The archive.

Data may feed inquiry, but can they produce theory? Felix Kaufmann turns this methodological dispute into a three-stanza song, here in Arlene Oost-Zinner’s 2010 English translation with an accompanying score. His satire respects the labor of collecting evidence while rejecting its claim to generate theory unaided; an obscure appeal to “natural value” fares no better. Yet the joke also reaches Professor Mises’ seminar, where evening argument promises certainty until dinner asserts a more bodily demand. The song’s distinctive pleasure lies in this double edge: theoretical conviction and affectionate mockery share the same table, allowing readers to encounter methodological loyalties in the lighter register of seminar sociability.

Abolishing the employer does not by itself give workers a stake in collective life. This distinction anchors Emil Lederer’s review essay on Walther Rathenau’s proposals for economic and social reconstruction. Welcoming Rathenau’s turn toward expropriation, Lederer asks what would make self-government more than a change of administrators: participation in production, municipal affairs, and communal housing must make solidarity an everyday experience. His criticism also reaches Rathenau’s fear that economic equality would impoverish culture. Why should the disappearance of wealthy patrons entail the disappearance of creative initiative or diverse audiences? Rather than promise socialist flourishing, Lederer challenges the projection of wartime deprivation onto a future social order. The essay offers a concrete account of what ownership reform leaves unresolved: motivation, cultural freedom, and the institutions through which people acquire shared responsibility.

When a country reckons its standing in the world, the ledger of exported and imported goods tells only part of the story — and that omission is the subject of this short manuscript essay on travel and the balance of payments. Beginning from the observation that railway passenger traffic on Europe's most developed lines had doubled in twenty years, Inama-Sternegg treats modern travel not as a cultural curiosity but as a measurable economic force. Tourists circulate needs as well as bodies: exposure to foreign hotels, food, and comforts differentiates demand and makes national markets porous. He then converts visitors into lodging-days and expenditures, and folds tourism receipts, transport services, emigrant funds, and workers' remittances — with figures from Switzerland, the Tyrol, and Italian labourers — into a fuller Zahlungsbilanz that mere merchandise trade conceals.

Der Reisezauber hat es den Kulturmenschen angetan.

English translation: “The spell of travel has taken hold of the civilized man.”

Explaining why banking systems differ is not the same as deciding which is preferable. This distinction drives Ludwig von Mises’s short review of Walter Huth’s comparison of German and French large banks. While crediting Huth’s diligence, Mises finds that his preference for combining banking functions turns the inquiry toward a defence of the German system. Mises instead locates the stronger explanation for divergent banking development in the structures of industry and commerce, rather than in banking techniques alone. The review offers a compact example of his critical method: acknowledging useful research while asking whether its evidence explains institutional differences or merely ranks their merits.

A hostile notice in the Prenzlauer Zeitung, picking up a foreign source's reading of an article he had written for the Lloyds Review, forced Schumpeter to explain himself to his faculty dean. The letter reconstructs the piece's reluctant, patriotic origin, commissioned through Lloyds Bank and Sir William Dampier and taken up only after an appeal to his national feeling, and restates its transfer-theoretical core: reparations cannot be treated as a bare legal demand when world protectionism, and France's Kontingentierungspolitik in particular, block the German exports through which alone they could be paid. Insistence on the claim, he argues, must be tested against willingness to accept German goods. By authorizing the dean to circulate the letter, he turns a private defense into a document of Weimar intellectual politics.

Wenn das Bestehen auf der Reparationsforderung keine böse Schikane sein soll, so müsste sich die Welt im Allgemeinen vom Protektionismus abwenden und Frankreich im besonderen seine Kontingentierungspolitik aufgeben, was das wahre Kriterium der Annahmewilligkeit und doch nicht unmöglich wäre.

English translation: “If insistence on the reparations claim is not to be sheer malicious harassment, then the world in general would have to turn away from protectionism, and France in particular would have to abandon its quota policy—which would be the true criterion of a willingness to accept payment, and yet would not be impossible.”

Accused by the Prenzlauer Zeitung of denying Germany's capacity to make further tribute payments, Schumpeter answers the newspaper directly, and his grievance is as much logical as political. To prove an impossibility, he explains, one first states the conditions under which the thing would be possible and then shows that they do not obtain; the paper had seized only that first, conditional step and reversed the argument into its opposite. He notes that the editors relied uncritically on a source known to be unfriendly to Germany, that a telephone call would have spared them the error, and that a German teacher was hardly likely to hold the position ascribed to him. Nationalist in tone yet formal in method, the short letter defends argumentative accuracy under the pressure of the reparations crisis.

Reißt ein feindlicher Bericht das erste Glied heraus und lässt er die Bedingungen, deren Unmöglichkeit die Unmöglichkeit des Tributs erweist, weg, so ist das Argument in sein Gegenteil verkehrt.

English translation: “If a hostile report tears out the first link and omits the conditions whose impossibility proves the impossibility of the tribute, then the argument is turned into its opposite.”

A wage increase cannot be assessed through wages alone: its effects on prices, employment, and production depend on the accompanying policy choices. In this 1977 article, Guillermo L. Gómez M. and Gerhard Tintner build an aggregate model of Colombia that combines Keynesian consumption relationships with neoclassical production and labor demand. Their estimates make the case for coordinating investment, public expenditure, and trade policy rather than treating economic targets separately. Yet the practical ambition encounters unreliable data, restrictive assumptions, and the unresolved choice of a welfare objective. Readers can examine both the numerical trade-offs the authors identify and their refusal to turn modeled wage effects into a mechanical recommendation for wage freezes—a concrete encounter between econometric calculation and political feasibility.

Hard problems melt like chocolate creams, and hungry seminar participants replenish themselves through “Import tariffs”: Felix Kaufmann’s song affectionately brings intellectual ambition down to the dinner table. In Arlene Oost-Zinner’s 2010 English translation, this portrait of the Mises Circle makes debate and conviviality parts of the same pleasure. Yet its confidence briefly falters: why keep questioning when life flows on regardless? The answer—a resolve to take a stand—gives the returning refrain a seriousness its exuberant praise of truth might initially conceal. This small work offers a distinctive glimpse of scholarly fellowship expressed through jokes, shared appetites, and the feeling of being at home in argument.

Royal authority in Hammurabi’s Babylon depended on institutions it did not simply replace: lineages, temples, households, and privileged associations. In this completed section on the state, Richard Thurnwald reads laws alongside royal letters and contracts to ask how kingship cut across inherited dependencies while continuing to govern through them. His distinctive emphasis falls on overlapping functions: temples stored and lent as well as taught, while figures translated as merchants also collected dues and directed exchange. Legal distinctions between free people, royal dependents, and enslaved people make these relationships tangible through unequal compensation and punishment. Readers encounter a reconstruction of government through personal obligations rather than an impersonal apparatus—one whose tentative institutional identifications and evolutionary assumptions remain open to scrutiny.

An economist’s books have no buyers: in Felix Kaufmann’s comic song, even the defence of marginal utility suffers from insufficient demand. A Vienna-trained scholar greets his school’s supposed demise with theatrical despair, turning Menger’s work into a devotional object and his pen into a dagger—until economic polemics summon him back to battle. Set to Schumann’s music with an acknowledged debt to Heine, the song makes scholarly allegiance look at once ridiculous and resilient. Its humour lies in the uneasy overlap between devotion to a theory and concern for one’s own professional survival. Arlene Oost-Zinner’s 2010 English translation and arrangement preserve this small drama of intellectual loyalty, in which economic terminology itself joins the heroic posturing.

An invitation to refute a doctrine becomes comic when the speaker declares in advance that no critic can succeed. Felix Kaufmann’s two-stanza song turns economic conviction into a performance of certainty: marginal utility supplies the recurring answer, while Vienna claims privileged access to liberalism’s reasons. The sharper joke concerns values, which the speaker holds at a distance before insisting that thought cannot proceed without them. In Arlene Oost-Zinner’s 2010 English translation, with music by Gustav Pick, readers encounter a compact satire of theoretical allegiance and methodological self-contradiction. Although the title names Mises and Mayer, the lyrics leave their respective positions unassigned; the interest lies in the confident voice and the tensions it cannot quite conceal.

A scientist writes through the night until a methodologist compares his prose to beer foam and dismisses his a priori assumptions. In Felix Kaufmann’s satirical song, scholarly correction becomes mock-tragic catastrophe: the manuscript turns to ashes, taking its author’s sense of purpose with it. Yet the scientist’s increasingly elaborate “knots” of thought leave his own intellectual pretensions exposed. Presented in Arlene Oost-Zinner’s 2010 English translation, with music by Friedrich Silcher and an acknowledged debt to Heinrich Heine, this miniature stages a pointed tension between critical scrutiny and the confidence inquiry requires. Its comedy lies in the disproportion between a methodological rebuke and the ruin it brings.