The archive.

Remembered chiefly as a moralist and forerunner of socialism, Simonde de Sismondi had his strictly theoretical economics undervalued for a century—an imbalance this first volume, offered as a belated centenary tribute, sets out to correct. Amonn reconstructs the 1803 De la richesse commerciale, in which capital governs production understood as a process of turnover, and translates key passages with commentary. He follows Sismondi's distinction of necessary from surplus wages, his national economic balance set against the mercantilist trade balance, his treatment of money as sterile wealth and credit as merely immaterial capital, and his consumer-centered case for free trade against tariffs, guilds, apprenticeship laws, and privileged companies. Throughout, he marks where Sismondi's labor-based reduction of land and capital anticipates the socialist value theories their author himself declined to draw.

«Die Regierung kann also» – so schließt Sismondi – «niemals in die Irre gehen, wenn sie in allen Fällen in Sachen der Handelsgesetzgebung nach dem wohlverstandenen Interesse des Konsumenten verfährt.»

English translation: “The government," Sismondi concludes, "can therefore never go astray if in all matters of commercial legislation it acts in accordance with the well-understood interest of the consumer.”

Rising output need not mean rising welfare: displaced workers may lose purchasing power just as mechanization expands productive capacity. In this 1945 essay, Alfred Amonn makes Sismondi’s attention to such disruptions central to a reassessment of his economic thought. He separates theoretical achievement from policy allegiance, challenging both the dismissal of the early liberal work as derivative of Adam Smith and the reduction of the later interventionist work to humanitarian protest. Amonn finds continuity in Sismondi’s analysis of capital, income, and consumption, while acknowledging weaknesses in his deductions. The distinctive issue is not merely whether an economy eventually reaches equilibrium, but what happens to employment and livelihoods along the way—a distinction through which Amonn connects Sismondi’s work to modern theories of crises and employment.

A remedy for one industry may become a different proposition when applied across an economy. This tension gives Hayek’s review of Frank D. Graham’s Social Goals and Economic Institutions its critical edge. Welcoming Graham’s renewed attention to the purposes of economic activity, Hayek asks how proposed institutions would affect freedom over time. State ownership might address an immediate monopoly problem while helping monopoly perpetuate itself; general rules might limit deliberate control while making individual efforts more effective. His sympathy for Graham’s aims thus coexists with resistance to some of his remedies. The review offers a compact example of Hayek’s institutional reasoning—and of his insistence that practical economic judgment needs theoretical discipline, even though technical competence alone cannot supply wisdom.

Social inquiry assumes that people understand one another’s actions—but what makes such understanding possible? In this essay, first published in 1945 and reprinted here in 1967, Alfred Schütz approaches Husserl’s phenomenology with that foundational concern in view. A perceived chair, a blossoming tree, and a learned theorem make technical distinctions concrete: experience includes unseen possibilities, remembered appearances, and knowledge whose original acquisition no longer needs to be repeated. Schütz explains why suspending judgments about the world’s existence is not denying the world, and why investigating essences need not invoke mystical intuition. His account gives social scientists a precise boundary as well as a resource: phenomenology does not replace empirical research, but examines the structures of consciousness and meaning that research takes for granted.

A mountain watershed may look like a natural frontier without being either a military barrier or a boundary between communities. In this December 1945 letter to The Times, Hayek challenges the proposed return of South Tirol to Italian administration by separating these questions. His case for reunion with Austria rests on enduring regional ties rather than a demand to unite all German-speaking peoples; his strategic argument distinguishes the easily crossed high Alps from the rugged ranges enclosing the historical Tirol. Drawing on the Italian historian Gaetano Salvemini, Hayek asks whether postwar reconstruction will repair or perpetuate an earlier territorial injustice. This brief intervention offers a concrete instance of his attention to historically formed communities—and to the damage political boundaries can inflict on them.

A currency can look stable while rationing and trade controls conceal the pressures that would undo its exchange rate. In this 1945 article, Gottfried Haberler asks how governments should set postwar rates when recorded prices offer unreliable evidence and devastated economies face urgent import needs. He treats purchasing-power parity as a useful but crude guide, judging rates instead against the domestic price policies and removal of controls that countries can realistically sustain. His case for initially low valuations in continental Europe is conditional: undervaluation may ease liberalization and avoid confidence-damaging depreciations, but it also raises prices and can worsen the terms of trade. The article makes concrete why choosing a rate means choosing which risks of reconstruction to bear.

For the reigning doctrines of the age, conflict is the natural condition of intergroup relations: nations, races, and Marxian classes are read as groups whose gain must come at another's loss, so that war and civil war become the logical conclusion of what people already believe. Mises answers with the classical case for a harmony of rightly understood interests. Caste society, bound by inherited legal privilege, bred real antagonism; capitalism replaced it with equality under law, under which shoemakers are merely competitors, not enemies. The genuine conflicts of the day, tariffs, immigration barriers, pressure-group politics, spring not from the unhampered market but from interventionist policies that revive mercantilism, protectionism, and guild-style exclusion. Utilitarian ethics, he warns, stands or falls with the science of economics.

Mercantilism was a philosophy of war.

The stranger expects unfamiliarity; the homecomer expects to know where he belongs. In this essay, first published in 1945 and republished here in 1964, Alfred Schütz examines why that confidence can make return unexpectedly difficult. His central example is the veteran whose changed priorities and experience meet a household shaped by its own intervening life—and by public stereotypes of combat. Letters may sustain affection without preserving shared understanding; restoring an old job may fail to recognize newly acquired ambitions. Schütz’s distinctive contribution is to connect these practical failures of recognition with the way later experience alters the meaning of the past. Homecoming, he argues, requires preparation on both sides: renewed belonging cannot simply reproduce the life remembered.

A prediction can come true without having been justified when it was made. This distinction anchors Felix Kaufmann’s inquiry into what makes a scientific judgment warranted when every empirical claim remains revisable. In this 1945 article, he uses analogies with law and grammar to locate scientific correctness in procedural standards rather than guaranteed truth or eventual success. Yet rules themselves change, and observation is never free of interpretation. Examples drawn from relativity and the failed Harvard business-cycle barometer give these tensions concrete form. Readers can discover how Kaufmann defends objectivity without claiming an ultimate foundation for scientific method—and why, for him, distinguishing warranted belief from fortunate conjecture matters to social inquiry and honest public argument.

Can Kelsen’s account of legal science survive without a fundamental divide between Is and Ought? In this brief review of William Ebenstein’s The Pure Theory of Law, Felix Kaufmann praises an exposition that connects Kelsen’s questions with those of British and American jurists, while challenging a premise Ebenstein accepts. The point of disagreement is concrete: what makes statutes, judicial decisions and executive orders parts of one legal order? Where Kelsen treats the “basic norm” as a fundamental hypothesis, Kaufmann proposes understanding it as a definition of that order’s unity. His review offers a compact encounter with a sympathetic critic who seeks to preserve Kelsen’s methodological achievements while revising their philosophical basis.

The economic problem of society, on Hayek's recasting, is not how a single mind might allocate resources it already knows, but how to make use of knowledge that no one possesses in full—dispersed, local, changing, and often tacit. Planning is not the issue, since every actor plans; the question is whether planning is centralized in one authority or divided among the many who hold knowledge of the particular circumstances of time and place. The price system is his answer: prices condense relative scarcities into signals that let people economize and substitute without grasping the underlying cause, as when a distant shortage of tin quietly prompts users everywhere to conserve it. Markets thus figure as epistemic institutions, a species of spontaneous order alongside language and law, and the socialist calculation debate turns on the impossibility of gathering that knowledge in one directing mind.

Or, to put it briefly, it is a problem of the utilization of knowledge which is not given to anyone in its totality.

An unfinished investment changes the value of the funds needed to complete it. In this 1945 article, Hayek uses that dependence to reconsider his earlier emphasis on productivity rather than time preference in explaining investment returns. The crucial distinction is between steady capital accumulation and a capital structure built on expectations of further financing that fail. When saving falls short, existing projects create an urgent demand for completion funds; the economy cannot simply retrace the path it took during expansion. Readers can discover why Hayek preserves his productivity-centred account for uninterrupted growth while allowing time preference a decisive role when expected investment is withheld—and how this distinction offers a possible explanation of sharp interest-rate increases without attributing them exclusively to monetary disturbances.