The archive.

When an economic prediction fails, does the failure refute the theory—or expose a mistaken use of it? In this 1942 article, Felix Kaufmann approaches the dispute between Hutchinson and Knight by distinguishing claims about facts from rules for directing inquiry. A price–demand relationship, qualified by an indefinite ceteris paribus clause, may tell economists where to begin investigating rather than what must happen. This distinction lets Kaufmann defend theoretical isolation without excusing forecasts that neglect foreseeable influences. His comparisons with physical science also challenge the idea that economics must choose between empirical testing and attention to human purposes. Readers can discover how profit-seeking and informed choice may serve as useful starting points without becoming necessary truths about human conduct.

Closer analysis reveals that the ceteris paribus clause is a way of formulating a heuristic postulate, a methodological program.

When a peacetime economy converts to war, military demand piles onto civilian demand, usable productive means shrink, and the money circulation is thrown out of joint—three simultaneous shocks that no ordinary peacetime remedy can absorb. Written in Zurich in 1942 alongside Swiss reports by Böhler and Dütscher, this study refuses the comforting idea that policy should preserve the old circular flow; the whole national economy, Amonn argues, becomes structurally a war economy or it is none. He challenges the dogma that taxes never inflate while loans always do, subordinates the prevention of inflation to the overriding goal of maximum production, and defends rationing, differentiated price control, and savings-based war loans, testing each against Swiss figures for the cost of living, wages, and foreign trade.

Aber man geriete dann von der Scylla der Inflation unvermeidlich in die Charybdis der Deflation.

English translation: “But one would then inevitably pass from the Scylla of inflation into the Charybdis of deflation.”

Concentrated economic power may demand regulation, but can the same principles govern mergers formed in prosperity and cartels formed in depression? In this brief review of Fritz Haussmann’s study, Karl Pribram locates a precise weakness in an ambitious legal and sociological account of big business. He appreciates Haussmann’s international scholarship and attention to the distribution of power, yet argues that treating concentration chiefly as a social phenomenon obscures the different economic conditions that produce its organizational forms. The review offers a compact encounter between two approaches to corporate regulation: one centred on power and social order, the other insisting that policy also reckon with falling prices, shrinking markets, and business fluctuations.

Can an economic method survive the failure of the philosophy used to justify it? In this review of Joseph Mayer’s Social Science Principles, Felix Kaufmann praises Mayer’s sustained attack on classical and neoclassical value theory while challenging the reach of its conclusions. Exposing the unreality of perfectly rational “economic man,” Kaufmann argues, does not by itself refute a method of explaining markets. His discussion of Austrian marginal utility theory makes the distinction concrete: followers could use its methods without sharing their founders’ philosophical overconfidence. This brief review offers a focused encounter with Kaufmann’s discriminating approach to methodological criticism—one that separates claims of ultimate validity from explanatory usefulness, without excusing either from scrutiny.

Can an economy remain capitalist when private ownership survives but government dictates how enterprises operate? In this 1942 review of Maxine Y. Sweezy’s The Structure of the Nazi Economy, Ludwig von Mises praises her empirical research while contesting her classification of the system she describes. His criterion is effective control over production, not legal ownership or equality of incomes; on that basis, he calls the Nazi economy socialist. A particularly revealing tension concerns managers: deprived of independent authority, they may nevertheless preserve capital in the hope of recovering their businesses after the war. This brief review offers a concentrated encounter with Mises’s distinction between the outward forms of enterprise and the power to make economic decisions—and with his attempt to explain productive incentives within a system he condemns.

Philosophy can cease to rival empirical science without losing its own questions. This distinction anchors Felix Kaufmann’s review of Philipp Frank’s Between Physics and Philosophy. Kaufmann endorses Frank’s criticism of metaphysical systems that force relativity and quantum physics into preconceived schemes, but resists treating that failure as grounds for dismissing philosophical inquiry. His counterpoint is precise: rational analysis of meanings may reach further than logical positivists acknowledge, and their work on semantics may bring them back to problems explored by earlier philosophers. This short review offers a carefully drawn disagreement within an otherwise favorable assessment—showing how Kaufmann can recommend Frank’s exposition of physics and positivism while defending a continuing task for philosophy.

I am far from believing, however, that this is a death blow to philosophy, even though philosophy ceases to be a rival of empirical science.

Listening to someone speak, we follow a thought as it unfolds; reflecting on our own experience, we grasp what has already occurred. This temporal contrast anchors Alfred Schütz’s alternative to Scheler’s account of how we understand others. In this essay, republished in 1967, Schütz accepts Scheler’s challenge to theories that infer another mind from bodily signs, but rejects the hypothesis of an originally undifferentiated consciousness. A shared present, he argues, can explain the priority of the “We” without dissolving distinct persons into a common stream of experience. The resulting account separates participation in another’s unfolding activity from certainty about what that person thinks. Readers can discover why ordinary conversation offers a precise philosophical problem: how we inhabit time together while remaining irreducibly different centres of experience.

Between a rise in commodity prices and money wages that lag behind it lies a mechanism Hayek retrieves from Ricardo and sets at the center of capital and cycle theory. When labor grows cheaper relative to selling prices, the methods that pay are not the long, roundabout, machine-intensive ones but the quick-turnover processes that recover and reinvest their outlays fast—so a boom in consumer demand can perversely reduce demand for capital goods as firms work old plant harder, postpone replacement, and shift toward circulating capital. Reworking the wage-price relation through rates of turnover and internal rates of return, Hayek argues against treating the interest rate as the sole determinant of technique, and shows how credit expansion, once incomes and prices rise, pulls resources back toward shorter processes and throws the capital-goods trades into unemployment.

A textbook’s starting point can determine which economic phenomena its students learn to see. In this review of George J. Stigler’s The Theory of Competitive Price, Schumpeter admires the clarity and rigor of the teaching while challenging its conceptual foundations. His sharpest objection concerns perfect competition: what the model excludes, he argues, belongs to the substance of capitalism, not merely to its incidental disturbances. He likewise questions whether monetary mechanisms can be postponed until after general theory has been established. The review offers a compact encounter with Schumpeter as a critic of economic instruction, showing why lucid exposition and sound theoretical architecture are separate achievements—and why the sequence of a course can embody substantive claims about how an economy works.

A production decision commits resources now while changing what can be done later. In this article, Gerhard Tintner asks how firms should plan when future prices and productive conditions are uncertain—and when the highest expected profit need not be their preferred prospect. His distinctive move is to separate the probability distribution of possible profits from the firm's valuation of that distribution, allowing dispersion and skewness to matter alongside the mean. A two-period example, in which applying lime now improves later agricultural production, gives this abstract distinction a concrete setting. Through graphical demonstrations, readers can trace how present commitments, later adjustments, and preferences toward risk jointly determine a production plan. Tintner also treats uncertainty about probability distributions themselves, rather than assuming that the relevant odds are always known.

Could knowledge of the trade cycle prevent entrepreneurs from helping to set one in motion? In this short response to L. M. Lachmann, Mises accepts that a credit-induced boom depends on how businesspeople interpret easier borrowing, while denying that Austrian theory had overlooked this condition. His distinctive emphasis is on calculation rather than mere optimism: interest rates can mislead investors even when they appear normal or high, if they inadequately reflect monetary depreciation. The exchange clarifies where expectations enter Mises’s monetary explanation—and why recognizing credit expansion is harder than observing abundant loans or rising demand. It also leaves open a pointed possibility: entrepreneurs who understand the mechanism might respond differently, changing the outcome the theory explains.

Can a precise account of economic equilibrium explain how an economy changes when expectations fail? In this 1943 review of Mabel F. Timlin’s Keynesian Economics, G. L. S. Shackle makes admiration for her exposition the starting point for a pointed methodological criticism. He asks whether the formal prominence of interest rates reflects their practical influence on investment, and whether perfect-foresight analysis obscures Keynes’s concern with uncertainty. His sharpest reservation concerns aggregation: identical economic relationships may conceal different individual expectations, producing different responses to disappointment. This short review offers a concrete way to distinguish the consistency of an equilibrium model from its power to explain movement through time.