The archive.

Historicism reaches its fullest force precisely when it dissolves every human form into a historically conditioned object—and at that same moment exposes its own insufficiency, as life, dogma, myth, and an 'Ur'-history press beyond mere appearance. Engel-Janosi stages the argument as a sequence of confrontations: Burckhardt's contemplative culture of remembering against Nietzsche's demand for an art of forgetting; Acton and Döllinger's historical method defeated by dogmatic reasoning at the First Vatican Council; Spengler's biological determinism against Toynbee's refusal to freeze history at the present. As the scale of comparison widens, factual narration yields to myth as a mode of truth, and the overcoming of historicism becomes a search for a history behind history—an ideal eternal history in Vico's sense, closing on Burckhardt's hope of hearing the valley's dissonances as harmony.

Acton hat den Gegensatz richtig gefühlt, als er notierte: „Le dogme a vaincu l'histoire.“ Für ihn war es ein großes Unglück.

English translation: “Acton sensed the antithesis correctly when he noted: "Le dogme a vaincu l'histoire" [Dogma has vanquished history]. For him it was a great misfortune.”

A large, rent-controlled apartment can cost less than a smaller new one: for Alfred Amonn, this disparity helps explain why housing shortages persist even when construction resumes. His 1953 article on Swiss housing argues that frozen rents discourage shrinking households from moving, protecting established tenants while leaving newcomers to bear higher costs. Yet he separates rent reform from the removal of security of tenure: insufficient vacancies still justify protection against termination. This distinction gives his case for market restoration its particular shape—gradual rent increases, continued supervision, and assistance directed towards need rather than possession of a controlled tenancy. Readers can examine a concrete tension between protecting current occupants and making fuller use of scarce housing, without treating all emergency safeguards as equally necessary or equally obsolete.

The entrepreneur who sinks his fortune into a single plant makes a choice no lottery can model — and it is mathematical expectation, the workhorse of investment appraisal, that Shackle attacks in this sequel. Multiplying outcomes by probabilities and summing them, he argues, is legitimate only where an experiment is divisible or seriable, so that a spread of results can be possessed as a statistical aggregate; one business commitment has no such structure. The textbook urn and the game of chance are closed worlds that bar by rule the very unknowns constituting reality. In their place stand focus-values — the strongest gain one can plausibly hope for and the gravest loss one must plausibly fear — standardized on a gambler's indifference map, where a steeper feared loss demands a larger promised gain. The framework recasts Kalecki's principle of increasing risk without objective probability.

When the course of action is a non-divisible non-seriable experiment, such an additive procedure loses entirely the relevance it has for a divisible experiment, and has only one claim to fall back on: that of being a compromise.

Scientific concepts can become more effective while their experiential foundations grow less clear. This tension gives Alfred Schütz’s review of Husserl’s Ideas III, presented here in its 1970 republication, a focus beyond exposition. Through the case of psychology, Schütz traces Husserl’s distinction between studying consciousness as the experience of embodied individuals and investigating its essential structures. Such clarification is meant to ground empirical inquiry, not replace it. Schütz also keeps the manuscript’s early, unrevised status in view, resisting an easy reconciliation with Husserl’s later work. The essay offers readers a precise approach to a foundational question: what must a science already understand about its objects before observation and experiment can yield intelligible knowledge?

For a hundred years the interventionists foretold capitalism's final collapse; Mises answers, in this 1953 essay, that the crisis actually underway belongs to the welfare state itself. He traces its doctrine to Ferdinand Lassalle's exalted image of the state and to Bismarckian Sozialpolitik, then presses a single arithmetical objection: government can spend only what it taxes, borrows, or inflates away, and the wealth of the 'nabobs' cannot fund mass benefits forever. From confiscatory taxation he moves to nationalized railroads, telegraphs, and New York's subway deficits—enterprises that devour revenue instead of yielding it. Low fares and generous programs are politically irresistible, but scarcity, he insists, returns as chronic deficits and decaying service. The essay ends less as treatise than as an object lesson addressed to the American voter.

They are not taxpayers, but tax-eaters.

'Profit,' Shackle observes, names two quite distinct things: the realized figure an accountant records and the forward-looking conjecture that induces an enterpriser to commit resources at all. Because production takes time, those resources must be specialized before the future market is known, and it is this unavoidable uncertainty that creates the enterpriser's double role as decision-maker and uncertainty-bearer. Written for accountants but aimed at economic theory, the essay dismisses both the rough 'best guess' and mathematical expectation, whose frequency ratios describe repeatable series but say nothing about founding a firm or building a factory. In their place stands potential surprise: ventures compared through focus-gain and focus-loss rather than a single maximized number. Timeless Walrasian equilibrium, he charges, excludes the very time, novelty, and monopoly from which profit springs.

In all production, because it takes time, there is an ineradicable uncertainty.

How can a person coherently expect to be surprised? Shackle's Economica note turns the paradox into a piece of logic. To expect an event, in his vocabulary, is to attach zero potential surprise to it — so a counter-expected outcome, one already imagined and rejected, cannot be the source of true surprise; only the genuinely unexpected, a possibility never before entertained, can. His resolution is the residual hypothesis: a deliberate heading for the possibilities one cannot yet specify, to which zero potential surprise may attach even as its detailed content is bound to astonish, like a nineteenth-century physicist confronted with a digital computer. The economics follows. When residual ignorance threatens widely separated gains and losses on a gambler's indifference map, doing nothing and holding cash may outrank any active policy — a theory of enterprise inhibited by news too obscure to interpret.

In contrast with this I define an unexpected event as one which has never been formulated in the individual’s imagination, which has never entered his mind or been in any way envisaged.

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.

The complete economist, on Shackle's mischievous accounting, would need mathematics, philosophy, psychology, anthropology, history, geography, politics, prose, and practical finance all at once—an impossible portrait meant to show that no single technique defines the field. Theory, he argues, is the disciplined imaginative construction of recurrent structures; it grows rigorous not by turning algebraic but by drawing out implications and testing them against rival forms. Keynes stands as proof, since abler mathematicians produced no revolution of their own. From this breadth follows an educational program: recruit able rather than residual students, delay premature specialization, and keep mathematics the servant of economic problems. An economist, on this view, is formed by breadth disciplined into judgment—the capacity to quantify without forgetting the people economics is finally about.

Economics emphatically is about chaps.

Even a fully developed economic theory, Morgenstern contends, would leave many policy problems unsolvable — because policy adds demands theory never faces: aims stated quantitatively, timing, tolerated side-effects, feasible computation, and, decisively, a list of admissible means. A problem impossible under one set of permitted operations may become trivial under another, as squaring the circle, Columbus's egg, and the Gordian knot each illustrate. Unemployment could be 'solved' by conscription, work camps, or forced relocation; ruling those out changes the problem itself. Invoking Gödel as a reminder that decidability runs deep, he separates the theoretical solution from the policy solution and warns that civilization, by narrowing the morally acceptable instruments of action, tends to make its economic problems harder even as economic knowledge advances.

The statement that a problem has no solution for a given set of means is exactly equivalent to stating that a contradiction prevails.

Adam Smith did not lay the foundation stone of political economy but its keystone: with this revision Mises opens his 1953 introduction to a selection from The Wealth of Nations, recasting Smith less as a solitary inventor than as the synthesizer who gave the liberal tradition durable architecture and impeccable literary form. Smith's importance, he argues, is civilizational—his laissez-faire principles dismantled mercantilism and secured even the less industrious a standard of living above the well-to-do of earlier days, all under the discipline of consumer sovereignty. Against socialist caricatures of Smith as an apologist for greed, Mises enlists Buckle and Bagehot. Yet the essay ends in warning: read Smith for the origins of freedom, never as a substitute for studying modern economics, any more than reading Euclid replaces mathematics.

Its publication date—1776, the year of the American Declaration of Independence—marks the dawn of freedom both political and economic.

The claim organizing this survey is that international trade theory is no autonomous doctrine but general price, production, monetary, and welfare theory applied to a world of nations, currencies, and immobile factors. Tracing the line from Hume's price-specie-flow mechanism and Ricardo's comparative costs through Mill and Marshall's reciprocal demand, Haberler shows how opportunity cost and general equilibrium rescued comparative advantage from the wreck of the labour theory of value. He weighs Heckscher-Ohlin factor-price equalization, the Stolper-Samuelson theorem, and Leontief's paradox, always separating sharp theorems from empirically reliable ones, and carries the same caution into terms-of-trade measurement, the foreign-trade multiplier, and purchasing-power parity. The classical free-trade case survives as a powerful benchmark — never an unconditional theorem.

There exist only rudiments of truly dynamic analysis in the field of non-monetary trade theory.