The archive.

Older social philosophies held human interests to be naturally antagonistic, and so justified coercion, moral self-denial, and submission to inequality as the price of order. Against them Mises reconstructs the utilitarian and classical case that peaceful cooperation, not sacrifice, is what the division of labor makes possible. Delivered as a 1945 conference paper, the essay moves from Ricardo's law of association—proof that specialization benefits even the unequal—to what he names the Montaigne fallacy, the zero-sum belief that one man's gain must be another's loss. He traces that error through protectionism, exploitation theory, and just-price doctrine, and reframes profit as reward for foresight and the market as a consumers' democracy. Economics is called inhuman, he argues, only because it names the real cost of shielding inefficient producers.

Under capitalism, competition is the peaceful method to assign to every individual that place in society in which he renders the most valuable services to his fellow men.

An economist may explain how a profits tax affects employment without possessing scientific authority to choose society’s ultimate ends. In this 1945 review of E. Ronald Walker’s From Economic Theory to Policy, Joseph A. Schumpeter makes that boundary a defence of economic expertise rather than a concession of its futility. He praises Walker’s combination of theoretical knowledge and governmental experience, but questions his tentative claim to a wider policy authority. Equally pointed is Schumpeter’s distinction between logical schemata and statistical generalizations: a proposition clarifying an implication cannot be tested against reality in the same way as an observed association between prices and interest rates. This compact review offers a precise account of why different kinds of theory require different standards of judgement—and why useful policy advice need not dictate political purposes.

What if the pursuit of national unity, rather than a fixed national character, helps explain Germany’s political catastrophe? In this 1945 review of Edmond Vermeil’s Germany’s Three Reichs, reprinted in 2013, Hayek praises a history that holds German humanism and Nazi aggression in the same frame without explaining either away. He develops Vermeil’s doubts about Germany’s national cohesion into his own argument: strong regional identities coexist with a longing for common characteristics that can make unity attractive regardless of its political content. His proposed response is neither permanent partition nor restored centralisation, but regional autonomy linked to a wider Western European community. This short review exposes the connection Hayek draws between imagined national belonging and the institutions through which it might find a less destructive expression.

A property right, for Rueff, is a 'container of value' distinct from the thing it holds: its volume equals the value of its contents, and it may be filled true or left false. From this reinterpretation of Article 544 of the Civil Code he builds an entire economics of true and false rights—price controls, deficit finance, and the discounting of unbacked claims all manufacture rights that cannot be exercised, and such false rights are the real engine of inflation and disorder. Conceived as a monetary dynamics extending his 1927 Théorie des phénomènes monétaires into the problem of governing societies, the work defends legal-economic institutions as the 'technique of freedom,' warning that once the State injects false rights the road runs toward rationing, command, and the loss of human dignity.

Le droit, c'est la coque qui enveloppe le fruit.

English translation: “Law is the shell that envelops the fruit.”

Can reduced consumption impoverish society when it finances future production? In this 1945 article, Frank Albert Fetter tests Lauderdale’s oversaving theory against the distinction between present expenditure and accumulated productive wealth. His criticism turns on what Lauderdale’s account leaves out: future yields from investment, the gradual decline in returns to additional capital, and the tax liabilities extinguished by public debt repayment. Fetter also gives the dispute a political edge, interpreting Lauderdale’s attack on saving as an argument against Britain’s sinking fund and as protective of creditors facing lower reinvestment yields. The result is a pointed encounter between economic reasoning and fiscal interests, showing why temporary disruption, reduced consumption, and permanent loss of wealth cannot simply be treated as equivalent.

Where should a student of economics begin—thrown at once into the tangle of modern theory, or led through the history of the science's own errors? This guide answers plainly: the aim of study is the capacity to judge practical policy on a theoretically grounded understanding, and the surest path runs through the original works of Turgot, Smith, Ricardo, Menger, and Walras before any textbook. Amonn maps the terrain to be mastered—general value and price theory, the factor incomes of wage, interest, and rent, money and the quantity theory, comparative costs, business cycles, and Malthusian population theory—always separating theoretical questions from the political goal-setting that lies beyond science. A closing mathematical appendix reduces supply, demand, and equilibrium price to linear functions worked out by hand.

Das Primäre in einer Wissenschaft sind ihre Probleme.

English translation: “What is primary in a science are its problems.”

Gunnar Myrdal's 1933 essay on monetary equilibrium deserves, Shackle argues, a recognition equal to anything in interwar economics, and he reconstructs it to show why. Myrdal's achievement was to reset Wicksell's problem in time: the natural rate cannot be the observable yield on existing capital, since that yield, once the stream of expected net receipts is discounted at the current interest rate, is tautologically tied to it. The live variable is instead the gap between a projected plant's capital value and its construction cost, a valuation formed before building and therefore a matter of expectations. Equilibrium is recast as compatibility among plans, read alongside Hayek: not balanced aggregates but a state in which realized events force no one to remake their anticipations. Even aggregate equality of investment and 'waiting', Shackle shows, can conceal offsetting individual errors.

Monetary equilibrium in this meaning is a means of classifying the set, considered as a whole, of systems of expectations which are entertained, one system by each individual, at some one point of time.

Falling asleep, becoming absorbed in a play, and adopting a scientist’s detached standpoint change not just what we attend to, but what counts as real. In this essay, Schütz recasts William James’s multiple realities as “finite provinces of meaning”: distinct ways of experiencing, rather than separate worlds. His central tension is that everyday life remains paramount even when imagination, dreams, or theory suspend its demands. Bodily action, resistant objects, and communication with others give practical reality its special weight. This perspective sharpens a difficulty for social science: how can detached theoretical models account for people whose actions are lived, purposeful, and shared? Readers can discover both what abstraction makes intelligible and what it leaves behind when it departs from the actor’s standpoint.

"Planning," in the mouths of its advocates, almost always means socialism, Russian socialization or German Zwangswirtschaft, yet Keynes, Beveridge, and Hansen promised a third road that could plan for freedom without embracing either. Delivered to the American Academy of Political and Social Science in 1945, this address answers that the supposed third way is only interventionism, the old Bismarckian doctrine of Schmoller and Wagner in new dress. Mises argues that isolated coercive commands, minimum wages, easy money, restricted profits, disrupt the integrated market and defeat their own authors' purposes; depression follows credit expansion, and enduring joblessness follows wage rates propped above market levels. Profit and loss, not planners, are how consumers govern production. Between totalitarian control and liberty, he concludes, there is no durable middle ground.

The market and its inescapable law are supreme.

A gain in British imports from Belgium need not mean a gain in world trade. That distinction anchors Richard Schüller’s reply to Professor Morgan on postwar British trade policy: exchange controls, he argues, may facilitate individual transactions while restricting trade overall. His alternative rests on a pointed reversal—Britain’s large import surplus is not merely a payments problem but a source of bargaining power. This brief rejoinder clarifies what Schüller means by negotiated trade expansion, including reciprocal free trade without a common external tariff. Its interest lies in the practical boundary he draws between accepting controls during the transition from war and making them permanent, and in his willingness to consider quotas alongside freer trade rather than offer an unqualified laissez-faire prescription.

Nationalism need not seek conquest to obstruct international cooperation. This distinction sharpens Hayek’s 1945 review of E. H. Carr’s Nationalism and After, reprinted here with editorial notes in 1997. Hayek welcomes Carr’s growing recognition of the dangers of centralized authority, but questions whether his proposals for regional agreements and overlapping international organizations justify confidence in nationalism’s decline. Beneath their disagreement lies a question about coordination: must effective cooperation have a directing centre? Hayek finds Carr insufficiently attentive to the possibilities of decentralized economic order. The review offers a compact encounter between two accounts of postwar integration, culminating in Hayek’s warning that established Western European states might frustrate cooperation through an obstructionist nationalism allied with socialism.

What can a peace settlement accomplish when neighboring national groups refuse to relinquish competing territorial claims? In this short 1945 review of Joseph S. Roucek’s edited symposium, Ludwig von Mises questions whether collecting national grievances explains the obstacles to peace. He distinguishes the benefits claimed by multinational rulers from the consent of those they govern: Czech assistance, he argues, does not answer Slovak and Ukrainian demands for independence. He also challenges a contributor’s acceptance of Soviet annexations as accomplished facts, asking how that reasoning differs from German Realpolitik. The review offers no alternative map. Its interest lies in Mises’s insistence that schemes for durable peace must confront the unwillingness to compromise that helped defeat earlier settlements.

They do not want to be "minorities" in a multinational state; they prefer to be majorities in their own country, even if it is only a small country.