Friedrich August von Hayek: Review of the Kress Library Catalogue (1942)

Hayek’s book review assesses the catalogue of Harvard’s Kress Library of Business and Economics, published in 1940 and covering material through 1776. Its central judgment is that a major collection has received an unusually reliable catalogue: the publication’s value rests on accurate transcription, careful bibliographical description, and judicious annotation. The review moves from the collection’s importance to the catalogue’s editorial merits and extent, before ending with a narrow criticism of capitalization.

The Kress Library combines several economic collections, including the second library assembled by the late Professor Foxwell. Hayek credits this foundation, supplemented by American financial generosity, with placing Kress among the world’s leading libraries of its kind. Publication makes that accumulated scholarly resource more accessible:

The publication of its catalogue is therefore most welcome and it is to be hoped that the present volume, which gives in chronological order the titles up to 1776 inclusive, will be followed by further volumes.

The hope for continuation establishes the volume as the beginning of a larger bibliographical undertaking. Hayek nevertheless judges the existing publication by its defined purpose. It is a library catalogue, incorporating a few hundred related titles from other Harvard libraries. Compared with Henry Higgs’s bibliography and the catalogue of Professor Hollander’s library, its aims are less ambitious and its production less lavish; its distinguishing achievement is editorial precision.

The transcription of the 7,279 titles and the bibliographical description of the volumes are as complete and reliable as could be wished, and the few and short explanatory notes always helpful.

Hayek’s praise distinguishes practical scholarly usefulness from either comprehensive bibliographical ambition or luxurious presentation. The short notes add interpretive value without overwhelming the descriptions. His example is a note by Foxwell on Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees, linking its influence on political economy through Adam Smith to a conditional claim about the justification of individualism and laissez-faire. Hayek presents this as evidence of the editors’ well-chosen annotations, rather than developing or endorsing its theoretical argument.

Reliability also requires acknowledging uncertainty:

The careful mentioning of the authors of doubtful or conflicting ascriptions of anonymous publications is particularly to be commended.

This commendation makes attribution part of the catalogue’s scholarly achievement. Rather than conceal disputed authorship behind apparently settled entries, the editors preserve information needed to evaluate it. Hayek then supplies a quantitative measure of the collection’s breadth: for 1751–1775, the catalogue lists 2,095 titles against 6,741 in Higgs’s bibliography. The comparison is especially favorable because Kress uses a stricter definition of economic material.

The concluding objection concerns the policy of largely restricting initial capitals to proper names. Hayek finds its effects awkward in German and inconsistent across honorifics, particularly the lower-case French designation corresponding to English “Mr.” Framed humorously as the reviewer’s obligation to find a fault, this criticism qualifies rather than reverses the favorable verdict. The review’s relevance lies in its account of the bibliographical standards that support historical economic scholarship: breadth matters, but dependable descriptions, transparent attribution, and useful notes make a collection usable.