The archive.

Does ethical neutrality require political science to exclude moral judgments—or to make their standards explicit? Felix Kaufmann argues for the latter by drawing a precise analogy: ethical criticism judges valuations against moral standards, just as scientific criticism judges assertions against rules of inquiry. Neither set of standards possesses an ultimate rational justification, yet this need not make judgments within them merely subjective. His example of adultery’s status under a particular penal code shows why dependence on a framework differs from arbitrariness. Challenging Max Weber, Kaufmann gives political inquiry a task beyond abstaining from judgment: reconstructing the value hierarchies behind disagreement. Readers can discover how opponents may share commitments to freedom, order, or human dignity while differing sharply over their rank.

Two biologists can agree on experimental findings yet disagree about what those findings warrant. For Felix Kaufmann, this gap exposes a tension in John Dewey’s account of inquiry: can the development of successful habits explain their authority as standards of judgement? This article defends Dewey’s effort to bring logic into contact with scientific practice while questioning its grounding in the genesis of habits. Kaufmann locates the stronger foundation in the explicit criteria scientists presuppose when submitting results and methods to criticism. His reconstruction shows how inquiry can reach definite conclusions without granting any conclusion immunity from revision—and why explaining how scientists behave is different from clarifying what justifies their inferences.

To state that no scientific result is indubitably established is not to declare that scientific problems cannot be solved.

Read as a demand for clarity rather than a refutation of reason, the foundational crises of modern mathematics, Cantorian antinomies, the intuitionist assault on excluded middle, the arithmetization of geometry, become in Kaufmann's hands symptoms of confusions in language and abstraction. Offered here in English translation, the essay grounds logic phenomenologically: language is not a stock of sounds but a system of rules coordinating signs with intended objects, so speaking about language clarifies rather than retreats. Russell's paradox does not topple logic; it shows what follows when predicates, classes, names, and functions are herded into one undifferentiated domain, and type theory is treated as a useful symbolic device short of the real philosophical solution. Number is derived from ordered counting, induction from the completeness of that form, and Brouwer's challenge is met with stricter interpretation rather than a rival logic.

We have emphasized that language is not a system of acoustic complexes and their configurations, but a system of co-ordinating rules between these and thoughts of objects and facts in the world.

If the “least important need” is simply the one a person sacrifices, does saying so explain the choice? In this reply to Bernardelli, Felix Kaufmann makes that problem of circularity a test for claims of necessary truth in economics. He argues that definitions can secure certainty only by leaving open whether actual behaviour conforms to them. His treatment of marginal utility distinguishes rational valuation as a definition, its applicability to conduct as an empirical assumption, and diminishing utility through satiation as a claim grounded in experience. The point is not to discard these concepts, but to establish what they can explain. This compact methodological dispute shows how an apparently unassailable economic principle can acquire explanatory content precisely by becoming open to refutation.

Can investigating the business cycle bring it to an end? Felix Kaufmann makes that absurd prospect the closing joke of this satirical song, presented in Arlene Oost-Zinner’s 2010 English translation. His speaker distrusts scientific abstraction, demands that science feed a nation, and calls on the state to halt value-neutral inquiry. These complaints become comic through their excess: the critic of scientific methods cannot explain why engines run, while a renowned institute’s board leaves one man doing all the work. The song offers a compact encounter with methodological controversy turned into performance, where anxiety about science’s limitations gives way to fear of its improbable power.

A circle without its center becomes an affectionate joke about intellectual fellowship in Felix Kaufmann’s three-stanza song. Radii wander with nowhere to go, while π laments a wound measured to the thousandth decimal place. The mathematical conceit lets the Mises circle express attachment to its absent center without abandoning its taste for precision—or taking its own grief entirely seriously. Presented in Arlene Oost-Zinner’s 2010 English translation with the musical score, this small work offers a glimpse of shared scholarly language turned into sociable wit: calculation supplies the terms of sorrow, and the hoped-for return promises collective jubilation.

A seminar’s survival becomes a personal worry in Felix Kaufmann’s farewell song for Mises: Geneva cannot accommodate everyone, and Vienna’s departing scholars leave more than empty chairs behind. Presented in Arlene Oost-Zinner’s 2010 English translation and folk-song arrangement, the four stanzas mingle affectionate tribute with nervous humour. Drumming fingers and a recurring Latin lament sit alongside opposition to import taxes—a pointed reminder that friendship and economic conviction bound this circle together. The song offers a compact, intimate view of scholarly allegiance under the pressure of separation: its speaker honours the teacher’s new appointment while wondering what will become of the shared life he leaves behind.

Marginal utility becomes a farewell-party joke in Felix Kaufmann’s song for Stonier and Sweezy, presented here in Arlene Oost-Zinner’s 2010 English translation. Sweezy plans to convert Harvard to the ideas he has encountered in Vienna, only to stumble over the difficulty of deciding what things are worth; Stonier voices his suspicions but promises to return for more argument. Kaufmann affectionately teases both intellectual conversion and resistance, setting theoretical vocabulary to a folk melody. The pleasure of this small occasional work lies in its tone: disagreement, uncertainty, and ambitious claims become reasons for laughter and a shared toast rather than obstacles to friendship.

When does an economic theory explain conduct, and when does it merely redescribe the assumptions built into it? Felix Kaufmann’s 1933 essay makes this distinction the test of methodological claims. His central case is subjective value theory: ordering a consumer’s preferences is not yet explaining how those preferences arose. He treats marginal utility as a guide to investigating economic plans, whose usefulness must be demonstrated rather than secured by deduction alone. At the same time, he distinguishes economics’ subject—social exchange—from its explanatory instrument, the individual plan. Readers can discover why accepting preference analysis need not mean defining all purposive action as economic, and how conceptual precision exposes claims of empirical certainty that definitions and formal reasoning cannot support.

Data may feed inquiry, but can they produce theory? Felix Kaufmann turns this methodological dispute into a three-stanza song, here in Arlene Oost-Zinner’s 2010 English translation with an accompanying score. His satire respects the labor of collecting evidence while rejecting its claim to generate theory unaided; an obscure appeal to “natural value” fares no better. Yet the joke also reaches Professor Mises’ seminar, where evening argument promises certainty until dinner asserts a more bodily demand. The song’s distinctive pleasure lies in this double edge: theoretical conviction and affectionate mockery share the same table, allowing readers to encounter methodological loyalties in the lighter register of seminar sociability.

Hard problems melt like chocolate creams, and hungry seminar participants replenish themselves through “Import tariffs”: Felix Kaufmann’s song affectionately brings intellectual ambition down to the dinner table. In Arlene Oost-Zinner’s 2010 English translation, this portrait of the Mises Circle makes debate and conviviality parts of the same pleasure. Yet its confidence briefly falters: why keep questioning when life flows on regardless? The answer—a resolve to take a stand—gives the returning refrain a seriousness its exuberant praise of truth might initially conceal. This small work offers a distinctive glimpse of scholarly fellowship expressed through jokes, shared appetites, and the feeling of being at home in argument.

An economist’s books have no buyers: in Felix Kaufmann’s comic song, even the defence of marginal utility suffers from insufficient demand. A Vienna-trained scholar greets his school’s supposed demise with theatrical despair, turning Menger’s work into a devotional object and his pen into a dagger—until economic polemics summon him back to battle. Set to Schumann’s music with an acknowledged debt to Heine, the song makes scholarly allegiance look at once ridiculous and resilient. Its humour lies in the uneasy overlap between devotion to a theory and concern for one’s own professional survival. Arlene Oost-Zinner’s 2010 English translation and arrangement preserve this small drama of intellectual loyalty, in which economic terminology itself joins the heroic posturing.