The archive.

Kaufmann relocates the objectivity of social science from private conviction to public procedure: a proposition is valid only relative to the rules that govern how claims are accepted, rejected, connected, and corrected within inquiry. Written in English under the influence of Dewey's Logic, the book refuses to seek certainty before science begins, holding that every attempt to ground empirical knowledge in self-evident truths is foredoomed. Its recurring operation is a sorting of levels, separating facts, meanings, rules of procedure, and formal relations that disputants habitually let slide into one another. Economic theory supplies his sharpest cases. Demand curves and marginal-utility principles are not empirical laws falsifiable by a single instance but theoretical rules; and Mises's a priori derivation of value and price is shown to be analytic unless tied to empirical rules. Objectivity here is procedural, not absolute; formalism clarifies rather than reduces.

All attempts to base empirical science on ultimate grounds conceived as self-evident truths are foredoomed to failure.

Should a farmer invest in new buildings and machinery, or spend more on feed, fuel, repairs, and supplies? Gerhard Tintner and O. H. Brownlee bring this practical allocation problem to production-function analysis using 1939 records from 468 Iowa farms. Their estimates suggest that these farms were, on average, over-improved: additional operating expenditure and productive assets promised greater marginal returns than further improvements. The interest lies as much in how they reach that judgement as in the recommendation itself. Translating accounts into inputs exposes unmeasured differences in land and labor and, crucially, the absence of any satisfactory measure of management. Readers can see how elasticities become investment comparisons—and why findings from unusually prosperous farms in a single year cannot become general rules for Iowa agriculture.

When does a political ideal become a claim that evidence can test? In this 1944 review of Harold J. Laski’s Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time, Joseph A. Schumpeter respects the radical convictions while questioning the diagnosis that makes socialist reconstruction urgent. His distinctive move is to turn Marxist criticism back upon the intellectuals who proclaim capitalism exhausted: a doctrine’s ideological origins do not disprove it, but neither do shared convictions establish its truth. Soviet expansion provides a concrete test of the claim that imperialism depends on capitalism. This brief encounter lets readers see Schumpeter distinguish ethical preference from causal explanation—and acknowledge, in the case of fascism, where criticism has yet to yield an adequate explanation.

Disputes over capital punishment, taxation and political representation often concern not just conclusions but the standards of justice themselves. In this brief review of Ray Lepley’s Verifiability of Value, Felix Kaufmann asks what such disagreement means for the possibility of testing value judgments. He credits Lepley with a strong defense of the view that values can be tested much like facts, yet rejects its central premise: for Kaufmann, value judgments assess the correctness of valuations under presupposed standards rather than assert facts in the strict sense. The review offers a compact encounter between two approaches to verification, showing why a favorable assessment of an argument need not entail agreement about the logical character of what it seeks to establish.

Agreement with democratic ideals is not yet a demonstration of their rational validity. This distinction gives Felix Kaufmann’s review of Arthur E. Murphy’s The Uses of Reason its critical focus. Kaufmann welcomes Murphy’s defense of moral knowledge without theological or metaphysical foundations, but asks whether appeals to justice as a harmony of enlightened interests can withstand the charge that they merely disguise group preferences. His reservation concerns not the ideals themselves but the missing logical analysis of value judgments needed to defend them. The review offers a compact encounter between sympathy for Murphy’s democratic purpose and insistence on argumentative rigor: readers can see precisely where Kaufmann thinks a reasonable moral outlook still owes its skeptical opponents an answer.

Does distinguishing social from physical causation require different ways of testing causal claims, or merely different subjects of inquiry? This question sharpens Felix Kaufmann’s review of R. M. MacIver’s Social Causation. Kaufmann welcomes MacIver’s rejection of explanations that make climate, economic production, or heredity the single decisive cause, and his insistence on comparing situations before identifying what produced a change. Yet he questions whether MacIver’s classification of causal strata establishes a genuine methodological distinction. The review offers a compact encounter between sociological explanation and the philosophy of scientific testing: motives can explain action without being known infallibly, causal attribution cannot by itself establish responsibility, and differences in subject matter do not settle how claims should be verified or falsified.

A plea for peace becomes grounds for suspecting an economist’s financial motives: this episode anchors Ludwig von Mises’s review of S. Leon Levy’s biography of Nassau W. Senior. Mises praises Levy’s portrait of the liberal publicist while rejecting the title’s elevation of Senior into a prophet of capitalism. His sharper concern is the reception of Senior’s proposed arbitration of the Oregon boundary dispute, when even Macaulay questioned his impartiality rather than answering his arguments. Mises finds here a failure of reasoned debate within liberal Britain itself. This brief review reveals his standards for judging an intellectual predecessor: theoretical originality matters, but so does the independence to oppose national passions without being dismissed as cynical.

Richard von Strigl conducted much of his teaching and research in the time left over from his work at Vienna’s Unemployment Insurance Board. In this brief obituary, Hayek places that constrained academic career beside an unusually extensive influence on younger economists. He remembers Strigl as a link to Böhm-Bawerk’s seminar and as a teacher on whom hopes for the Austrian School’s survival in Vienna had rested. Testimony from Strigl’s pupil J. Steindl adds a distinct perspective: liberal, humane teaching offered an alternative to the nationalism of Austrian academic life. The result is a personal account of intellectual continuity sustained through teaching and friendship, with Hayek’s assessments of Strigl’s books set against the limited public recognition their author received.

Economics cannot become exact merely by borrowing the vocabulary of mathematics; it must first clarify what utility, strategy, coalition and stability mean. From that conviction von Neumann and Morgenstern rebuild economic behavior as interdependent choice, where each participant maximizes an outcome he does not control—so games, not single-agent calculation, become the governing model. Read here in the German translation of the 1944 Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, the argument runs from an axiomatic numerical utility through the minimax theorem for two-person zero-sum games, where rational play may demand mixed strategies and probability becomes part of optimal design rather than uncertainty. Extending to n-person games, they replace the single optimal outcome with stable sets of imputations—standards of behavior that resist internal domination—and turn coalitions, bargaining and market organization into formal objects against the Lausanne equilibrium tradition.

Man kann nicht exakte Methoden verwenden, solange keine Klarheit in den Begriffen und Fragen besteht, auf die sie angewendet werden sollen.

English translation: “One cannot employ exact methods so long as there is no clarity concerning the concepts and questions to which they are to be applied.”

Knowing a group’s customs is not the same as knowing how to act among its members. In this essay, republished here in 1964, Alfred Schütz examines the adult newcomer whose inherited expectations no longer provide reliable guidance. The immigrant is his principal example, but his concern is the practical work of entering any unfamiliar social world. Insiders rely on shared recipes for conduct; the stranger must investigate whether those recipes will work from a position they do not necessarily anticipate. Schütz’s distinction between understanding a language and expressing oneself through its social nuances makes this difficulty concrete. His analysis also reframes apparent disloyalty: what members regard as reluctance to accept their ways may be the newcomer’s inability to take those ways for granted.

Three problems—development, individuality, and success—organize this genealogy of how history became the medium in which German thought grasped culture, politics, and human meaning. Tracing a line from Herder's Volksgeist through Humboldt, Goethe, Niebuhr, and the Romantic school to Hegel, Ranke, Marx, and Schopenhauer, Engel-Janosi shows historicism forming by refusing the Enlightenment's universal progress: each epoch, people, and life-form becomes an individual with its own inward justification. The culmination is Jacob Burckhardt, who abandons Hegelian purpose and moral progress for constants, types, and recurring forms, and who holds that political power is in itself evil even as culture depends upon it. Historicism thereby reaches its height as a disciplined art of memory—already shadowed by Nietzsche's counter-demand for an art of forgetting.

Ich aber behaupte, jede Epoche ist unmittelbar zu Gott.

English translation: “But I maintain: every epoch is immediate to God.”

Faithfully printing a manuscript is not the same as making a usable bibliography. In this 1945 review of MacMinn, Hainds, and McCrimmon’s edition of John Stuart Mill’s hand-list, Hayek tests editorial fidelity against the needs of researchers: missing writings, misplaced dates, and an absent index all obstruct access. He also supplies repairs, drawing on earlier notes and surviving pamphlets to identify elusive publications. His concern extends beyond accurate titles: an annotation of Mill’s review of Thornton overlooks what Hayek identifies as its retraction of the wage-fund theory. This brief review shows Hayek at work as a bibliographical investigator, appreciative of newly accessible evidence yet attentive to the practical details that allow readers to trace changes in Mill’s thought.