The archive.

Modern culture, for all its machinery, has not freed anyone from material dependence, and that unfreedom, Schwiedland contends, now shapes character, morality, and world politics alike. His survey of the West's crisis runs from the psychic toll of rationalization and big-city life, through capitalism, individualism, and imperialism, to a social question that has outgrown classes and nations to set whole continents against one another. Europe, exhausted by war and stripped of prestige, confronts three non-European powers, the United States, Russia, and Japan, while its former colonies industrialize and awaken to national self-determination. Against economic feudalism by cartel and trust, he urges European integration, Riedl's collective trade treaties, and the League of Nations, insisting that peace must be built by deliberate effort, not awaited.

Willst du Kriege vermieden sehen, so organisiere den Frieden.

English translation: “If you wish to see wars avoided, then organize peace.”

Every endogenous theory of crisis, this 1928 essay contends, must in the end become a theory of disproportion — not a hunt for one privileged cause but an inquiry into which mismatches harden into cyclical form. Lederer locates the decisive asymmetry in unequal elasticity: raw materials and profits rise faster than wages, salaries, and interest, so accumulation shifts the social product away from consumption even as real wages climb. Ordinary discrepancies self-correct through price and capital movements; crisis begins only when a distributive disproportion becomes rigid and resists the market's usual repair. Banks and technical innovation amplify the swing. Against those who would cure a slump by lending alone, he warns that producer credit cannot conjure the final purchasing power output needs, and that noninflationary recovery would demand a degree of coordinated planning beyond the ordinary banking system.

Eine Diskrepanz der Einkommen aber löst keine Gegenbewegung im Angebot der Arbeitskräfte aus.

English translation: “A discrepancy in incomes, however, triggers no counter-movement in the supply of labor.”

Because the study of foreign trade sets every part of economic theory in motion, Schüller refuses to reason from abstract 'branches of production' and turns instead to real firms making the same good at different costs, so that imports strike down the high-cost producer while the low-cost one survives. On that footing he rebuilds the free-trade case, reading the comparative-cost doctrine of Ricardo and Mill as tacitly resting on a subjective theory of price, and gauging tariffs by the spread of domestic costs and the degree of foreign superiority. The later chapters turn to postwar currency disorder and the revival of mercantilist reflexes, to cartel dumping and the Brussels Sugar Convention, to the transfer problem of reparations and interstate debt, and to the hard prospects of customs unions among sovereign states.

Von entscheidender Bedeutung ist, daß die Erreichung entsprechender Erleichterungen für die Ausfuhr vorteilhafter ist als die Behinderung der Einfuhr.

English translation: “It is of decisive importance that achieving corresponding facilitations for exports is more advantageous than obstructing imports.”

Who legally pays a tax tells you almost nothing about who ultimately bears it — this is the wedge Strigl drives through the theory of tax shifting. Building a deliberately simplified static economy of circular flow, where entrepreneurs buy factors and sell at cost price without profit or loss, he shows that a levy on labor or land alters demand, supply, output, and prices whether the buyer or the seller formally remits it, so that incidence turns on the elasticity of supply and demand rather than on legal form. An income tax generally cannot be shifted, since the purchasing power it removes reappears as state demand; a tax on entrepreneurial profit is the archetype of the non-shiftable tax, yet by starving capital formation and blunting competition it harms the very factor owners and consumers it seems to spare.

Man kann leicht sehen, daß der Unternehmer nicht einfach den Betrag der Steuer auf den Preis des Produktes aufschlagen kann.

English translation: “It is easy to see that the entrepreneur cannot simply add the amount of the tax onto the price of the product.”

Business-cycle theories may be easier to distinguish than the theorists who hold them. In this brief 1929 review of Alvin Harvey Hansen’s Business-Cycle Theory, Gottfried Haberler endorses Hansen’s refusal to draw a rigid boundary between monetary and non-monetary explanations, yet questions the usefulness of a classification in which the same authors repeatedly reappear. His pointed objection to the placement of harvest theories makes the difficulty concrete: does locating cyclical effects within capitalism adequately distinguish their causes? Haberler’s discriminating appraisal separates orderly presentation from substantive insight, reserving his praise for Hansen’s detailed analysis, especially his criticism of Foster and Catchings. The review offers a compact example of Haberler judging competing explanations without forcing their proponents into exclusive camps.

Does an elastic banking system necessarily generate business cycles? In this 1929 review of Friedrich A. Hayek’s Geldtheorie und Konjunkturtheorie, Wilhelm Röpke welcomes a monetary explanation that looks beyond the general price level to credit creation and interest rates, but stops short of endorsing its exclusive claims. Writing as a monetary theorist himself, he asks whether changes in real accumulation can also disturb equilibrium and challenges Hayek’s reliance on automatic market adjustment, particularly in agriculture. His response offers a compact encounter with monetary theory under internal scrutiny: agreement on the importance of commercial-bank credit leaves open both the necessity of recurring fluctuations and the scope for policies to moderate them.

Does calling an economy “dynamic” help explain interest, or merely shift the terms of the problem? In this review of Gerhard Heinze’s comparison of Cassel, Schumpeter, and Böhm-Bawerk, Hayek singles out unstable concepts as a weakness in rival explanations. He endorses Heinze’s pointed observation that entrepreneurial creativity is itself a datum, just as the valuations of agents in a static economy are. Yet his approval is discriminating: neglecting Wicksell weakens the discussion of bank and real interest, while other omissions leave important alternatives unexamined. This brief review shows why Hayek judged Böhm-Bawerk’s explanation stronger than Cassel’s and Schumpeter’s without treating it as immune to criticism: logical consistency and closeness to economic facts matter more than claims to theoretical novelty.

Higher wages for some workers cannot simply compensate for unemployment among others: this distinction anchors Hayek’s appreciation of Richard Strigl’s analysis of collective bargaining. In this short 1929 review, presented in English translation, Hayek praises applied economics that refines theoretical assumptions rather than merely popularising them. Strigl’s experience observing wage negotiations supplies concrete institutional differences and frictions that abstract models can miss. Hayek’s approval is discriminating: he challenges an argument that production can absorb artificially increased wages when its success depends on later capital accumulation. The review offers a compact encounter with Hayek’s standards of economic explanation—attentive to bargaining power and customary profits, yet insistent that an adjustment argument account for the conditions that make adjustment possible.

Cheap credit promises more investment—but what happens when the projects it encourages exceed the capital available to sustain them? In this discussion address, delivered in Zürich in 1928 and first published in 1929, Ludwig von Mises links the business cycle to entrepreneurs’ calculations under artificially lowered interest rates. His distinctive emphasis is on bank-created credit, rather than increases in money generally: expansion makes otherwise unprofitable ventures appear viable, while public pressure for lower rates helps explain why the process recurs. Preserved here in facsimile republication, the address brings theoretical explanation into direct contact with banking practice. Readers can examine both Mises’s case for early restraint and his reservations about price stabilization as a straightforward remedy.

Trade unions at the close of the 1920s boom pressed a seductive claim: that higher wages would themselves raise productivity and general welfare—the doctrine this book was written to dismantle. First published in 1930 and reissued in expanded form in 1945, it untangles the many senses buried in the word wage: relative share against absolute goods, nominal against real, the wage rate per unit against total wage income. A higher rate, Amonn warns, need not raise a worker's income at all, since it may cut employment, hours, or output. He works out wage formation under free competition, ties real wages to productivity and capital accumulation, and grants unions a genuine but bounded power to lift wages toward the competitive level while denying they can be pushed permanently above it at capital's expense.

„Lohnsteigerungen“ bilden also eine sehr zweischneidige Waffe im Kampfe der Arbeit mit dem Kapital und den Anteil am Gesamtprodukt. Wenn man sie benutzt, läuft man Gefahr, sich damit ins eigene Fleisch zu schneiden.

English translation: “Wage increases" thus constitute a very double-edged weapon in the struggle of labor with capital over the share in the total product. If one uses them, one runs the risk of cutting into one's own flesh.”

National spirit, for Schumpeter, is real only as a historically shifting pattern of dispositions lodged in social strata—never a single essence or moral trait, and altered whenever the relative weight of classes shifts. Refusing both the romanticized Volksgeist and its reduction to statistics, he reads Germany since unification through class morphology, replacing the one social pyramid with coexisting agrarian and industrial hierarchies. Urbanization is irreversible; the peasantry, having secured its essential aims, now stabilizes rather than threatens the order; the nobility, bred for service rather than independent leadership, cannot lead, and neither can the ever-mobile industrialist—so present-day Germany, he concludes, has no leading class at all. Workers grow into the strongest power yet seek a socially secured petty-bourgeois existence, while the swelling ranks of salaried employees and officials promise a future stamped by bureaucracy.

Der Bauer hat gesiegt. Innerhalb der ländlichen Sphäre hat er im Wesen, was er wollte. Aus dem revolutionärsten ist er zum konservativsten Element unseres Volkes geworden.

English translation: “The peasant has triumphed. Within the rural sphere he has, in essence, what he wanted. From the most revolutionary he has become the most conservative element of our people.”

Can bank credit support increased production without making enterprises dependent on continued expansion? In this 1929 critical essay on D. H. Robertson’s Banking Policy and the Price Level, Gottfried Haberler tests Cambridge monetary theory against the movement of capital and labour between industries. His objection is concrete: keeping wheat prices steady after agricultural productivity improves may hold resources in farming when adjustment requires their transfer elsewhere. Admiring Robertson’s analytical distinctions while challenging his policy conclusions, Haberler asks what simplified barter models leave out when applied to a monetary economy. Saving, production time, and especially interest become tests of whether credit-financed investment can endure. The essay makes visible a tension between stabilizing prices and sustaining a productive structure once credit expansion ends.