Hardcover
€ 44
the standard edition
- 25 colour chapter plates
- two-colour typesetting with margin scholia
- delivery on publication
A World History of Exchange and Power · Rahim Taghizadegan
Anyone who drank coffee this morning took part in a ritual that connected more people than any council in history. Nobody decreed it, and yet it has worked for thousands of years: exchange to mutual advantage, the oldest win-win in the world. The book is at the same time the first complete overview of the original Austrian school and its most interesting parts, interdisciplinary and grounded in practice.
Hardcover € 44 · audiobook € 19 · bundle € 54

Two decades of research and teaching at the scholarium, condensed into one book. For the first time a single volume joins the whole depth and breadth of the Austrian school with readability: the theory is told as world history, and it leads into practice. Thinking clearly, building ventures, stewarding wealth, choosing one's place, living well: the final part turns the school's way of seeing into a tool.
25 chapters · six parts · 375 pages · 25 chapter plates · 202 sources · margin scholia
Gift, money, market: the order that emerges where strangers make each other offers.
Tribute, monopoly, war: the power that lives off exchange and stifles it again and again.
The ideas that accompany both: from contempt for the merchant to the Viennese insight.
Much in this book began in the Scholien. They continue to appear monthly, free of charge.
Three times humanity has discovered the order of exchange: with its hands, with its head, and most bitterly in loss. And three times it forgets again, because forgetting is built into the order's success. The prologue opens with the invisible miracle of the everyday: hundreds of power plants, millions of consumers, and a single number they all hold steady together, 50 hertz, without a conductor.
€ 44
the standard edition
€ 19
the complete reading · digital · pre-order
€ 54
hardcover + audiobook · instead of € 63 separately
There is deliberately no e-book: the colour chapter plates and the typesetting live in the printed book, the voice in the audiobook. Book orders are pre-orders; delivery follows on publication.
Frédéric Bastiat stood in Paris almost two centuries ago, marveling: a city full of people, hardly one of whom can produce what he consumes daily, and yet every one of them has food every day. Nobody commands it, and nobody could even plan it. A large supermarket today carries several tens of thousands of items, and behind every single one stands a chain of intermediate contributions that no human being can survey: seed breeders and freight captains, packaging chemists and actuaries, cooperating across all borders, languages, and enmities. Whoever believes that the full shelves already are the prosperity, needing only to be divided up, overlooks this chain: what is visible is the tip of an iceberg whose mass drifts below the waterline. We usually call a miracle whatever breaks the laws of nature. This one leaves the laws of nature untouched and breaks instead the laws of our perception: too large, too finely branched, too everyday to be seen. It belongs to that curious class of things Adam Ferguson described as results of human action that stem from no human design.
Front matter, table of contents, the complete prologue and the first two chapters with their chapter plates: around forty typeset book pages. The PDF is available after joining the Scholien, our newsletter; the download appears right away.
No signup needed: read the short excerpt here
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