The archive.

Mandeville and Adam Smith showed that a market can turn private self-interest into social coordination; Strigl's 1933 offprint, printed for the Association of Austrian Banks and Bankers, denies that this licenses the state to grant favors to particular firms and trades. He tests the interventionist slogan that every branch of national labor has a claim to protection and finds it hollow: imports do not make employment vanish but merely shift it while raising costs, wages, and consumer prices, and rescuing loss-making firms diverts scarce capital from productive uses. Such policy he names anti-selectionist, since it freezes existing arrangements against necessary structural change, and he traces a self-reinforcing spiral in which crisis breeds intervention and intervention deepens crisis. Every measure, he insists, must face one objective test: whether it serves the whole or only a favored few.

Eine gefährliche Schraube ohne Ende.

English translation: “A dangerous screw without end.”

Can the historical record ever yield laws that govern future action? Mises's answer, worked out across these essays - first published in German in 1933 as Grundprobleme der Nationalokonomie and offered here in English translation - is an emphatic no. Economics, he insists, is a branch of praxeology, an a priori science whose theorems about choice, means, ends, value, and cost are grasped from within and can be neither confirmed nor refuted by statistics. Writing as Menger's heir in the Methodenstreit, he takes on the Historical School, positivism, and historicism, and reconstructs Max Weber's ideal type only to deny that economic concepts are one-sided historical intensifications. Value is ordinal rather than measurable; socialism, without market prices, cannot calculate; and liberalism follows not as a creed but as theory applied to shared human ends.

Conception is reasoning; understanding is beholding.

The paired terms Kapitalbildung and Kapitalaufzehrung conceal an ambiguity: in a boom, a society may genuinely accumulate productive wealth or merely bid up the monetary valuation of assets it already holds. Pursuing that distinction drives Schiff's contribution to early empirical business-cycle research, issued through Vienna's Institute for Business Cycle Research with acknowledged help from Hayek, Morgenstern, and Machlup. Working in the Austrian tradition of Böhm-Bawerk, he treats capital not as a stock of things but as a value-form — the capitalized stream of expected returns — so the same plant signifies differently as interest rates and profit expectations shift. Vertical malinvestment in the upswing, over-lengthened roundabout production, and the crisis felt as capital shortage amid idle capacity organize an argument haunted by the fear of secular capital shrinkage.

Die Theorie, die das Wesen des Kapitalwertes als diskontierten oder kapitalisierten Ertrages vielleicht am meisten betont und die belangreichsten Folgerungen daraus ableitet, ist die Kapitaltheorie Fishers.

English translation: “The theory that perhaps most strongly emphasizes the essence of capital value as discounted or capitalized yield, and that draws the most significant conclusions from it, is Fisher's theory of capital.”

Written in 1933 as the United States' experiment in credit-controlled stabilization was collapsing, this pamphlet—introduced by Harry Gideonse—makes monetary law the guardian of production and employment rather than of abstract justice between creditor and debtor. Its rule is the stabilization of purchasing power through a wholesale-price index, chosen over broader cost-of-living standards that merely register productivity or contracts. Its sharpest theoretical stroke is the contrast between stable money and the Hayekian ideal of neutral money, which Mahr judges administratively unusable because velocity and money substitutes cannot be measured. Reconsidering the 1920s, he concedes that stable prices did not prevent the boom, yet blames the catastrophe on deflationary collapse—and licenses credit-financed public works, disciplined by a legally fixed price target, while demoting gold from principle to mere reassuring camouflage.

If currency policy, however, is legally directed toward the stabilization of purchasing power, the limit of credit expansion would coincide with the attainment of the intended level of prices.

Written in the spring of 1933, as Hitler consolidated power, this short essay confronts a comforting misreading head-on: that National Socialism was a conservative or capitalist reaction. Hayek argues the opposite, that it was a genuinely socialist and collectivist movement, the ripened fruit of an anti-liberal current running through German thought since the Bismarckian era. Its hostility to the Marxist parties, he contends, was national and cultural rather than economic, while its intellectual debts ran to Marxian relativism and anti-rationalism. Tracing how collectivist planning tends toward coercion, the suppression of intellectual freedom, and finally dictatorship, he warns that other Western nations expanding state control over economic life court the same descent. A compact statement of the themes Hayek would enlarge a decade later in The Road to Serfdom.

The inherent logic of collectivism makes it impossible to confine it to a limited sphere.

No sect, no school: the new discipline gathering around Econometrica is, on Schumpeter's telling, not a mathematical faction but the explicit recognition that a large part of economics is already numerical. Prices, unlike many physical magnitudes, need no artificial measuring procedure invented for them; they exist socially as numerical relations, which lets him call economics the most quantitative of all sciences, physics not excluded. Econometrics simply faces the consequences of that fact. He reconstructs the history of the field as an unfinished quantitative tendency running through Petty, Gregory King, Ricardo, Cournot, Thünen, Walras, Marshall, Fisher, and Moore, then diagnoses the present ailment as institutional: theorist, statistician, and fact-collector work past one another. The remedy is cooperation on concrete numerical problems rather than methodological polemic, disinterested work whose practical uses arrive only as by-product.

There is high remedial virtue in quantitative argument and exact proof.

Here in the English translation of Haberler's 1933 Der internationale Handel, the whole of foreign trade is folded into general price theory: exchange rates are prices formed by supply and demand, balances of payments are not autonomous magnitudes, and comparative advantage is rebuilt on opportunity cost rather than the labour theory of value. The treatise runs from the foreign-exchange market and the gold standard through the transfer problem — with extended treatment of German reparations and the Keynes-Ohlin controversy — to a systematic anatomy of commercial policy: tariffs, dumping, cartels, infant-industry claims and quotas. Throughout, protection is judged by its hidden diversion of resources and its costs to consumers and exporters, not by the visible survival of sheltered industries. Haberler reserves his sharpest hostility for quantitative restrictions, which suppress the price mechanism more arbitrarily than any duty.

It is the increase and not the reduction of duties which is the real economic burden!

What Hayek defends under the name 'neutral money' is a tool of theoretical analysis, not a norm for central banks—a distinction he presses against Koopmans and Egle. The concept names an imagined case in which a money economy would leave relative prices to the 'real' determinants of barter-equilibrium theory, a counterfactual for detecting when money becomes an independent force. Its starting point is that money breaks the identity of supply and demand that barter enforces in every market: hoarding, dishoarding, newly created and destroyed money each inject demand without supply, or the reverse. From this follows the benchmark of a constant money stream. Yet sticky prices, long-term money contracts and downward wage rigidity create frictions, so practical policy may need a compromise—perhaps stabilizing an index of original-factor prices—which must not be confused with neutrality itself.

Der Begriff neutrales Geld war bestimmt, als Instrument der theoretischen Analyse zu dienen und sollte keineswegs in erster Linie eine währungspolitische Norm bilden.

English translation: “The concept of neutral money was designed to serve as an instrument of theoretical analysis and by no means was intended primarily to constitute a norm for monetary policy.”

Marxism stands or falls with its theory of value—and by that measure, this 1933 polemic sets out to demolish it. Presenting Marx largely in his own words before turning to a factual but uncompromising critique, Kerschagl reverses the Marxian causal order: labor does not create value; labor is undertaken because a purposively valued good is sought. Socially necessary labor time becomes a fiction unable to compare heterogeneous work or accommodate scarcity and demand, while the money chapter convicts Marx of a crude metallism blind to credit and purchasing power. The book's sharpest thrust is the calculation argument—by admitting only one factor of production, Marxism destroys the very measures a planned economy would need to know which processes waste labor and capital. Class struggle, he concludes, dissolves nation, law, and religion into organized antagonism.

Geldschöpfung, Angebot und Nachfrage, Marktprobleme existieren für Marx überhaupt nicht.

English translation: “Money creation, supply and demand, market problems simply do not exist for Marx.”

The book that Hulsmann's introduction calls the great untranslated work of interwar Austrian economics appears here in its first English edition, rendering the 1934 Kapital und Produktion for readers of capital-based macroeconomics. Strigl builds an entire theory of production on the higher yield of roundabout methods and the wage-fund idea: capital is not an independent force but a way of using labor and land across time, sustained by a fund of subsistence goods. He distinguishes free capital, intermediate products, and fixed capital, and traces how credit expansion — money capital created beyond real saving — lowers interest below equilibrium, lengthens production past what the subsistence fund can support, and immobilizes investment. Two appendices carry the argument into the business cycle, joining Bohm-Bawerk's production theory to Mises's theory of the crisis.

Owning capital equipment can never in itself represent wealth; it only becomes wealth if it can be integrated into the structure of production.

By 1934 the Grundsätze had grown almost impossible to obtain, even as the doctrines it launched spread across Europe—an obscurity Hayek's essay sets out to correct. His claim is that Menger did not merely share the marginal-utility discovery with Jevons and Walras but gave it the causal-subjective form from which Austrian method, value theory, price theory and monetary analysis all descend; the ideas Böhm-Bawerk and Wieser refined were at bottom Menger's own. Reading the Grundsätze closely, he shows economic activity as planning for the future, value as ordinal and quantity-dependent, productive factors priced by imputation, and money emerging through degrees of saleability. The Untersuchungen and the Methodenstreit with Schmoller become a defense of theory itself, grounded in an individualist method and an insight into the unintended order of social life.

But it is not unduly to detract from the merits of these writers to say that its fundamental ideas belong fully and wholly to Carl Menger.

Rappard defines the small state not by population, territory, wealth, or neutrality but by a single constitutional fact: exclusion from the League of Nations Council's permanent seats. That negative definition — Max Huber's 'Nichtgrosstaaten' — lets him read the League as both a rupture with old diplomacy and its continuation, since the nineteenth-century Concert of Europe had already married nominal equality to rule by the principal Powers. Article 4 of the Covenant, he argues, did not merely manage this hierarchy but legalized it, turning long-standing political inequality into open constitutional fact. Tracing the Paris negotiations, where Cecil defended Great-Power control and Wilson supplied democratic language, he shows why intermediate and aspiring states — Spain, Poland, Argentina, Brazil — made resentment inevitable, and why the weak came to prize law as both moral preference and practical necessity.

It is not unnatural, although it may give rise to cynical comment: the nations whose only material bond is a common lack of might are spiritually linked together by a common love of right.