The archive.

Accurate evidence can still yield a distorted picture: this is Emil Lederer’s objection to Freda Utley’s account of Japan in his 1937 review of Japan’s Feet of Clay. Accepting her documentation of poverty and exploitation, he questions what it explains. Rice yields become a test of misleading international comparison; proposals for agrarian reform expose the difference between redistributing income and increasing production. His more contentious argument concerns the hold of imperial myth and tradition, which he believes Utley underestimates. The review offers a compact encounter with Lederer’s insistence that economic constraints and cultural allegiance must both enter social explanation—and with his conditional alternative to conquest: peaceful industrial development linked to China and Siberia.

Documenting military supremacy is not the same as explaining it. In this 1937 review of Kenneth W. Colegrove’s Militarism in Japan, Emil Lederer welcomes evidence drawn from Japanese sources but questions an account centred on powerful personalities. Could individual statesmen genuinely restrain an army that dominated budgets and foreign policy? And did expansion into China express military ambition alone, or pressures that even a pacifist government would face? Lederer’s distinctive contribution is to shift attention from elite manoeuvring to social groups and economic conditions, without pretending to resolve the questions Colegrove leaves open. This brief review offers a pointed example of how documentary evidence can establish who holds power while leaving its social foundations unexplained.

Appeals to self-evident principles can turn disputes over social-scientific method into contests of rival certainties. In this review of Rudolf Carnap’s Logische Syntax der Sprache, Felix Kaufmann examines an alternative: replacing claims to privileged philosophical insight with explicit rules for constructing and analysing scientific language. Writing with sociology, economics, and historical inquiry in view, he concentrates on the book’s philosophical consequences rather than its technical logical investigations. His account clarifies how Carnap distinguishes empirical questions from questions about concepts and theories, and why tolerance toward different logical systems requires clearly stated rules. Kaufmann’s endorsement remains qualified: he does not fully accept Carnap’s position, but regards it as a productive basis for debate. The review offers a concise encounter with that tension between methodological clarification and philosophy’s reduction to syntax.

What makes a statutory text usable without commentary? In this brief 1937 review, Helene Lieser credits the Beck edition of the Stock Corporation Act with providing practical alternatives: an official explanatory statement, a subject index, and skillfully placed cross-references. Her compact judgement distinguishes editorial assistance from legal commentary, showing what she values in a reference edition without offering a substantive assessment of the law itself.

How must a legally prescribed “workplace community” be adapted to commercial credit cooperatives? Helene Lieser’s brief 1937 review identifies this as the subject of E. H. Meyer’s study and commends his account as clear and interesting. The notice records her favorable assessment of a specific encounter between labour law and cooperative organization, without detailing Meyer’s proposals or offering an independent argument.

How can a nonspecialist find a way through German foreign-exchange law? In this brief 1937 review of Kurt Urbanek’s Die Devisengesetzgebung, Helene Lieser singles out the practical value of grouping and numbering difficult legal material. Her praise concerns a compact, inexpensive guide to legislation and its implementation, not the merits of exchange controls themselves. The notice offers a precise glimpse of her criteria for useful legal exposition: affordability, economy and navigability.

Helene Lieser’s brief review of Robert Lisnik’s Das neue Depot-Gesetz judges the guide by its usefulness to readers facing a change in German securities-custody law. She singles out the introduction’s clear account of the new provisions, alongside annotations and a subject index. The review offers a compact example of her practical reviewing criteria: clarity about legislative change and ease of reference, rather than an assessment of the law’s merits.

Who should bear the cost of insecurity when neither workers nor individual employers can control its causes? Writing in 1937 for members of the United States Social Security Board, Karl Pribram examines the emerging American programme against European insurance institutions rooted in mutual provision. His comparison makes technical choices—pension reserves, employer unemployment accounts, and state boundaries—legible as allocations of economic responsibility. He questions whether rewarding individual firms for stable employment can address fluctuations in demand, and whether financial self-sufficiency necessarily serves the economy that sustains contributions. The article offers a concrete way to distinguish insurance as an actuarial technique from social protection as a collective commitment, at a moment when the American system’s institutional choices were still taking shape.

A statistical pattern can fit the business cycle without explaining what causes it. In this 1937 abstract prepared for three lectures he was unable to deliver, Joseph A. Schumpeter makes that distinction the basis of a compact research agenda. He urges quantitative researchers to look behind aggregate series at the industrial processes through which disturbances spread: an economy-wide fluctuation need not originate in an economy-wide cause, nor must a cyclical response have a cyclical trigger. His separation of observed facts, formal mechanisms, and causal theories offers a precise way to ask what statistical confirmation actually establishes. Readers encounter not a completed empirical investigation, but a pointed account of the evidence an explanation of the cycle would require.

More employment need not mean economic recovery: this distinction drives Emil Lederer’s 1937 analysis of National Socialist economic doctrine. He argues that rearmament required wages and consumption to remain constrained, since rising prosperity would make military expansion more expensive. His distinctive approach tests the regime’s appeals to national will against the continuing requirements of production, credit, and exchange. Private enterprise survives, but its decisions are subordinated to state purposes; autarchy promises independence while disregarding comparative costs. By separating economic mobilization from individual welfare, Lederer shows how spending and controls can redirect resources toward power without abolishing economic limits. The article offers a concrete way to examine what employment figures conceal when a government determines both the purposes of production and the sacrifices demanded of its population.

Can removing mathematical notation make price theory harder to understand? In this short review of E. H. Phelps Brown’s The Framework of the Pricing System, Hayek praises the book’s coherent exposition while questioning its approach to beginners. His objection is not to mathematical economics but to presenting functional dependencies without the tools that make them intelligible. Calculus might better prepare some students; diagrams could clarify substitution and prevent confusion with older utility concepts. The review offers a focused encounter with Hayek as a reader and teacher of economic theory, distinguishing agreement with an argument from confidence in how it is taught.

Does steel production make monopoly inevitable, or do pricing rules help create the concentration they are invoked to justify? In this 1937 review essay, Frank Albert Fetter challenges the defense of basing-point pricing advanced in The Economics of the Iron and Steel Industry. He distinguishes large producing plants from corporations controlling many plants, and investors’ hopes of recovering costs from rights to protected returns. His case for mill-base pricing rests not on perfect competition but on weakening discrimination and centralized price control. Especially pointed is his treatment of investment losses: established firms’ objections to reform leave unheard the businesses already displaced or prevented from forming. The essay offers a concrete way to examine the passage from explaining industrial concentration to defending it as necessary.

Clearly it is not overhead costs but monopoly that permits fixing prices to realize overhead costs.