The archive.

For Fritz Machlup, brevity in an economics textbook need not mean theoretical impoverishment. His 1938 review of Richard von Strigl’s Einführung in die Grundlagen der Nationalökonomie contrasts the flood of American elementary textbooks with German-language introductions weighed down by bibliographies and footnotes. Strigl offers a different teaching model: supply and demand by page two, and a compact treatment linking roundabout production to wage-fund and marginal-productivity theories. Machlup’s praise makes clear what he values in introductory instruction—rapid access to analytical tools rather than scholarly apparatus. His notice of Strigl’s politically delicate discussion of the “common good,” including its use to justify protection and subsidies for particular groups, also shows how he connects accessible economic teaching with scrutiny of policy claims.

Inventories that look excessive in a depression may be precisely the reserves a recovery needs. In this 1938 journal article, Ludwig M. Lachmann and F. Snapper challenge the assumption that surplus stocks must disappear before expansion can resume. Drawing on commodity statistics and contrasting cases such as rubber and copper, they argue that industrial raw-material stocks generally accumulate during contraction and shrink during prosperity, buffering rather than simply amplifying fluctuations. Their distinctive emphasis is on who holds the goods, who can finance storage, and how production lags and market expectations affect inventory movements. The article shows why fixed equipment and raw-material reserves cannot be treated as interchangeable forms of investment—and why aggregate stock figures alone cannot explain a crisis.

Kerschagl's 1938 inaugural lecture surveys Austria's contribution to modern economics as both doctrinal history and methodological self-portrait, and its verdict is pointed: scientific economics on Austrian soil begins not with cameralism or mercantilism but with the marginal-utility school. Menger supplies the foundations of subjective value and imputation; Böhm-Bawerk extends them into capital, interest, and taxation; Wieser gives the theory a broader social cast—before Mises, Hayek, Schumpeter, Morgenstern, and Haberler enlarge the field. What unites them, he argues, is not uniform doctrine but an elastic analytical core, and he plays down the Methodenstreit with the German historical school as an exaggerated quarrel. Universalist organic economics, associated with Spann, earns cautious respect: valuable for recalling economists to society, but unable to replace causal explanation with metaphysical totality.

Die Ökonomie kann daher auch selbstverständlich keine größere Sicherheit bieten, als eben die beschränkte der Erfahrung selbst.

English translation: “Economics can therefore of course offer no greater certainty than the limited certainty of experience itself.”

National Socialism cannot be grasped as mere immorality, propaganda, or institutional power; it is a religious phenomenon, and a satanic force cannot be beaten by ethics and humanity alone. From that 1938 provocation Voegelin builds a morphology of sacred-political symbols reaching back to Echnaton's Aton cult, where a world-god and god-son king bind cosmos and empire. His decisive concept is the Realissimum: whatever is experienced as holy becomes the most real center around which collective life crystallizes. When secularization lets worldly contents — people, race, class, nation — swell until God vanishes behind them, these become innerworldly apocalypses, and the Führer becomes the point at which the sacred substance of the people speaks. Judged from a Christian standpoint, such divinization of collectives is apostasy.

Wo immer ein Wirkliches im religiösen Erlebnis sich als ein Heiliges zu erkennen gibt, wird es zum Allerwirklichsten, zum Realissimum.

English translation: “Wherever a reality reveals itself in religious experience as a sacred one, it becomes the most real of all, the realissimum.”

Does the equality of saving and investment express an economic fact, or follow from how the terms are defined? In this brief 1938 reply, Gottfried Haberler challenges Copeland’s claim that consistent definitions necessarily produce equality, while defending Robertson’s terminology against an alleged contradiction. His approach is neither to reject accounting identities nor to impose one vocabulary, but to distinguish what definitions establish from what requires economic explanation. The concrete test is timing: today’s earned income is not the same as today’s disposable income when the latter means yesterday’s earnings. Following this distinction, readers can see how spending from hoards or newly created money enters the account—and how shifting the meaning of “income” can manufacture a contradiction.

The vocabulary of freedom, Hayek warns, has been turned inside out — "liberalism" now names the restrictions that collectivists promise will free men from want. Written on the eve of war and anticipating The Road to Serfdom, this Chicago pamphlet argues that comprehensive planning threatens the liberties it claims to enlarge. Its logic is institutional, not conspiratorial: directing all economic life requires agreement on a ranked scale of social ends that plural societies simply lack, so planners must impose values and then manufacture belief in them. Prices, by contrast, combine dispersed knowledge no single mind commands. Because whoever controls the means controls the ends they serve, economic dictatorship cannot stay merely economic — propaganda and the suppression of dissent become essential parts of the system. Only competitive capitalism, he contends, keeps democracy from having to decide everything, and so from destroying itself.

Freedom and liberalism have become terms that are used to describe the exact opposite of their historic meaning.

Agreement that society should be more just does not settle whose needs should take precedence when resources are scarce. In this 1938 article, republished in 1997, Friedrich August von Hayek makes that gap central to his critique of comprehensive economic planning. He acknowledges the socialist ambition to enlarge freedom, but argues that centrally directing individual activities requires a ranking of purposes on which democratic citizens cannot agree. Delegating decisions to experts cannot resolve this conflict of values; in his account, it instead encourages unchecked authority and the suppression of dissent. The article offers a pointed connection between economic allocation and intellectual liberty: readers can examine why Hayek regards disagreement not as an obstacle to social reason, but as one of its necessary conditions.

Prosperity can undermine the investment that set it in motion. In “Investment and Costs of Production,” Ludwig Lachmann explains how rising consumption can increase construction costs without improving the expected long-term returns on durable assets. His distinctive move is to examine relative profitability rather than aggregate income: unemployed workers and idle machinery do not eliminate shortages of the particular skills and equipment a project requires. Readers can discover why cheap credit may fail to overcome these bottlenecks—and why commodity speculation may accelerate the cost increases that discourage investment. The article develops a qualified defence of Austrian cycle theory, while refusing to infer that falling costs will necessarily restart interrupted production. Its central tension is between an expansion’s apparent resources and the specific combinations needed to sustain it.

If saving and investment are equal by definition, what can their equality explain? In this 1938 essay, Gottfried Haberler separates an accounting identity from the monetary processes and changing plans that business-cycle theory must explain. His engagement with Keynes is discriminating: he accepts the saving–investment identity while challenging its use as an explanation of adjustment. The same concern for conceptual precision shapes his treatment of national income as a welfare measure. More medical spending need not mean better health, and government services cannot all be counted alike without risking duplication or misleading valuation. Readers can discover why welfare appraisal, causal explanation, and statistical estimation require different definitions—and why a discrepancy between measured saving and investment need not establish economic disequilibrium.

Every government that gathered at Geneva professed the Cobdenite creed that commerce breeds peace; every government, called to concrete concessions, reached instead for the tariff, the quota, and the bargaining duty. Delivered as the Cobden Lectures at the London School of Economics in February 1938, these three lectures reconstruct two decades of League conferences—Brussels, Genoa, the bold 1927 resolution to halt and reverse the rise of tariffs, the wrecked London gathering of 1933—and ask why they failed. Rappard sorts the protectionist arguments by purpose rather than chronology, weighing infant-industry claims and agrarian defenses, and locates the deepest cause not in ignorance or private greed but in the fear of war, which drove nations toward autarky. From Geneva, he warns, no honest message of optimism can come.

Thus those who could, will not, and those who would, cannot.

Can falling prices deepen a depression, while rising prices undermine recovery? In this 1938 article, Emil Lederer refuses to choose between correcting price imbalances and stimulating investment. He argues that flexible prices can accelerate contraction as falling wages and receipts erode demand, while particular rigid prices—especially those of steel and building materials—can make new investment prohibitively costly. Drawing on price and production evidence from 1929–1937, he distinguishes rigidity that restrains deflation from rigidity that obstructs expansion. The resulting policy tension is concrete: public works may launch recovery yet raise the material costs that discourage private projects. Readers encounter an analysis of why stimulus must attend not only to how much is spent, but also to the prices and production costs through which spending takes effect.

Japan’s industrial expansion looks different when low wages and depressed farm incomes enter the explanation. Reviewing the July 1937 Japan issue of Weltwirtschaftliches Archiv, Emil Lederer values its economic evidence while questioning the political assumptions that shape its interpretation. His criticism becomes concrete in the conflict over rice prices: cheap rice helps sustain low industrial wages, but threatens farmers’ livelihoods; support for farmers puts pressure on workers’ real incomes. Rather than dismissing the collection as propaganda, Lederer distinguishes its empirical strengths from its neglect of competing social interests and peaceful alternatives to territorial expansion. This short review offers a pointed example of how a critic can use a publication’s own evidence to challenge the national necessities its contributors take for granted.