The archive.

Why are peaceable peoples so thoroughly organized for war? Rappard, invited by A. Lawrence Lowell to lecture as a second war broke out, sets that paradox against the wreckage of the first peace. He follows the Wilsonian ideal of organized peace from the Fourteen Points into the Covenant's three great instruments—arbitration, collective security under Articles 10 and 16, and disarmament—and charts their erosion across the Geneva Protocol, Locarno, the Kellogg-Briand Pact, and the Disarmament Conference that Germany abandoned in 1933. The League could judge, he argues, but not police; the Aaland Islands were peacefully settled while Abyssinia was left to conquest. Behind each failure stands American abstention and, in Pascal's phrase, a justice never armed with force. His one remaining hope is federation.

Organizing economic history by problems rather than chronology promises clarity—but what happens to the connections between an economist’s ideas, or to the sequence in which those ideas emerged? In this brief 1941 review of Edmund Whittaker’s A History of Economic Ideas, Hayek weighs that teaching problem against the textbook’s careful exposition and unusual selection of authors. His example is precise: describing Malthus’s account of rent as superior to Ricardo’s can obscure the fact that Malthus published first. Yet Hayek praises Whittaker’s handling of methodological disputes and recommends chronological supplementation rather than rejecting the book. The review offers a compact view of his standards for historical explanation: understanding separate doctrines requires more than collecting their treatments under common headings.

When does a statistical model of business cycles warrant conclusions about economic policy? In this 1941 review of J. Tinbergen’s study of the United States in 1919–1932, Gerhard Tintner admires the ambition of linking economic theory to an extensive system of estimated equations, but scrutinizes the grounds for trusting its results. His objections are concrete: time-series residuals require testing, regression coefficients may change, and expectations remain insufficiently explicit. Findings that public investment dampens fluctuations while price stabilization increases them depend on restrictive conditions, including the absence of a stock-exchange boom. The review offers a compact encounter with econometric judgment: Tintner distinguishes the achievement of constructing a comprehensive model from the reliability of its causal explanations and policy deductions.

Clarity and popularization are not the same achievement in Hayek’s 1941 joint review of studies of early Marx and Feuerbach. Newly available writings by Marx and Engels provide the occasion; the question is what scholars make of them. Hayek praises H. P. Adams for combining careful source study with a readable account of Marx before the Communist Manifesto. His response to Konrad Bekker is more revealingly hesitant: he admits uncertainty about understanding the argument while recognizing the value of its comparisons between Marx and Hegel. Chamberlain’s Feuerbach, by contrast, earns sharp criticism for journalistic embellishment without added understanding. This brief review offers a concrete glimpse of Hayek’s critical standards—and of his willingness to distinguish specialist usefulness from successful exposition.

Can the desire to put science and industry at the service of human welfare justify directing them from a centre? In this 1941 paired review, Hayek welcomes Michael Polanyi’s challenge to scientific and economic planning, emphasizing the gap between benevolent intentions and the specialized knowledge on which discovery and practical judgment depend. Colin Clark’s reconstruction of Soviet economic statistics gives that institutional criticism a concrete test. Hayek draws attention to depressed food consumption and deteriorating housing, but also acknowledges later improvements and industrial gains. Read together, his assessments show why increased production cannot alone settle questions about freedom or material welfare—and how a critic of planning weighs evidence that complicates his own position.

A venture may promise substantial gains yet remain unthinkable if failure would end the entrepreneur’s capacity to try again. In this 1941 article, G. L. S. Shackle connects that asymmetry to a concrete proposal: a public Board would guarantee partial recovery of investment costs when equipment is surrendered, financed by a levy on successful ventures. His distinctive concern is not average expected returns but the imagined extremes of success and disaster that command an investor’s attention. The scheme tests how far public protection can encourage private initiative without removing responsibility for loss. Its uncomfortable provision for scrapping surrendered equipment sharpens the tension between preserving productive assets and opening new investment opportunities. Readers encounter an institutional application of Shackle’s thinking about uncertainty, explicitly offered for experiment rather than as a proven remedy.

Protecting small shopkeepers can preserve their businesses while making them increasingly dependent on political privilege. In this 1941 reply to Reisner, Walter Froehlich examines that tension through Central European retail restrictions: scarce licences acquire prices of their own, while price controls redirect competition toward costly services and additional outlets. His distinctive concern is how protection generates demands for further controls over business size, location, turnover and wages. Froehlich does not claim that retail regulation alone produces Fascism; he argues that it can foster an outlook in which political power replaces economic adaptation. The note offers a concrete way to examine the distance between defending independent proprietors and preserving their independence—and why, in Froehlich’s account, nominal private ownership need not safeguard democratic compromise.

How can an economic theory become obsolete while its author remains a productive guide? In this 1941 appraisal of Alfred Marshall’s Principles, Joseph A. Schumpeter separates the survival of doctrines from the continuing usefulness of a way of investigating economic life. He finds Marshall’s strength in the conjunction of mathematical reasoning, close observation of English business, and tools capable of supporting statistical measurement. His admiration is exacting: partial equilibrium can mislead when extended beyond its proper setting, and Marshall concealed the mathematics essential to his achievement. Readers can discover why theoretical compromises that look defective in a general system may nevertheless enable concrete inquiry—and why Schumpeter locates Marshall’s lasting influence in research possibilities rather than authoritative conclusions.

One God in heaven, one lord on earth: the Mongol letters and edicts of 1245–1255 turned that cosmic analogy into a working juridical doctrine of world conquest. Voegelin collects and classifies the documents carried between the papal and French courts and the khans—two khan letters, two edicts, two commanders' letters—reconstructing their preambles after Pelliot and reading them as formal legal instruments rather than mere barbarian arrogance. The empire they proclaim is an imperium mundi in statu nascendi, a world-empire-in-the-making in which every ruler, upon contact, must submit and enter as vassal or be destroyed as rebel. What lifts the study above orientalist antiquarianism is Voegelin's closing move, comparing the Mongols' sacral literalism—killing and conquest proclaimed as divine judgment—to the peace rhetoric of modern communist regimes.

Das Opfer der Aggression ist der Aggressor.

English translation: “The victim of aggression is the aggressor.”

How could America’s gold accumulation support employment yet leave it with a largely useless stock of metal? In this conference discussion paper, Fritz Machlup reviews arguments advanced by Neisser and Hardy, separating the effects of acquiring gold from the benefits of possessing it. His answer turns on idle resources: exports exchanged for gold could raise income without displacing much other production, though wartime bottlenecks would change that calculation. Equally pointed is his refusal to equate correcting policy with reversing it. He condemns the 1933–34 dollar devaluation but argues that lowering the gold price during war would weaken Britain’s purchasing power. The paper offers a concrete way to distinguish financial expenditure from real economic sacrifice—and to assess monetary decisions by their present consequences rather than their apparent consistency.

If it is found that a certain move was a mistake, it is not always possible to repair it by moving back; moving back may often be just another mistake.

Housing needed for armament workers and housing stimulated by rising wartime incomes pose different policy problems. In this December 1941 article, Karl Pribram argues for supporting the first while restraining the second—not only to conserve scarce materials, but to preserve demand that could sustain employment when defense spending declines. His perspective joins the timing of durable-goods production to the risks of mortgage and building cycles. The practical difficulty is distributional: tighter credit can exclude poorer households, while limits on construction can raise tenants’ rents. By weighing mortgage restrictions against building-permit limits and accompanying tenant protection, Pribram shows why restraining a boom requires more than reducing construction totals: it requires deciding which needs to meet now and which purchases can safely wait.

Written in 1941 and reprinted here in 1997, Hayek’s wartime essay asks how Britain can act intelligently towards Germany without mistaking understanding for forgiveness. He traces a practical weakness in British policy to alternating admiration and hostility, reinforced by travel impressions rather than sustained study of German intellectual life. His distinctive concern is that German ideas already circulate within Britain and among its allies: refusing to study them does not prevent their influence, but makes it harder to judge. The essay connects this problem to concrete institutional remedies—university training for specialists and controlled scholarly access to current German publications. It offers a pointed account of why foreign knowledge requires interpreters able to notice developments beyond a government’s immediate wartime needs.