The archive.

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.

Business cycles and foreign trade feed on one another, and Mahr maps their interaction across six combinations of domestic and foreign boom and slump: a home upswing leaks abroad through imports, a downturn is cushioned by exports and cheaper foreign goods. From this he weighs the modern, Keynesian case for protection—full employment defended against multiplier leakage—only to warn that in depression protectionism spreads faster than at any other time, tipping into beggar-my-neighbour escalation. His distinctive contribution, written in 1957, is the 'Defensivzoll,' a defensive tariff justified strictly up to the point where it offsets, rather than compounds, the productivity loss inflicted by foreign barriers. List's infant-industry argument is confined to agrarian latecomers; the standing ideal remains reciprocal free trade, and OEEC liberalization, through the accelerator, is read as broadly expansionary.

Vor allem aber wirkt der Protektionismus zu keiner anderen Zeit so ansteckend wie in der Depression.

English translation: “Above all, however, protectionism is at no other time so contagious as during a depression.”

Can feeling disclose objective values, and if so, why do moral cultures disagree? Alfred Schütz reconstructs Scheler’s answer by connecting his account of knowledge with his ethics of the Person. In this expanded version, the critique of Kant sharpens the central contrast: for Scheler, moral insight discovers concrete values rather than deriving goodness from formal law. Schütz shows why this position depends on distinguishing intentional feeling from subjective emotional states, and enduring values from the goods that embody them. His exposition brings a further tension into focus: an immutable value-order must remain accessible through historically changing perspectives. Readers can follow how Scheler makes love, participation in another person’s acts, and cooperation across generations bear on the possibility of moral knowledge.

Written as prison letters to a daughter, Jawaharlal Nehru's Glimpses of World History becomes, in Engel-Janosi's reading, a revealing experiment in universal history composed from outside the conventional Western centre. He grants the book's flaws—no developed system, uneven proportion, a heavy tilt toward the modern age—while arguing that its very subjectivity gives it significance: India, China, Islam, and the Mongol world stand contemporaneous with Europe rather than subordinate to it. Nehru's premises mix anti-imperial nationalism, a Marxian account of the distribution of wealth, secular ethical religion, and faith in science and progress, aligning him at points with Wells and Toynbee even as his interest in Asia is lived inheritance rather than detached comparison. The essay presents Glimpses less as a solution to universal history than as a document of world history turning genuinely global.

Von den ungefähr 1000 Textseiten beschäftigen sich 400 mit der Periode seit dem Ersten Weltkrieg, während die Zeitalter bis zum Ende des Mittelalters mit 240 auskommen müssen.

English translation: “Of the roughly 1,000 pages of text, 400 deal with the period since the First World War, while the epochs down to the end of the Middle Ages have to make do with 240.”

The slim volume in which Hicks reworked the demand theory of Value and Capital gets a patient, skeptical reading here. Machlup follows Hicks through weak ordering, the derivation of the law of demand, and the awkward Giffen case that requires an inferior good, a small substitution effect, and a large budget share at once. He sorts out the four consumer's surpluses Hicks had once collapsed into one, the First and Second Substitution Theorems, and the reciprocity of cross-effects. His verdict is measured: the revisions change neither policy nor prediction, but they honor Occam's razor by resting demand theory on fewer primitive terms, an important reconstruction, he grants, though difficult and joyless to read.

An important book is sometimes enjoyable to read. Unfortunately this cannot be said about this book.

When do long odds make an outcome seem not merely improbable but impossible? In this brief reply to Gould, Shackle acknowledges a difficulty for his account of decision under uncertainty: even someone facing a unique venture may let probabilities shape judgements of what can happen. He welcomes investigation of Gould’s proposed modification while insisting on a prior question—whether the conflicting evidence from which businesspeople form expectations can be expressed as numerical odds at all. The exchange offers a compact view of Shackle responding to criticism without abandoning his central distinction between probability and possibility, and helps readers separate two sources of uncertainty: the rarity of a decision and the difficulty of interpreting its evidence.

The saver, in Mises's telling here—rendered into English from the 1957 German 'Der Sparer als Wähler'—is no marginal figure begging paternal favor but a structural pillar of capitalism, since to defend savings is to defend property, capital formation, and the rising real wages they finance. Genuine protection of savers, he insists, differs entirely from protectionist privilege: it means securing the legal and monetary order in which accumulated capital can survive. His sharpest move recasts the ordinary wage earner, with his savings account and life-insurance policy, as a creditor—one whom inflation quietly robs. The democratic danger is epistemic: voters mistake inflation for mere rising prices rather than an expansion of money and credit, and so demand the cheap-money policies that erode their own claims. Only patient explanation to the voter, he concludes, offers a way out.

The American "common man," as a saver and especially as an owner of life insurance policies, is a creditor to a much greater degree than was the average German of the Weimar Republic.

Can society claim the rental value of natural sites while protecting ownership of everything people build upon them? In this 1957 essay, republished in 2011, Murray N. Rothbard challenges Henry George’s single tax at precisely that boundary. He argues that separating site value from accumulated improvements requires arbitrary assessment, and that landowners perform a service even when they postpone development: they allocate scarce locations across uses and time. His economic objections lead into a moral dispute over whether gains arising from social development justify confiscation. The essay offers a compact encounter between two defenses of property that diverge over land, revealing how Rothbard connects market valuation, entrepreneurial foresight, and original appropriation—and why he regards taxing away land rent as a threat to those connections.

One adjective, Hayek contends, has done more to muddle political thought than any other. 'Social'—as in 'social market economy' or 'social Rechtsstaat'—lends moral prestige while quietly voiding the words it modifies of definite meaning, until almost nothing in life is not 'social' in some sense and the term becomes, for all practical purposes, empty. Presented here in a revised English translation of his 1957 German essay, the argument recovers an older sense of society as spontaneous order—language, custom, law, evolved without central design—and sets it against the modern demand that individuals and governments pursue concrete collective aims they cannot fully know. That demand, he warns, corrodes the inherited rules of conduct on which it rests, and much that parades as social proves, in the deeper sense, thoroughly anti-social.

To be “social” is not the same as being good or “righteous in the eyes of the Lord”.

Grant an inventor exclusive rights over a new process, and you plant a monopoly in an economy that otherwise prizes competition, the tension Machlup was asked to weigh when the Senate patent subcommittee commissioned this study. He traces the institution from Venice's 1474 law and England's Statute of Monopolies through the free-trade antipatent movement of 1850 to 1873, when the Netherlands actually repealed its patent law, and dissects the four classic defenses: natural property in ideas, monopoly as just reward, monopoly profit as incentive, and disclosure traded for temporary exclusivity. His conclusion is a famous refusal to conclude, that on present knowledge economics can pronounce the system neither a clear gain nor a clear loss to society.

To confuse an important invention with the patent that excludes people from using it is like confusing an important bridge with the tollgates that close it to many who might want to use it.

Can labour explain capital formation without treating saving as its original cause? In this critical essay, Alfred Amonn examines Alexander Kokkalis’s attempt to rebuild economic theory around human productive powers. Kokkalis locates productive advance in invention, organization, and education rather than abstention from consumption; even the maintenance of workers becomes part of production, not merely its endpoint. Amonn takes these connections seriously while testing the distinctions that sustain them: between natural conditions and controllable means, and between directive intellectual labour and executive bodily labour. The essay’s interest lies in this combination of sympathetic reconstruction and conceptual scrutiny. It allows readers to see how redefining labour changes the explanation of capital, income, and wages—and where that explanation depends on contestable premises.

Beryllium production expanded even as its price fell: this apparent paradox gives Richard Kerschagl’s 1958 survey its economic focus. A metal valued in aircraft, nuclear technology, and copper alloys was acquiring new sources of supply, notably in India and the Belgian Congo. Yet Kerschagl refuses to equate rising reported tonnage with increased extraction alone: better statistical coverage and improved metal recovery complicate the figures. His account distinguishes geographically dispersed mining from concentrated American and British processing, and connects cheaper supplies with a wider range of economically viable uses. Readers can discover both the changing supply geography of a strategic metal and the care required to interpret production statistics whose units, coverage, and relationship to usable metal vary.