The archive.

Can civilizations follow recurring patterns without obeying fixed historical laws? Emil Kauder’s 1946 article grounds comparison in the religious and imaginative inheritance he calls “myth”: convictions that connect generations and continue to shape ostensibly secular ideals. Drawing on Vico, he argues that intellectual clarification can exhaust the beliefs that sustain collective action. Yet he refuses to turn analogies into universal sequences: Homer and Dante may perform comparable poetic tasks without their societies repeating the same political history. The article’s central tension lies between this methodological restraint and Kauder’s conviction that civilizations decline as their myths disintegrate. His treatment of freedom and progress lets readers examine what cyclical history can explain—and where claims of historical necessity leave room for creativity, cultural inheritance, and uncertain renewal.

When civilizations seem to repeat one another’s histories, what makes the resemblance an explanation rather than an analogy? Emil Kauder’s 1946 article tests cyclical interpretations of history against this question, placing Vico—not Spengler—at its conceptual centre. For Kauder, Vico’s distinction between an ideal historical structure and its particular realizations offers a firmer foundation than appeals to civilizational souls or destiny. He values Toynbee’s comparative evidence while questioning whether accumulated parallels can establish historical necessity. Writing in the aftermath of war, he also challenges confidence that human cruelty serves a benevolent providential plan. The article makes visible the philosophical commitments behind accounts of civilizational rise and decline: what acts in history, what recurs, and whether recurrence carries any moral meaning.

Marginal utility was discovered long before it was believed. Kauder's puzzle is the gap: French, Italian, and Swiss writers had utility and scarcity, Bernoulli its mathematics, Lloyd its marginal insight, yet British classical economics clung to objective labor and cost value. His boldest explanation is theological. The seventeenth- and eighteenth-century split was not ignorance but the antagonism of two moral worlds—Calvinist culture, which placed work at the center of social order and made labor value morally compelling, against an Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition that oriented economic life toward need, satisfaction, and the good life. For the nineteenth-century delay Kauder shifts ground, rejecting hedonism, neo-Kantian revival, and bourgeois apologetics alike: what blocked marginalism was the prestige of Ricardian value and the anti-theoretical climate of the historical school, until Menger, Jevons, and Walras wrote where theory still had standing.

Before 1870 the history of the theory of value shows rather strange features, not easily paralleled in the history of any other science.

Production takes time—but does taking longer make it more productive? In this review of the second edition of Walter Eucken’s Kapitaltheoretische Untersuchungen, Emil Kauder tests capital theory against technological evidence, drawing on observations of American steelmaking to challenge any simple link between duration and efficiency. He also asks where a production period could actually begin: with the allocation of iron, leather, or a factory building? These concrete difficulties sharpen his objection to Eucken’s measurement procedure. Yet Kauder finds greater promise in Eucken’s treatment of interest, especially where price expectations and interdependent industrial investment loosen the original theoretical framework. The review distinguishes the problems Eucken exposes from the solutions Kauder finds convincing.

That production is time consuming does not necessarily imply that the theory of roundabout production is correct.

Menger, Böhm-Bawerk, and Wieser shared marginal utility with Jevons and Walras, yet Kauder argues that Vienna gave the doctrine a shape found nowhere else. The distinguishing marks are not subjective value itself but philosophical realism and social ontology: an Aristotelian search for the essences behind economic appearances, a suspicion of equations and functional interdependence, and a genetic-causal method that unfolds complex phenomena from consumer valuation. Menger's rejection of Walras's mathematics becomes a symptom of this deeper conception of science. Kauder then reads the school's politics against its Habsburg setting: shaped by Aristotle, Aquinas, Josephinism, and Metternich's bureaucratic paternalism, all three admired competition without embracing Manchester liberalism, and Wieser drifted toward order, charity, and organized social power. Economic method, on this telling, carries an inherited philosophy of reality and society inside it.

For Menger and his followers the model is the photography of a reality behind the appearances of every day life.

What can an economist’s marked books tell us that his published arguments leave unsettled? In this article, Emil Kauder examines Carl Menger’s library at Hitotsubashi University, using marginal comments, acquisition dates, and uncut pages to distinguish intellectual influence from mere ownership. He argues for an Aristotelian foundation to Menger’s economics: the ordering of human purposes, beginning with life and health, matters more than an undifferentiated calculus of pleasure. The same evidence brings a neglected predecessor, Joseph von Kudler, into view and complicates allegations of plagiarism. Kauder’s Menger also resists easy identification with unrestricted competition. This preliminary investigation offers a concrete encounter with the evidence behind intellectual history, showing how private reading can revise an interpretation without supplying a complete intellectual biography.

What happens to marginal-utility calculation if people pursue ends other than their own well-being? In this 1961 editorial introduction, Emil Kauder finds that unresolved question in Carl Menger’s annotated copy of the Grundsätze, preserved at Hitotsubashi University. He reads its unfinished additions as evidence of a phase of Menger’s thinking not adequately represented by the posthumous 1923 edition. His account brings value-free economic theory into contact with Menger’s concern for the moral conditions of economic agency, without turning tentative reflections into a completed system. Kauder also explains how interleaved pages, pasted sheets and nested marginal notes were made readable. The result offers both a less settled picture of Menger’s economics and a concrete account of the editorial decisions on which that picture depends.

The annotated books Menger left at his death—his own Grundsätze, his copy of Rau, his Mill—traveled to Tokyo, where they entered the library of Hitotsubashi University and preserved a Menger the published works conceal. From these marginalia Kauder reconstructs an Aristotelian realist rather than a Kantian, a theorist of rational freedom, and a social liberal far from Manchester dogma. The Rau notes of 1867 already reject labor value, assert individual and immeasurable value, and sketch imputation, dismantling the charge that Menger plagiarized Gossen, whom he read only later and rejected. Menger emerges as a critic of luxury and aristocratic idleness who treated poverty itself as a form of bondage, and whose unfinished program—reaching into capital, money, overproduction, and price—passed to Böhm-Bawerk, Wieser, Mises, and Hayek. The Nachlass, Kauder insists, bequeathed far more than a value theory.

Aber die Armen sind durch die Ungunst der Verhältnisse bedrückt, sie sind noch nicht vollständig frei, sie sind »halbe Sklaven, ihre Kette ist länger«.

English translation: “But the poor are oppressed by the adversity of circumstances; they are not yet fully free, they are "half-slaves, their chain is only longer.”

Value is not lodged in goods, in labor, or in cost—it is the significance of a marginal satisfaction within an ordered plan of wants. That claim anchors Kauder's sweeping history, first published in 1965, which recovers marginal utility as a long and uneven effort rather than a sudden revolution of the 1870s. Its prehistory runs from Aristotle's value-in-use through the scholastics, Galiani, Turgot, and Condillac, past Bernoulli's mathematics of risk to Gossen's neglected system of diminishing and equalized utility. Menger, Jevons, and Walras succeed less by class interest than by the internal breakdown of classical value theory—and Menger sharpens the doctrine into its purest causal form. The later Austrians—Böhm-Bawerk, Wieser, Mayer, Mises, Morgenstern—then extend it to cost, imputation, complementarity, and uncertainty, exposing as much as they resolve.

The architects of marginal utility took their building stones from philosophy, psychology, religion, mathematics, and morals.

Labor-market statistics and the recognition of trade unions belong to the same scholarly portrait in Emil Kauder’s brief Neue Deutsche Biographie entry on Ignaz Jastrow. Kauder emphasizes how this historically trained economist joined empirical inquiry to social reform: measuring labor supply, demand, and food costs while seeking to place social policy within administrative science. His assessment gives particular interest to Jastrow’s unfinished project and identifies his economic reporting as a precursor of business-cycle reporting. Yet Kauder reserves his highest praise for Jastrow’s late world history. The entry offers a compact account of the practical commitments and historical breadth by which Kauder judges this scholar’s achievement.