The archive.

Begin not with heaps of data but with the plain fact that men act—selecting means to reach chosen ends—and you have, Mises argues, the true starting point of economic science, which he presents as the most elaborated branch of praxeology. The essay rests on a theory of mind: sense data become knowledge only through the categories that order them, and causality itself is a precondition of all thought and action, not a mere laboratory habit. From this follows a sharp line between physics, which experiments and measures constants, and the sciences of human action, which have no constants to find—so that statistics and history record events without disclosing the theory that renders them intelligible. Against positivism, behaviorism, and the dream of social engineering, Mises defends methodological individualism and the categories by which human beings understand themselves as choosing agents.

For thousands of years the minds of physicians did not perceive germs and did not divine their existence.

'Bad money drives out good' is an ancient saying only accidentally tied to Gresham's name, and as a bare maxim, Hayek insists, practically worthless. His concern is methodological: to show that historical explanation cannot proceed on such slogans without theory to specify the conditions under which they hold. Properly stated, the law requires two monies equivalent in value for some purposes—settling domestic debts—yet unequal for others, such as foreign payment or industrial use of the metal; only then does individual choice compose into a collective shift in circulation. Good coin need not vanish at once, and its eventual flight signals no fresh public discovery but a change in monetary balance. From the Kipper und Wipper crisis to the English recoinage of 1696, even elementary theory guards the historian against false causal tales.

What theory will tell him is that he must look for some cause which led to a fall of the internal value of both good and bad coins relative to their value in foreign commerce and in industrial uses.

Knowledge is no ornament and its diffusion no work for court jesters, Kerschagl insists — it is as materially vital as the erection of industrial plants. That conviction anchors this treatment of development aid, written just after its author took the presidency of the Austrian UNESCO Commission, which ranges across population theory from Malthus to Nurkse's circular causation, the psychology of entitlement and colonial guilt, and the institutional scaffolding of trade unions, honest bureaucracy, and stable currency. Identifying mass poverty and illiteracy as the true marks of a development area, it ranks agriculture before heavy industry, holds up the Marshall Plan as a model that cannot be transplanted into pre-industrial economies, and presses throughout the principle of Hilfe für Selbsthilfe against both beggar ideology and condescending charity.

Das Verhältnis zwischen Helfenden und Hilfe Empfangenden kann nicht das von Gönnern und Bettelnden sein, sondern nur das echter Partnerschaft.

English translation: “The relationship between those giving aid and those receiving it cannot be that of patrons and beggars, but only that of genuine partnership.”

Addressing an international savings-bank congress in 1963, Hayek defends thrift as economic fact, moral habit, and political condition at once. Against the intuition that spending helps others while saving is sterile — an intuition he traces from Franklin and mercantilist praise of luxury through Keynesian underconsumption theory — he restates the old truth that real capital forms only when a society produces more than it consumes. Yet volume is not the point: what a nation spends on capital formation matters far less than what comes of it, and only decentralized owners testing dispersed knowledge can find its best uses. He warns that inflation, forced 'frugality' through taxation, state growth planning, and expansive social security all corrode the widely shared habit of reckoning in capital rather than income on which a free economy rests.

Ein Volk wird nur dann eine erfolgreiche Unternehmerschicht hervorbringen, wenn eine vielfach größere Zahl von Menschen Gelegenheit hat, sich in der nutzbringenden Anwendung von Kapital zu versuchen.

English translation: “A people will bring forth a successful class of entrepreneurs only if a many times greater number of people have the opportunity to try their hand at the profitable use of capital.”

Two kinds of order must be kept apart, this essay argues: the organization that someone deliberately makes, and the spontaneous, polycentric order that no one designs. From that distinction Hayek builds an account of how the coordinated action of millions can arise without a coordinator, further separating concrete arrangements that can be perceived or commanded from abstract orders that encompass many manifestations at once. Language, law, morality, money, crystal formation, and the market's division of labor all display complex order emerging without central design, sustained by general rules of conduct that let individuals use dispersed local knowledge. A free society, he concludes, must rely on such abstract general rules rather than concrete command — a thesis set pointedly against Carl Schmitt's concrete-order jurisprudence.

Die Hauptschwierigkeit ist, daß die Ordnung sozialer Geschehnisse nicht mit den Sinnen wahrgenommen, sondern nur vom Verstand nachgebildet werden kann.

English translation: “The main difficulty is that the order of social events cannot be perceived by the senses, but can only be reconstructed by the intellect.”

Cultivation, not engineering: that metaphor governs this presidential address on 'Economic Budgeting,' the non-coercive sharing of forecasts and investment intentions among entrepreneurs. Lachmann keeps it strictly apart from Communist central direction and Nazi-style corporatism, presenting it instead as an attempt to make private plans mutually intelligible before resources are irreversibly committed. His conceptual pivot is the contrast between the neoclassical equilibrium of Walras, Pareto, and Cassel, where all plans are already consistent, and the open market economy, whose profits exist precisely because knowledge is dispersed and expectations conflict. Because capital goods are heterogeneous and complementary, isolated investment breeds excess capacity and stranded facilities; a scheme that diffuses entrepreneurial knowledge might reduce such malinvestment before it occurs. The verdict stays deliberately restrained—markets are vindicated as processes of learning, not as engines of equilibrium.

The market process tends to eliminate the results of malinvestment but cannot prevent its occurrence.

Neither the blurry category of Mittelstand nor sheer firm size captures Bayer's object: the person-shaped enterprise, formed and carried by an entrepreneur rather than run as a self-perpetuating institution. Continuing his project on the firm as economic stabilizer, this volume asks whether such medium firms still hold a stabilizing function, and why, if they do, their position keeps eroding. He credits them with pioneering, agility, specialization, individualization, and supplier roles, then separates the difficulties that policy could remove, chiefly discriminatory turnover taxes and a cartel law that treats their cooperation as suspect, from the endogenous tensions they must bridge themselves. Invoking subsidiarity and drawing on some three hundred visited firms, he argues that federative working groups, research-institute links, and reformed finance let medium firms complement the large institutionalized enterprise rather than dissolve into it.

Im September 1960 waren mehr als ein Drittel aller in der Industrie Beschäftigten (Betriebe mit zehn und mehr Arbeitnehmern) in der mittleren Industrie tätig

English translation: “In September 1960, more than one-third of all persons employed in industry (in establishments with ten or more employees) were engaged in medium-sized industry.¹⁶”

'Natural right' has hardened, over centuries of scholastic and modern doctrine, into a supposed stock of immutable norms, and undoing that hardening is the essay's whole aim. Reading Aristotle's difficult page on physei dikaion in the Nicomachean Ethics through the frame of the Politics, Voegelin recovers natural right as a symbol of noetic experience rather than a code. Aristotle's 'nature' is equivocal, physical, divine, human, so that the right by nature is at once universally valid in its divine essence and changeable in its human realization, identical not with eternal legal propositions but with the paradigm of the best constitution. The second section turns to phronesis, the existential virtue through which the divine order of the cosmos comes to its truth in concrete action, with the mature spoudaios, not an abstract rule, as the measure.

Die Wahrheit der Existenz erfüllt sich dort, wo sie konkret wird, das ist im Handeln.

English translation: “The truth of existence fulfills itself where it becomes concrete, that is, in action.”

Few economic subjects breed more confusion than money, and here — in the German translation of Rothbard's 1963 What Has Government Done to Our Money? — that confusion is dismantled by returning to the market. Money is no creature of decree but a commodity risen from barter, the most saleable good gradually accepted by all; gold and silver won the role by being durable, divisible, and independently desired. Paper circulates only by inheriting purchasing power already established in metal. From this Rothbard argues that the size of the money stock is irrelevant to real wealth, that inflation is a hidden tax enriching its first receivers, and that fractional-reserve banking issues many claims to the same specie — fraud dressed as credit. State mints, legal-tender laws, and central banks complete money's long descent into fiat disorder.

Weil Gold ein allgemeines Tauschmittel ist, ist es am marktgängigsten, kann es aufbewahrt werden, um morgen genau wie heute verwendet zu werden, und werden alle Preise in seinen Einheiten ausgedrückt.

English translation: “Because gold is a universal medium of exchange, it is the most marketable of goods; it can be stored so as to be used tomorrow just as today, and all prices are expressed in its units.”

Long read as the skeptic who woke Kant from dogmatic slumber, David Hume reappears here as something else entirely: the most coherent theorist of liberty under law. Hayek strips away the myth of a single Enlightenment, setting French constructivist rationalism against a British-Scottish line running through Mandeville, Smith, Ferguson, and Burke, in which durable institutions grow rather than get invented. Justice, property, and promise-keeping, on Hume's account, precede government and arise from convention among partial, ignorant, and scarcity-pressed beings; law must therefore be general and inflexible, never a case-by-case reckoning of merit or utility. The closing pages set Hume against Rousseau, whose democratic enthusiasm displaced this sober Whig liberalism and fed later doctrines of popular sovereignty.

Er wußte, daß die größten politischen Werte, Frieden, Freiheit und Gerechtigkeit, ihrem Wesen nach negativ sind, eher ein Schutz gegen Unrecht als positive Gegebenheiten.

English translation: “He knew that the greatest political values—peace, liberty, and justice—are by their very nature negative, rather a protection against injustice than positive givens.”

To ask why taxes exist, this textbook contends, is really to ask why the state exists — every tax system is at bottom a theory of the state. Kerschagl's teaching text moves from the history of the tax state through Adam Smith's four canons, tax justice, universality, and the interdependence of prices, wages, and shifting that dissolves the tidy line between direct and indirect taxes, to a claim central to the welfare age: even the fully socialized Soviet economy cannot replace taxation with enterprise profit, leaning instead on a turnover tax that works as a consumption tax. A long comparative part then dissects the fiscal constitutions of the United States, the USSR, Italy, France, both Germanys, Benelux, Scandinavia, England, and Austria, exposing how divergent tax systems threaten EEC and EFTA integration.

Der Wohlfahrtsstaat des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts ist eben ein riesiger Ausgleichsmechanismus, durch den etwa die Hälfte aller originären Einkommen einem Prozeß der Neuverteilung unterzogen wird.

English translation: “The welfare state of the twentieth century is nothing other than a gigantic equalization mechanism, through which roughly half of all originary incomes is subjected to a process of redistribution.”

Are there limits to the use of mathematics in economics? The question, this essay answers, is wrongly posed: the obstacle lies not in the subject but in whether economists understand what mathematics is and formulate their problems well. Morgenstern dismisses the usual objections — psychology, non-quantitative data, expectations, unmeasurable utility — by noting that mathematics is not merely quantitative, that no deep gulf separates a simple addition from an integration. Economics erred not by too much formalism but by shallow model-building, borrowing equilibrium from mechanics and casting agents as solitary maximizers under fixed conditions. Game theory marks the conceptual break, supplying a mathematics fitted to strategic interdependence; expected utility, axiomatized, replaces cumbersome indifference curves. Since natural science once remade mathematics, he expects social science to do the same, leaving no fixed boundary that can honestly be drawn.

Nichts ist leichter, als die eigene Beschränktheit für die der Methode oder des untersuchten Gegenstandes zu halten.

English translation: “Nothing is easier than to mistake one's own limitations for those of the method or of the subject under investigation.”