lebenssicherheit und einigen Behagens.
English translation: “Freedom alone does not serve the individual; there is also need of security of life and a measure of comfort.”
Economics begins, for Schwiedland, in reflection on why some peoples prosper while others fall behind, and wealth, he warns, is relative, unstable, and worth having only as a condition of cultural and political power, ruinous to the nation that mismanages it. From that premise a sweeping course unfolds: the rise and fall of Italy, Spain, Holland, France, and England; the passage from medieval estates to liberal industrial capitalism; then a systematic doctrine of environment, population, value, and price. Economic activity he defines as foresighted provision for future wants, value as marginal utility (Grenznutzen) after Menger and Böhm-Bawerk. Against the materialism, speculation, and inequality that economic freedom breeds, these lectures to Vienna's engineering students end in an appeal for conscious idealism and reform.
Der Antrieb zur wirtschaftlichen Entwicklung der Völker ist der Drang der Einzelnen nach Bereicherung.
English translation: “The driving force behind the economic development of peoples is the individual's urge for enrichment.”
Wartime planning can organize an economy without emancipating those who work in it. This distinction drives Emil Lederer’s 1918 review essay on books by Karl Renner, Paul Lensch, and Johann Plenge. Open to revising Marxist theory, Lederer nevertheless challenges the inference that monopoly, state intervention, or national military power amounts to socialism in the making. His criticism is both economic and political: monopoly prices strain inherited value theory, while the portrayal of Germany as a revolutionary force substitutes conflict between states for conflict between classes. The essay exposes a difficult prospect beneath these wartime claims: if organized capitalism can avert economic collapse while preserving domination, socialist transformation requires more than confidence in historical necessity. Readers encounter a precise dispute over what distinguishes collective organization from collective freedom.
Restoring a currency’s old gold parity is not the same as repairing an economy damaged by war. In these two replies from 1918, Ludwig von Mises separates what monetary theory can explain from what policymakers must choose. Restoring Austria-Hungary’s prescribed parity, he argues, requires withdrawing notes through repayment of government debts to the central bank; whether the social costs justify that objective is another question. His distinctive focus is on the financial operations behind policy slogans: borrowing may retire notes, merely prevent new issuance, or leave circulation unchanged. Against appeals to practical experience, he insists that every proposed remedy presupposes a causal explanation. These compact interventions show why the mechanics of public finance matter—and why accepting a theory of inflation need not settle the choice between restoration and stabilization.
A persuasive defense need not be an informative account: this distinction governs Emil Lederer’s brief review of Alexander Täubler’s Eine Verteidigung der Bolschewiki. Täubler had lived in Russia as a prisoner of war, worked and taught there, and encountered bourgeois and proletarian circles. Yet Lederer finds that his advocacy supplies little concrete evidence of how the revolution changed provincial economic and social life. He acknowledges the argument’s effectiveness and the author’s personal conviction while detecting the influence of Bolshevik propaganda. The review offers a compact example of critical discrimination: firsthand experience, sincerity, and rhetorical force do not, for Lederer, substitute for detailed social observation.
Understanding Bolshevism as a coherent doctrine is not the same as endorsing it—or knowing whether it works. This distinction gives Emil Lederer’s 1919 review of Max Hirschberg’s Bolschewismus its critical edge. Lederer welcomes Hirschberg’s reconstruction from official sources while disputing his claim that Bolshevik doctrine simply restores Marx and Engels. Particularly revealing is the review’s treatment of Hirschberg’s distinction between dictatorship of the proletariat and dictatorship over it: class rule becomes a different proposition when one faction seizes power over a divided class. Readers encounter a socialist assessment that takes revolutionary ideas seriously without treating their internal logic as proof of practical success. Lederer’s concluding reservation is precise: an account of the ideas guiding Russia cannot establish its actual condition.
Who should decide what an economy provides: a central planning office or its consumers? In this short review of the third and fourth revised editions of Otto Neurath’s Wesen und Wege der Sozialisierung, Emil Lederer locates the decisive problem beyond the organization of production. Even if comprehensive planning could avoid coercion, he argues, it would overreach by prescribing the satisfactions people should seek. His objection draws a sharp distinction between socialism serving human lives and wartime administration maintaining people for an external purpose. The review offers a compact encounter with a criticism of planning grounded not simply in bureaucratic difficulties, but in the refusal to make organization an end in itself.
Vivid testimony is not yet an explanation: this distinction guides Emil Lederer’s brief review of Paul Olberg’s letters from Soviet Russia. Lederer values Olberg’s observations of Petersburg and Moscow, especially his accounts of intellectuals struggling for daily bread and a new bureaucracy resembling the old. Yet he asks what such scenes can establish when the observer does not distinguish the consequences of war from those of Bolshevik rule. His regret at the scant attention to new cultural institutions sharpens the reservation: an account can be compelling without being comprehensive. The review offers a concise example of how to acknowledge eyewitness evidence without accepting its implied diagnosis.
Schumpeter, newly installed as State Secretary of Finance, uses this March 1919 interview to sketch a program for a postwar state whose borders, currency, and debt all remained unsettled. Finance, he insists, must serve economic reconstruction rather than become a battlefield for short-term politics—recalling Böhm-Bawerk's quip that in Austria the treasury was always the whipping boy of policy. Two great boulders block recovery: the war loan and the depreciation of the currency. His central instrument is a one-time large capital levy, reframed against intuition—if it helps restore the value of money, its real sacrifice shrinks, felt as a benefaction rather than an amputation. Ordered finances, he argues, are the precondition for union with Germany and for any socialization; a secure currency, not a punitive return to old parity, is the goal.
Die alte Erfahrung, daß sich das Wirtschaftsleben auch von schweren Katastrophen schnell erholt, wird sich auch an uns bewähren, wenn wir nicht selbst die Gesundung verhindern.
English translation: “The old experience that economic life recovers quickly even from severe catastrophes will prove itself in our case too, provided we do not ourselves prevent recovery.”
Releasing seized property does not by itself restore the trust on which international commerce depends. In this 1919 journal contribution, Emil Perels asks how peace treaties can undo wartime attacks on private rights without making contractual restoration economically unworkable. Writing from a perspective shaped by Central Power interests and the eastern peace settlements, he nevertheless questions the effectiveness of German retaliation. His central tension is practical: restrictions he condemns as weapons may still serve as bargaining security for reciprocal restitution. Prewar supply prices, depreciated currencies, and competing claims on scarce foreign exchange make a simple return to legal normality impossible. The work offers a concrete account of why restoring private rights requires negotiated adjustments and credible international adjudication, rather than repeal alone.
Before the Budget Committee in July 1919, Staatssekretär Schumpeter reported on a fiscal crisis he refused to reduce to numbers—the deficit itself hung on an unsettled territorial map. Finance, in his account, is inseparable from social order, yet must not be rescued by the printing press: he opposed further note-stamping and favored an independent bank of issue that would do no business with the state. Against an interpellation, he denied that hundreds of millions had already been earmarked for nationalization, conceding only that a Sozialisierungsbank was under discussion—an institution meant to prepare the wealth levy, manage compensation bonds, and extend industrial credit. Socialization, in this design, is subordinated to solvency, banking technique, and monetary restraint rather than launched as an expropriation campaign.
Der Staatssekretär mahnte zur Sparsamkeit, erklärte, daß der Staatsbankrott auch eine soziale Katastrophe herbeiführen würde und daß mit dem gegenwärtigen Zustande der Arbeitslosigkeit so rasch als möglich ein Ende gemacht werden müsse.
English translation: “The State Secretary urged economy, declared that state bankruptcy would also bring about a social catastrophe, and that the present state of unemployment must be brought to an end as quickly as possible.”