The archive.

Karl Bücher's picture of an original closed household economy, sealed off from trade, is the adversary this third volume keeps returning to; Thurnwald rejects it as a construction unsupported by ethnography or history. Reciprocal giving, barter, ceremonial exchange, and market fairs, he shows, reach down to hunters and gatherers; the Trobriand Kula circulates armrings and necklaces as prestige rather than property, while Northwest Coast potlatch turns wealth into power through ceremonial dispersal, not hoarding. He coins Naturkapital for the self-renewing capital of seed and herds in moneyless economies, traces money from preferred exchange objects to cowries and cattle, and reads women and slaves as the earliest concentrated labor capital. Against Durkheim and Bücher he denies that economic development reduces to a growing division of labor, calling economic activity a psychically and socially conditioned process.

Was wir Wirtschaft nennen, kommt erst durch die Organisierung der Menschen eines bestimmten technischen Könnens zustande.

English translation: “What we call economy comes about only through the organization of people possessing a certain technical capability.”

The evolutionary set-pieces of ethnology are dismantled one by one in this second volume: primordial promiscuity and group marriage, read by Morgan and MacLennan out of Hawaiian kin-terms, and bride capture as an original form of marriage, which Thurnwald re-explains as staged ritual resistance rather than real abduction. Family, kinship, and the men's houses, initiations, and secret societies that overlay them are his subject. Mother-right and father-right, he insists, almost never appear in pure logical form; classificatory kinship sorts people by social obligation, not genealogical degree. Marriage orders teem with positive prescriptions, not only prohibitions, and what Europeans call incest is often better named social disgrace. Milk kinship and blood brotherhood extend the same logic, binding strangers into kin through the magical power of substance.

Es gibt ja keinen Menschen an sich, sondern nur männliche oder weibliche, junge oder alte.

English translation: “There is no such thing as a human being in the abstract, but only male or female, young or old ones.”

Profit-seeking, this comparative survey insists, is no natural law of economic life but a peculiarity of modern society. Ranging across Melanesia, Micronesia, East Africa, Sumer and archaic Babylon, Thurnwald treats economics not as mere food-getting but as a social system woven from household reciprocity, rank obligation, ritual, and the conservative force of tradition. He dismantles the tidy evolutionary sequence of hunting, pastoralism and agriculture, follows Edward Hahn in separating hoe from plough cultivation, and reads kula exchange, potlatch display, wergeld and temple redistribution as forms in which wealth circulates for prestige rather than gain. Against Max Weber he derives the Babylonian governor's estate from earlier temple administration, and against Carl Bücher he denies the self-sufficient manor. Capital first appears, he argues, in herds and standing crops.

A characteristic feature of primitive economics is the absence of any desire to make profits either from production or exchange.

A seventy-one-page pamphlet on price formation in the German scholarly antiquarian book trade, trailing a bibliography of theoretical works 'von Gossen bis Wicksell,' is exactly the mismatch of apparatus and achievement Hayek finds intolerable. His single-paragraph notice grants that the subject—rare, heterogeneous goods with widely dispersed valuations—could have been theoretically revealing, then denies that Bruck makes anything of it. The yield for price theory is meagre; the factual information is thinner than a regular reader of booksellers' catalogues could assemble unaided, especially on the two matters that would have mattered most: the movement of antiquarian prices over time and the 'Streuung' of simultaneous prices for identical works. The verdict is disciplinary—casual market observation, bibliographic display and genuine value theory are not the same thing, and Bruck has confused them.

Die preistheoretische Ausbeute ist recht mager.

English translation: “The yield for price theory is decidedly meagre.”

Reviewing Husserl's newly published Cartesian Meditations—still available only in French—Schütz reads it as an attempt to ground all philosophy in transcendental subjectivity, taking up Descartes's radical doubt while correcting its errors through the epoché and the phenomenological reduction. He follows Husserl's analyses of intentionality, the noetic-noematic correlation, and the transcendental ego as a monadic field structured by habitualities and passive genesis. Special weight falls on the difficult fifth meditation and its account of how the alter ego is constituted through appresentation and pairing, yielding an objective world valid for everyone. Schütz marks the work's transcendental idealism and its opposition to psychologism, points toward the tasks it opens for a phenomenologically grounded social science, and closes with the wish that Husserl make the book available to German readers.

„Gegenstände“ sind daher – in der reduzierten Sphäre sowohl als auch in der natürlichen Einstellung – nichts anderes als intentionale Korrelate ihrer Bewußtseinsweisen.

English translation: “Objects" are therefore – in the reduced sphere as well as in the natural attitude – nothing other than intentional correlates of their modes of consciousness.”

Statutes, reserve rules, and central-bank independence all fail, Strigl warns, against the one authority that can suspend them — the state itself. Written amid the crisis after 1929, as several central banks drifted back toward expansionary “accommodating” policy, this essay asks whether a currency can be secured against political manipulation rather than mere mismanagement. Its conceptual pivot is a reversal of Gresham’s law: where people are free to denominate contracts, wages, and credit in a sounder foreign currency, good money drives out bad, and depreciating money survives only through ignorance, habit, or coercion. Strigl’s remedy is not a new currency scheme but a legal one — treaties binding states never to prohibit a partner’s currency, creating an automatic and sensitive index of monetary health. A state that cannot outlaw the foreign money cannot inflate.

Der Geist der Zeit ist inflationistisch und manche Völker werden für ihre Heilung von währungspolitischen Irrtümern jetzt wieder schweres Lehrgeld zahlen müssen.

English translation: “The spirit of the age is inflationist, and some peoples will now once again have to pay dearly to be cured of their monetary-policy errors.”

A prediction come true frames this 1932 pamphlet: the crisis, its author had forecast, would end only after Italian banking reconstruction, the collapse and reorganization of Germany's banks, Britain's suspension of gold, and the fall of the Kreuger concern. With those grim preconditions fulfilled, Somary asks whether the turn has come. He indicts moratoria and the German Stillhalteabkommen as evasions that postpone necessary write-downs, argues that commodity prices have reached a despair point from which raw-material countries will lead recovery, and reads France's vast hoarded gold reserve—explained through the memory of John Law and the assignats—as a latent support. His proposals bind reparations to guaranteed purchases of American wheat, cotton, and copper, cut expenditure to revenue, and rehabilitate currencies by telling the truth and writing down claims.

Mit „Kreditschöpfung“ ist wenig zu erreichen, es fehlt nicht an Kapital noch an Kredit, sondern an guten Schuldnern.

English translation: “Little can be achieved with "credit creation"; what is lacking is neither capital nor credit, but sound debtors.”

Haberler delivered this lecture with the Depression as backdrop, but treats panics, bank failures and crashes as secondary drama; the real object of explanation is the recurrent rhythm of expansion and contraction in business activity. Money is a necessary condition of the cycle, though not in the crude quantity-theory sense: stable prices in the 1920s, he argues, concealed a "relative inflation" in which credit expansion masked the fall that rising productivity should have produced. The decisive shift is from the level of prices to the vertical structure of production. When bank credit pushes the market rate of interest below the rate warranted by voluntary saving, entrepreneurs lengthen production into more roundabout, capital-intensive projects that consumers have not chosen to fund — a maladjustment that the depression, painfully, corrects. Reflation aimed merely at purchasing power risks reviving the very disproportions that need liquidating.

The fundamental appearance of the business cycle is a wavelike movement of business activity

By 1932 capitalism had, on Lederer's reading, long ceased to be a purely free economy: tariffs, cartels, subsidies, emergency decrees, and bank rescues had already rewritten circulation and investment. The real question was not whether planning should enter an untouched market, but whether the planning everywhere present would stay defensive and irrational or become conscious coordination. Free economy and planned economy, he argues, are opposites only in principle; in practice they interpenetrate. He proposes a planned emergency sector, idle factories and unemployed hands producing necessities distributed outside ordinary sale, and locates the true lever in credit, whose control becomes control over production itself. Planning, he insists, is not nationalization; a socialized firm still bound to the market must obey it. Against Mises he holds that prices, money, and consumer choice survive the plan, leaving economic calculation intact.

Das Problem der „Wirtschaftsrechnung“ in der Planwirtschaft ist also ein Scheinproblem.

English translation: “The problem of "economic calculation" in the planned economy is thus a pseudo-problem.”

Between the causal explanation of what exists and the normative account of what ought to be, Engliš carves out a third, autonomous form of reason: teleology, the logic of whatever is willed. On that foundation the second volume of his teleological system, given here in the German of the 1932 Czech original, constructs the state economy as a purposive order governed not by any individual's satisfaction but by an objective 'human and national ideal.' Needs, utility, cost and yield reappear as formal categories, and from them he derives a theory of taxation in which burdens fall first on the highest incomes, producing a steep progression that levels from above, checked only by the need to preserve productive incentive. A sustained critique of Hans Ritschl's rival doctrine closes the book, faulting it for lacking any central ordering purpose.

Proportionalität oder Progressivität sind keine Steuergrundsätze, sondern bestimmte Konstruktionen von Steuersätzen, die sich erst aus den Steuergrundsätzen ergeben müssen.

English translation: “Proportionality or progressivity are not principles of taxation, but particular constructions of tax rates, which must first be derived from the principles of taxation.”

Taking up Karl Knies's proposal to rank means of exchange as a third class beside consumer and producer goods, Mises, read here in the English translation of the 1932 original, builds a subjective theory of money's value. Its worth, he argues, springs from demanded monetary services, not from any intrinsic material use, and analysis must start from the individual's cash balance rather than aggregates like velocity or the equation of exchange. He rescues the quantity theory's core while discarding its mechanical version: new money enters through particular hands and redistributes wealth before prices adjust, never proportionally or all at once. A sharp line separates money proper, fully backed certificates, and unbacked fiduciary media, the last being what truly moves prices and interest. Perfectly stable money, he concludes, is a wish to escape the temporal nature of capitalism itself.

Only with the use of money is it possible to compare the marginal utility of goods in all alternative employments.

When one people takes over the tools, rites, and ideas of another, what is adopted rarely keeps its old function. Acculturation, Thurnwald argues here, is a dynamic socio-psychological process rather than a mechanical transfer, driven by individual learning, imitation, and leadership, and passing through distinct phases: initial suspicion, eager imitation, the fear of losing one's identity, and eventual recovery or self-assertion. He distinguishes selective, rejective, eliminative, and transformative responses, drawing on New Guinea, Africa, Japan's reopening, Europe, and Indigenous North America, and stresses that what passes between peoples depends on the receiving culture's own traditions. Wars, migrations, and political upheavals, he concludes, are only the visible climaxes of these deeper and slower adaptations in the life of cultures.

The acquisition of any civilizatory accomplishment is not limited to the act of acceptance like the moving of an object from one case in a museum to another.