The archive.

Later revisions do not necessarily make an earlier exposition obsolete. In this brief 1932 review, Hayek welcomes the London School of Economics reprint of Böhm-Bawerk’s Grundzüge for restoring detailed discussions omitted from later presentations of his value theory. He credits Böhm-Bawerk not simply with restating Menger and Wieser, but with sharpening their arguments and resolving difficulties while preparing the foundations for his theory of capital and interest. The review offers a compact view of Hayek’s judgement of the Austrian tradition: clarity of exposition can itself advance theory, and an early text may retain analytical value even where its author subsequently changed his position.

Austria’s new personal income tax met government forecasts yet yielded strikingly less than its Prussian counterpart. In this brief review, Carl Menger assesses Friedrich von Wieser’s attempt to explain the gap without treating aggregate receipts as self-evident measures of wealth, administrative competence or tax morale. Menger welcomes Wieser’s effort to account for differences between the taxes, but presses two concrete reservations: the burden of yield taxes operating alongside income tax, and the need to compare the systems at similar stages of implementation. His qualified endorsement offers a compact example of his standards for fiscal comparison: before drawing conclusions about taxpayers, examine the institutions and assessment periods that produced the figures.

When the state reserves an industry to itself, are its earnings simply another tax? This distinction anchors Carl Menger’s review of Otto Gerlach’s revision of the fifth edition of Wilhelm Roscher’s System der Finanzwissenschaft. Menger welcomes the edition’s greater practical usefulness but challenges Gerlach’s classification of state monopoly receipts as indirect taxes. Excluding private enterprise, he argues, secures returns for the state through a mechanism distinct from taxation—even when a monopoly also facilitates tax surcharges. His qualified defence of Roscher makes this more than an assessment of editorial improvements: the review shows why the source of public income matters, and how apparently tidy fiscal categories can obscure the economic arrangements that generate it.

Must wartime price increases be reversed before foreign trade can recover? In this review of Robert Liefmann’s study of monetary expansion, Alfred Amonn challenges that prescription by distinguishing exchange-rate stability from restoration of a lower price level. He accepts that new money raises prices through incomes and demand, but disputes Liefmann’s claim to have discovered this mechanism. His sharper objection concerns causation: he treats rising domestic prices and currency depreciation as parallel effects of monetary expansion, rather than the former as the cause of the latter. The review offers a compact encounter with economic criticism in practice, showing why higher import prices measured in marks do not, in Amonn’s argument, necessarily mean paying more in goods or labor.

A common customs frontier does not imply a common economic interest. In this 1902 article, Eugen von Philippovich examines tariff negotiations in a monarchy whose economic unity depends on a renewable agreement between Austria and Hungary. His revealing example is grain protection: Hungary’s agricultural exporters can benefit from import duties because the shared customs territory has become a net grain importer, leaving Austrian consumers to bear higher food costs. By tracing such conflicts through constitutional procedures and organised pressure on bureaucracies, Philippovich shows why tariff policy cannot be read simply from parliamentary decisions. Germany’s proposed tariff adds an external constraint, encouraging even export interests to support retaliatory bargaining measures. The article offers a concrete account of how internal distributional struggles can turn hopes of commercial cooperation into competitive protectionism.

Böhm-Bawerk’s fiscal career becomes a defence of abstract economics in this dictionary entry by his lifelong friend and fellow Austrian economist Friedrich von Wieser. Wieser credits his colleague’s scientific training with the clarity needed to reform taxation, strengthen state credit and manage public finances—directly answering critics who regarded Austrian theory as remote from practical life. The appreciative portrait also makes room for disagreement: Wieser explains Böhm-Bawerk’s account of interest through the lower valuation of distant needs, while acknowledging its divided reception. This compact assessment shows how an intellectual ally connects theoretical precision with administrative judgment, yet distinguishes the value of Böhm-Bawerk’s research from acceptance of his central explanation of interest.

A brief private note, written two days before Christmas 1937, catches Alfred Schütz in an ordinary moment between his phenomenological labors. Just back from Paris, he has carried home an issue of the Revue de Paris for its essay by Paul Valéry, which he presses on his correspondent with the request that it be returned once read. He adds a book as a Christmas gift, should the friend not already own it, and sends warm wishes to him and his wife. Slight in itself, the letter survives as a small biographical trace of the émigré scholar's Parisian ties and reading life on the eve of war—a fragment of correspondence rather than a work of theory.

An economist’s lasting contribution need not lie in solutions that survive criticism. In this brief review of Edgeworth’s Papers relating to Political Economy, Ludwig von Mises locates much of Edgeworth’s value in his ability to expose weaknesses in others’ arguments and formulate difficult problems. His appreciation is discriminating: he questions the gains from mathematical reformulation and judges substantial portions of the collection superseded, while insisting that later obsolescence does not cancel original achievement. The review offers a compact view of Mises as a reader of another economist—skeptical of analytical effort without explanatory returns, attentive to the historical claims of outdated work, and appreciative of Edgeworth’s plea against mutual disparagement between theoretical and historical inquiry.

A system of equations can represent market equilibrium without fully explaining how prices arise. This distinction anchors Alfred Amonn’s two-installment review of the first edition of Gustav Cassel’s Theoretische Sozialökonomik. Appreciative of Cassel’s clarity and theoretical advances, Amonn nevertheless challenges his attempt to dispense with subjective valuation: demand functions still require explanation, and renaming valuation does not remove it. His criticism also exposes a tension between what markets do and what an economically rational allocation ought to accomplish. Purchasing power, he argues, cannot be mistaken for a common measure of the urgency of people’s needs. The review offers a precise encounter between rival explanatory approaches, showing why acknowledging interdependence among prices, incomes and demand is not the same as explaining its foundations.

Mit einem Worte: Cassels Darstellung des Preisbildungsprozesses ist noch keine Erklärung dieses Prozesses, sondern erst der Anfang einer Erklärung.

English translation: “In a word: Cassel’s account of the price-formation process is not yet an explanation of that process, but only the beginning of an explanation.”

A farmer can increase output, calculate carefully, and still become poorer. In this two-installment article of 1927–1928, Wilhelm Röpke examines why commercially advanced American agriculture remained vulnerable to debt, falling prices, and costs that resisted adjustment. His regional comparisons challenge easy equations between low yields and backwardness, or large acreage and the disappearance of family farming. The central tension is between individual enterprise and collective outcomes: responses to yesterday’s prices can produce tomorrow’s glut. This gives his criticism of the McNary-Haugen bill a specific edge—higher supported prices, without control of output, risk renewing the surplus they are meant to relieve. Röpke instead presses the case against industrial tariffs, showing how farmers could buy in a protected market while selling at world prices.

Opposition to communism, Röpke warns, need not prevent a state from copying Soviet methods of control. This newspaper article tests that distinction through accounts of Soviet Russia by M. Polányi, W. H. Chamberlin and André Gide. Röpke connects the failures of economic monopoly—poor goods, inadequate food, indifference to consumers—to the suppression of independent judgment. Gide’s disillusionment sharpens his question: why did an artist committed to individual creation expect freedom from collectivist organization? The article makes visible both Röpke’s institutional understanding of liberty and the contested reach of his conclusion: he treats Soviet experience not merely as evidence against one regime, but as grounds for arguing that socialist planning necessarily entails political dictatorship.

A stronger krone need not mean a richer Austria. In this article, Alfred Amonn challenges the demand for currency appreciation by separating money’s numerical value from the goods and services it can command. Against Emanuel Hugo Vogel, he argues that raising the exchange rate cannot create purchasing resources for the country; it can, however, redistribute income toward creditors while disrupting production. His alternative—stable domestic purchasing power—also presents a practical difficulty: Austria’s controlled prices, fiscal deficit, and delayed inflationary effects make existing monetary relationships unsuitable for immediate stabilization. The article connects a precise dispute over the aim of monetary policy with the difficult sequencing of reconstruction, showing why fiscal repair and price adjustment must, in Amonn’s account, precede durable stability.