§The book

Win-Win

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

Win-Win as a hardcover with dust jacket, three-dimensional view of the English edition

§The work

The magnum opus

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

§Three threads

Hand, Fist, Brain

The trading hand

Gift, money, market: the order that emerges where strangers make each other offers.

The threatening fist

Tribute, monopoly, war: the power that lives off exchange and stifles it again and again.

The interpreting brain

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.

§The arc

Practice first, then theory, then practice again at the end

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.

  1. IPractice before TheoryPrehistory to Antiquity
  2. IIConfessionals, Cities, Counting HousesThe Middle Ages to 1800
  3. IIIVienna: The Theory of Practice1800–1945
  4. IVThe Paper Money Age1945–2009
  5. VThe Rediscovery2009 to the Present
  6. VIThe School in PracticeTraining judgement for crisis and change

From the 25 chapters

The Invisible MiracleFrom Foe to FriendMoney Is Discovered, Not InventedThe Merchants' ConfessorsThe Relay of CitiesThe Austrian EnlightenmentThe War on HoardingThe Zero Interest TrapCrisis Means SeparationThe ContrepreneurMultiple Flags: GeoarbitrageThe Art of Living

Editions

direct sales · pre-order

Hardcover

€ 44

the standard edition

  • 25 colour chapter plates
  • two-colour typesetting with margin scholia
  • delivery on publication
Pre-order

Audiobook

€ 19

the complete reading · digital · pre-order

  • the whole book, around nine hours
  • delivery on publication
Pre-order the audiobook

Bundle

€ 54

hardcover + audiobook · instead of € 63 separately

  • the hardcover with the 25 chapter plates
  • the complete reading with it
  • delivery on publication
Pre-order the bundle

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.

§From the prologue

A glimpse inside

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.

§To take with you

The reading sample as PDF

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

Questions about an order? [email protected]