The archive.

An exiled Scottish gambler, versed in goldsmith banking and colonial companies, talked Regency France into the first central note-issuing bank the world had seen — and into the speculative ruin of the Compagnie des Indes. Working from rare multilingual sources, Kerschagl reconstructs John Law's life, his Money and Trade Considered, and his land-backed money scheme, whose fatal flaw was the confusion of credit, capital, and money: fiduciary credit may mobilize productive factors but cannot conjure the consumer goods that new purchasing power demands. He catalogs Law's errors against Keynesian parallels, salvages his genuine insights into central banking and legal tender, and traces the wreckage outward to the assignats of the Revolution and the banknote imagery of Goethe's Faust.

"Die Banknote ist nichts anderes als eine Anleihe ohne Zinsen".

English translation: “The banknote is nothing other than an interest-free loan.”

The fork, soap, the automobile, nylon stockings, television, frozen foods: each entered the world as an elite extravagance before becoming an ordinary necessity, and that compression is capitalism's real social achievement. Drawing on Gabriel Tarde's observation that innovations descend from the wealthy few to the many, Mises argues that large-scale enterprise, far from serving a closed aristocracy, requires mass markets and so multiplies consumers, steadily shortening—and finally almost abolishing—the lag between invention and common use. Capitalism, in his definition, is production at scale aimed not at a privileged few but at ordinary buyers. The essay's polemical target is the Marxist doctrine of increasing immiseration: the diffusion of once-exclusive goods is offered as empirical refutation, the old gulf between mobility and immobility having narrowed into the difference between first-class and coach.

Capitalism is essentially mass production for the satisfaction of the wants of the masses.

How can knowledge be socially conditioned without truth becoming relative? In this essay, Alfred Schütz locates that problem within the wider architecture of Max Scheler’s philosophy, connecting it to his accounts of feeling, personhood, and spiritual freedom. Schütz presents a thinker for whom emotions disclose objective values and another person’s joy is perceived in a smile, not inferred from bodily movements. These claims illuminate Scheler’s distinction between the social interests that select what becomes an object of knowledge and the validity of what is known. Rather than treating Scheler’s changing religious commitments as evidence of mere inconsistency, Schütz traces persistent tensions across them. The result offers a compact way into the connections between Scheler’s phenomenology of personal life and his understanding of historical and social forces.

An operatic ensemble lets several people sing at once—an implausibility in ordinary conversation, but for Alfred Schütz a way of making shared life audible. In this essay, he asks whether philosophical interpretations illuminate Mozart or merely recruit his operas into systems built elsewhere. His encounters with Cohen, Kierkegaard, and Dilthey lead to a distinctive alternative: Mozart’s music presents situations in which people experience the same event differently, rather than consistently unfolding fixed personalities. Susanna’s “Deh vieni, non tardar” and the interplay of voices and orchestra anchor this account in musical particulars. Schütz offers readers a way to hear how divergent, even antagonistic responses can inhabit a common time—and why the philosophical interest of Mozart’s operas exceeds the ideas expressed in their libretti.

Elections can replace rulers peacefully without securing independence from their power. This distinction anchors Hans F. Sennholz’s 1956 essay, contributed to the volume honoring Ludwig von Mises. Against communist promises of emancipation through collective ownership, Sennholz argues that nationalized production makes individuals dependent on administrators. But his defense of Western democracy is conditional: subsidies, protectionism, and redistribution, he contends, turn economic cooperation into competition for political favors. Agricultural price supports give this argument concrete institutional substance, showing how organized beneficiaries can prevail over a dispersed public. Readers encounter a market-liberal account of democracy that locates its value in peaceful political change, while asking whether that achievement can endure when government increasingly controls livelihoods and economic opportunity.

Specialization is indispensable to serious inquiry and, in the study of society, uniquely dangerous, and that is the tension this lecture-essay sets out to hold. A physicist may work fruitfully within a narrow technical field, but the student of society who masters only one discipline may misunderstand the very world he examines, since concrete social problems draw on law, economics, history, anthropology, philosophy, and inherited cultural wisdom at once. Hayek distinguishes systematic specialization in a theoretical field, which trains rigor, from topical specialization around an empirical object, which mature work demands; the danger lies in sequencing, for breadth without discipline becomes amateurism while discipline without breadth becomes blindness. He couples this with his anti-rationalist caution against discarding traditions whose significance we cannot yet articulate, and proposes settings, such as a College of Advanced Human Studies, where disciplines can meet after competence is won.

But nobody can be a great economist who is only an economist—and I am even tempted to add that the economist who is only an economist is likely to become a nuisance if not a positive danger.

Conceived as an introduction to The Free Man's Library, this 1956 essay pairs a bibliography of individualist and classical-liberal writing with a warning about how easily its lessons are forgotten. Hazlitt's target is the modern progressive who champions freedom of thought and speech while dismantling economic liberty, not seeing that the two cannot be separated. He reclaims the word liberal for Adam Smith, Bastiat, Cobden, and Herbert Spencer, sets historic liberalism's Rule of Law against the drift toward planning and bureaucracy, and quotes Hamilton to the effect that power over a man's subsistence is power over his will. The essay's provocation is its final inversion: the intelligent conservative, defending inherited liberties against expanding state power, has become the truer heir of the liberal tradition.

Liberty is a whole, and to deny economic liberty is finally to destroy all liberty. Socialism is irreconcilable with freedom.

Even sympathetic critics concede that market allocation may be efficient while inherited wealth renders its results unjust—unless the state periodically redistributes. That concession is the target here. The mistake, Lachmann argues, lies in treating the distribution of wealth as a fixed datum rather than a continuously revised outcome of the market process. He separates the two senses of 'datum'—something merely observed at an instant, and an independent determinant in equilibrium theory—and denies wealth the second role. Because capital goods are heterogeneous and their value hangs on complementarities discovered only under change, the market itself redistributes through capital gains and losses, passing wealth to those quicker to read new scarcities. The result is Pareto's circulation of elites: a leveling process, a game of skill rather than chance, in which no class of owners—shareholder or bondholder—escapes revaluation.

The owners of wealth, we might say with Schumpeter, are like the guests at a hotel or the passengers in a train: They are always there but are never for long the same people.

To ask an economist for the date a boom will break is to ask for the one thing economics cannot deliver—yet businessmen, knowing an artificial boom must end, press for exactly that. The monetary theory of the cycle is 'irrefutable,' Mises grants in this 1956 essay: forcing interest rates below their market level through bank credit distorts production and guarantees an eventual depression. But economics is qualitative, not quantitative; it can say the boom will not last, never precisely when it will break, for human action offers none of the constant relations natural science exploits. Statistics only describe the past. And a correct public forecast would annul itself—if everyone believed it, they would sell at once and bring the crash forward on the spot.

At the very instant this forecast was uttered and accepted as correct, the crisis would already be consummated.

Only actual choice reveals preference, and only at the instant it is made — this principle of 'demonstrated preference' is the lever with which Rothbard rebuilds utility and welfare economics. Utility is ordinal, never measurable; he rejects both Samuelson's revealed preference, which smuggles in stable orderings across time, and the indifference curves of Hicks and Allen, since indifference is never enacted in action. Turning to welfare, he grants that economics can make no interpersonal utility comparisons, then shows that voluntary exchange itself demonstrates mutual gain: each party acts to benefit, so the free market raises social utility without measurement. Coercion reverses the verdict. Because the state rests on taxation, which injures some against their demonstrated consent, no government act can be shown to raise social utility — a conclusion he presses against democratic consent, public goods, and the free-rider argument.

Individual valuation is the keystone of economic theory.

Stable money requires coordination—but how much coordination can coexist with economic freedom and central-bank independence? In this 1956 article, Richard Kerschagl rejects both a simple return to gold-standard automaticity and confidence in monetary technique alone. His distinctive emphasis falls on what credit finances, how quickly investment yields output, and whether private saving and capital formation can sustain productive capacity. Interest-rate changes and open-market operations thus appear as instruments whose effectiveness depends on institutions they cannot themselves create. His comparison of Soviet and American arrangements sharpens the tension between controlling purchasing power and preserving freedom in the use of money. Readers can discover why, for Kerschagl, currency stability demands cooperation across economic policy while also requiring protection from government financing needs.

How could the Zeitschrift für Nationalökonomie preserve its founding aims while rebuilding international scholarly exchange after wartime disruption? In this brief 1956 editorial notice, Alexander Mahr addresses that practical question as the journal’s new editor following Hans Mayer’s death. The appointments of Gottfried Haberler and Oskar Morgenstern connect earlier affiliations with hopes for closer contact with Anglo-American economics; plans to reprint unavailable articles and index earlier volumes give continuity a concrete editorial form. Rather than an appraisal of Mayer’s thought, the notice offers a compact record of how Mahr proposed to carry the journal forward through renewed collaboration and access to its past.