The archive.

A currency can remain a gold currency without ever putting gold into everyday hands—this is the paradox Machlup sets out to define rather than to sell. Separating the monetary standard from the physical medium of payment, he argues that gold need not circulate as coin if it is concentrated as a reserve behind a system held at parity through the Umtauschprinzip, the rule of convertibility between domestic and foreign money at a fixed rate. Tracing the idea to Ricardo's neglected 1816 ingot plan, appended here, and testing it against India, the South American conversion offices, and Austria-Hungary's own krone, he shows the arrangement economizes scarce gold while preserving discipline. The system is not self-enforcing: its sole danger, he insists, lies in inflationary measures.

Goldkernwährung bedeutet Goldkonzentration.

English translation: “The gold-core standard means the concentration of gold.”

Can dictatorship prepare a people for freedom, or does its promise of transition merely excuse permanent coercion? In this 1925 article, Friedrich von Wieser locates the answer not simply in constitutional rules or military force, but in the relationship between exceptional leaders and their followers. He treats democratic self-government as an acquired capacity for organized political leadership. That perspective informs his sympathetic, expressly provisional assessment of Mussolini and Primo de Rivera, while Bolshevism tests whether enforced equality can coexist with independent initiative. The article exposes a tension in Wieser’s reasoning: his hope that a vigorous nation will dismiss a dictator once his task is done depends on distinguishing genuine popular authorization from acquiescence under coercion.

Beneath the noisy quarrels over method, Schumpeter contends, the real work of economics advances quietly, and no one exemplifies that subterranean progress better than F. Y. Edgeworth, a master of exact analysis who founded no school. Formally a review of Edgeworth's collected papers, this 1925 essay becomes an assessment of the discipline's whole achievement. Schumpeter reads mathematics not as decoration but as the natural language of interdependent quantities, and insists that Edgeworth and Marshall, for all their classical rhetoric, stand on ground cleared by Walras, Jevons, and Menger. Taxation, where a levy disturbs equilibrium and its incidence shifts through the entire organism, and monopoly, where discrimination can sometimes beat competition, show why modern theory must analyze classes of cases rather than issue universal maxims of free trade or laissez-faire.

Fast unbekümmert um methodische Moden geht sozusagen subkutan die positive Arbeit der Wissenschaft ihren Weg.

English translation: “Almost unconcerned with methodological fashions, the positive work of science proceeds, so to speak, subcutaneously along its way.”

Method and subject matter mutually determine one another: define the economy as a system of means for ends, as causal regularity, or as functional relation, and you have already chosen a different object. That thesis governs this study of how pure economics can be scientific, appearing here in its third edition of 1948—delayed, its preface records, by the author's arrest, imprisonment, and dismissal from his teaching post. Kerschagl compresses the history of method from the Physiocrats through the classics, the historical school's cry of “back to reality,” and Menger's restoration of exact theory, then turns to its problems: what reality a science can claim, exactness without mathematical calculation, necessity replaced by probability and conditional validity. Methodological monism, he concludes, is a logical utopia; causal and teleological analysis both belong to a science of purposeful economic life.

Wirklichkeit ist ihrem Wesen nach das Wesentliche und nicht das Vollständige.

English translation: “Reality is, in its essence, the essential, not the complete.”

When does scholarly caution become a failure of public responsibility? In this first report, published in 1925 and republished here in 2022, Felix Somary confronts economists’ delayed opposition to German inflation. His criticism joins a defence of monetary theory to a concrete account of what depreciation concealed: firms could accumulate materials while uncertainty prevented long-term investment. Apparent enrichment, he argues, could coexist with the destruction of productive opportunities. Stabilization, meanwhile, remained vulnerable to reparations arrangements that might undermine central-bank restraint. The report offers a pointed encounter between economic diagnosis and professional obligation: Somary demands further empirical research but refuses to make complete evidence a prerequisite for warning against destructive policy.

Two men are inseparable in this 1925 portrait: the founder of exact interest theory and the disciplined servant of a vanishing Habsburg state. Böhm-Bawerk, Schumpeter argues, extended Menger's marginal utility through imputation into a full theory of capital whose decisive innovation was to make time internal to equilibrium, with present goods valued above future goods, longer roundabout production yielding more than proportional output, and interest emerging as an agio rather than a legal or social accident. Schumpeter ranks the Positive Theorie des Kapitales beside Marx's system in ambition but free of its political passion. The essay's second half follows the same intelligence into the 1896 direct-tax reform and the finance ministry under Koerber, where Böhm-Bawerk defended budget discipline against parliament and the army, resigning when military claims could no longer be contained.

Die Angelpunkte einer jeden Theorie des Wirtschaftsablaufes sind die Wert- und die Zinslehre.

English translation: “The pivotal points of any theory of the economic process are the theory of value and the theory of interest.”

Inflation redistributes wealth not only through rising prices but through unequal speeds of recognition and response. In this 1925 review of Julius Bunzel’s edited volume on Austrian monetary depreciation and stabilization, Martha Stephanie Braun draws a common argument from contributions she finds insufficiently integrated. Her focus is concrete: workers lose purchasing power between wage payments, tax revenues shrink between assessment and collection, and declining commodity quality conceals losses in living standards. She praises agreement across the contributors’ political differences while questioning their causal ordering and gaps in statistical evidence. The review offers a compact account of how monetary instability changes calculation and expectations—and a caution against treating it as the sole explanation for cultural developments whose origins precede the war.

Factories, workers, and materials may be available while the credit needed to bring them together is not. In this article on Czechoslovakia’s credit shortage, Alfred Amonn asks why issuing money for productive lending might nevertheless worsen the predicament. He grants that industrial expansion could benefit workers and consumers, but distinguishes that promise from the immediate pressures new spending would place on prices, foreign exchange, and currency reserves. His diagnosis shifts attention from an apparent shortage of notes to the state’s absorption of bank funds for consumption; his remedy is repayment rather than monetary creation. The article offers a concrete way to distinguish industrial distress from monetary insufficiency—and to understand why defending an appreciated currency could require further domestic restraint.

From a single household's valuations through exchange, money, capital, prices and interest to population, currency, credit and the cartelized modern economy, this systematic handbook follows the whole arc of provision for life. Here in the German rendering of Engliš's 1925 Czech lectures, the Brno economist and Czechoslovak finance minister grounds every category in purpose and means, deliberately omitting statistics so the doctrine will not date. He parts sharply from the Austrians: marginal utility, he argues, measures the value of a loss and cannot explain why a particular good is bought. Malthus, Gresham's law, bimetallism and the wartime paper inflations of central Europe all find their place within a framework that treats price above all as a regulator holding production and consumption in balance.

Ohne Zweck gibt es keine Nützlichkeit.

English translation: “Without a purpose there is no utility.”

Viewed from neutral, republican Geneva — a city shaped by religious refuge and small-state vulnerability — the League of Nations appears to Rappard not as one institution but as three uneasily combined: a League to execute the peace treaties, a League to promote cooperation, and a League to outlaw war. Across these lectures he weighs each function with an insider's candor, praising the Permanent Mandates Commission and the financial reconstruction of Austria while exposing the weakness of Articles 10 and 16, whose sanctions collapsed at Vilna and Corfu once Germany, Russia, and above all the United States stood outside. War cannot be outlawed, he insists, until an impartial legal alternative exists for every dispute; the Permanent Court, not coercive force, is the League's most durable achievement. He closes with an appeal for American participation.

As municipal law is the sole protection of widows and orphans, so is international law, in the last resort, the sole protection of small nations.

Restoring a currency’s gold value is not the same as restoring economic stability. This distinction drives Martha Stephanie Braun’s 1925 assessment of international monetary conferences and their unfinished work. She supports ending inflation, balancing budgets, and freeing foreign-exchange markets, yet accepts warnings against the unemployment and disruption caused by forcing depreciated currencies back to prewar parity. Her defense of gold is therefore also an argument for shared management: central banks must coordinate policy and distribute the costs of maintaining reserves rather than leave responsibility chiefly to Britain and the United States. The article offers a concrete way to examine the tension between a common monetary anchor and national policy discretion—and to understand why, for Braun, currency stabilization cannot by itself moderate economic fluctuations.

Historical usefulness and theoretical failure coexist in Mises’s brief review of the sixth revised edition of Karl Helfferich’s Das Geld. He credits Helfferich with defending Germany’s gold currency and systematizing Ludwig Bamberger’s monetary teaching, but finds that the former disciple later attempted an untenable reconciliation with Georg Friedrich Knapp’s state theory of money. Mises locates this reversal between the first and second editions—not in the latest revision—and adds a pointed charge of neglecting monetary-theoretical literature, German as well as foreign. The review offers a compact example of his critical discrimination: monetary history and statistics can retain their value even when, in his judgement, the theory supporting them fails.