The archive.

Legal concepts, Kaufmann argues, become intelligible only once the pure formal structure of law is stripped of everything empirical, psychological, sociological, and political clinging to it. Extending his earlier Logik und Rechtswissenschaft, this German study grounds jurisprudence in a general logic of science: the dualism of factual and essential knowledge, and a principle of compatibility spheres governing which predicates may belong to which domains. Against theories that define law by force, recognition, or fear of sanctions, Kaufmann insists that law is a totality of sanctioned norms, a double norm binding conduct to consequence, and that the juridical person is no metaphysical substance but a rule-governed unit of imputation. Fusing Husserlian phenomenology with Kelsen's pure theory, he traces legal validity to the Grundnorm and rejects natural law, since value-judgments admit no theoretical proof.

Recht ist ein Inbegriff sanktionierter Normen über menschliches Verhalten.

English translation: “Law is a totality of sanctioned norms concerning human conduct.”

Gold’s appeal, for Ludwig von Mises, lies not in perfect price stability but in limiting political control over money. In this 1924 lecture, published as a journal article, he asks whether currencies governed by price indices could offer a better safeguard. His concrete objection is that selecting commodities, weights and averages turns apparently technical measurement into decisions that redistribute wealth between creditors and debtors. Yet his defence of gold also exposes its institutional vulnerability: if central banks hold foreign claims rather than metal, responsibility for the world’s monetary gold falls on fewer countries. Readers can discover both the reasoning behind Mises’s preference for gold and a tension within his proposed restoration—monetary independence from governments secured through international agreements and even punitive tariffs.

Does recognizing the same object across different acts of thought require a special intuition of the object as a whole? In this review of Edith Landmann’s Die Transzendenz des Erkennens, Felix Kaufmann accepts the phenomenological distinction between a cognitive act and its object but challenges Landmann’s further claim that partial apprehensions depend upon a “total intention.” The disagreement becomes concrete in mathematics: numbers do not arise or disappear with counting, and Kaufmann resists making formal truths dependent on concrete existence. His sympathetic yet pointed assessment lets readers examine the step from intentionality to a hierarchy that places philosophical intuition above scientific knowledge—and see why admiration for a book’s subtlety need not entail acceptance of its governing premise.

When the Czechoslovak crown came into existence in late February 1919, old Austro-Hungarian notes overstamped and declared sole legal tender, a successor state set out to build a currency from a wartime paper inheritance. Amonn traces that reconstruction to the stabilization debates of 1924 through note circulation, Lombard credit, discount policy, foreign-exchange reserves, and the wealth levy. His governing distinction separates elastic money, born of discounting genuine commercial bills and adjusting automatically to trade, from inelastic money created by Lombard advances and devisen purchases. On that basis he rejects the loose charge of deflation: Czechoslovak policy aimed at exchange-rate stability and real reserve backing, not deliberate contraction, and the crown's 1922 appreciation owed more to intervention and speculative capital flows than to any shrinking of the money stock.

Die neue Währung stellt sich hiernach formell als eine „Staatsnoten“währung, materiell aber als eine Banknotenwährung dar.

English translation: “Formally, the new currency presents itself as a "state-note" currency, but materially as a banknote currency.”

How can taxation be justified economically when the benefits of security, justice, or disease prevention cannot be divided into personal shares? In this 1924 article, Emil Sax revises his earlier account of collective needs to confront that difficulty. He argues that public spending and the distribution of tax burdens must be judged together: who pays determines which private satisfactions are surrendered, and thus how much collective provision is warranted. Against treating taxes as prices for individually measurable benefits, Sax develops an account of collective appraisal and subjectively equivalent contributions. His disputes with Wicksell and Lindahl expose the difficulty of extending value theory beyond market exchange, while his qualified case for progression shows why that extension supplies neither an exact measure of equal burdens nor a universal tax schedule.

Can equal incomes explain prices if incomes themselves depend on prices? This is the central difficulty Alfred Amonn finds in Franz Oppenheimer’s reconstruction of objective value theory in the second edition of Wert und Kapitalprofit. In this 1924 critical article, Amonn grants his opponent’s premises provisionally, then tests what the equations actually explain. His objections turn on concrete distinctions: equally capable workers may demand different pay for unpleasant work; a bundle of consumption goods is not interchangeable with its monetary price or subjective worth. Neither dismissing classical theory wholesale nor accepting its reconstruction, Amonn asks what makes an economic explanation more than a restatement of interdependence. His analysis also shows why unchanged equilibrium prices need not demonstrate that demand has ceased to matter.

Restricting domestic credit and building foreign-exchange reserves might seem complementary tasks for a new monetary authority. In this 1924 article, Alfred Amonn shows why they initially worked against each other at the Czechoslovak Bank Office. His assessment of its first five years measures policy against inherited assets, available lending instruments, and the delayed response of trade—not merely against legislative intentions or note-bank doctrine. Lending against securities weakened monetary control, yet, he argues, helped sustain postwar recovery when commercial bills were scarce. Exchange-rate appreciation likewise demanded attention to inventories, production costs, and the financing of raw-material imports. The article offers a concrete account of how monetary authority was acquired through practice, and why reserve losses or departures from orthodox banking rules did not by themselves establish policy failure.

Schönfeld-Illy asks what marginal utility is once it is placed inside the real procedure of economic choice, and answers that it is not a measurable quantum of pleasure but a functional shortcut. Economic agents, he observes, do not measure utility; for one use to be greater than another means only that it holds economic precedence. Grounding subjective welfare in the Gesamtwirtschaftsnutzen — the total utility of an actor's whole stock of goods — he treats calculation as a maximum problem solved not by summing utilities but by weighing performance against counter-performance through successive partial decisions. Marginal utility, he concludes, belongs to the abbreviated procedure agents actually use, distinct from the theoretical utility-orderings behind it. Kurt Leube's preface to this 1924 treatise places its neglected author, a pupil of Böhm-Bawerk and Wieser, between Mises and the generation of Hayek and Machlup.

Die beim Wirtschaften über die Güter zu treffenden Verfügungen werden von dem subjektiven konkreten Nutzen dieser Güter regiert.

English translation: “The dispositions to be made in economic action over goods are governed by the subjective concrete utility of these goods.”

Wartime industrial expansion had not displaced Japan’s small farms, labor-intensive cultivation, or intricate networks of commercial intermediaries. In this three-part newspaper article of 1924, Emil Lederer asks how these enduring arrangements coexist with inflation and growing pressure for economic change. Writing from Tokyo, he distinguishes the organization that determines what Japan can produce from the monetary policies that determine its general price level. His criticism of gold and credit policy sits alongside a more troubling question: could European-style rationalization improve productivity without destroying the cultural foundations of Japanese economic life? Readers encounter an economist testing his analytical categories against unfamiliar institutions—and tracing how restricted political representation and policies favoring powerful producers turn economic constraints into social conflict.

A punishment remains legally prescribed even when the prisoner experiences it as comfortable provision rather than deprivation. For Felix Kaufmann, this distinction exposes the gap between a legal norm’s meaning and its psychological effects. In this 1924 essay, Kant’s contribution to jurisprudence lies not in particular legal doctrines but in the demand to distinguish an inquiry’s proper object from neighbouring questions. Kaufmann sees Kelsen’s pure theory of law as carrying out that demand: neither coercive power nor habitual obedience can establish legal validity. His analysis offers a precise way to distinguish what law requires from what people actually do, while confronting the harder question of how norms acquire authority. Particularly revealing is his account of legal delegation, where an authorized command need not be logically contained in the rule authorizing it.

A mathematical function is not a function of money; a unit of account is not a means of payment. These distinctions anchor Alfred Amonn’s sharp reply to Stephan Raditz’s defence of his German translation of Walras. Amonn argues that scholarly translation demands both linguistic accuracy and an understanding of the concepts being translated: plausible wording can otherwise alter an economic argument or turn a historical event into a hypothetical assumption. His examples make the stakes concrete, while his rejection of excuses involving haste and inadequate dictionaries raises the question of responsibility for a published text. This brief, combative exchange lets readers examine where translation errors become conceptual errors—and how a critic seeks to substantiate an adverse judgment without undertaking a complete correction.

Ricardo both founded theoretical economics and led it astray, so runs the double verdict of this centenary study. He founded it, Amonn argues, by isolating its true problem: not the justice of class shares but the formal mechanism by which rent, profit, wages, and prices arise in exchange. He misled it by taking the labor-value principle as an unexamined axiom, confusing a mere indicator of value with its cause. Across chapters on heterogeneous labor, capital durability, profit, and rent, Amonn shows the principle breaking down, rent springs from the scarcity of land relative to demand, not from cultivating inferior soil. In its place he rebuilds value on relative scarcity, joining Cassel's equilibrium equations to marginal utility, and reads modern theory as the recovery of an insight Ricardo glimpsed and abandoned.

Der Wert der Güter „hängt“ nicht und niemals „ab“ von der zu ihrer Produktion erforderlichen Arbeitsmenge.

English translation: “The value of goods does not, and never does, "depend" on the quantity of labor required for their production.”