The archive.

Knowing a group’s customs is not the same as knowing how to act among its members. In this essay, republished here in 1964, Alfred Schütz examines the adult newcomer whose inherited expectations no longer provide reliable guidance. The immigrant is his principal example, but his concern is the practical work of entering any unfamiliar social world. Insiders rely on shared recipes for conduct; the stranger must investigate whether those recipes will work from a position they do not necessarily anticipate. Schütz’s distinction between understanding a language and expressing oneself through its social nuances makes this difficulty concrete. His analysis also reframes apparent disloyalty: what members regard as reluctance to accept their ways may be the newcomer’s inability to take those ways for granted.

Three problems—development, individuality, and success—organize this genealogy of how history became the medium in which German thought grasped culture, politics, and human meaning. Tracing a line from Herder's Volksgeist through Humboldt, Goethe, Niebuhr, and the Romantic school to Hegel, Ranke, Marx, and Schopenhauer, Engel-Janosi shows historicism forming by refusing the Enlightenment's universal progress: each epoch, people, and life-form becomes an individual with its own inward justification. The culmination is Jacob Burckhardt, who abandons Hegelian purpose and moral progress for constants, types, and recurring forms, and who holds that political power is in itself evil even as culture depends upon it. Historicism thereby reaches its height as a disciplined art of memory—already shadowed by Nietzsche's counter-demand for an art of forgetting.

Ich aber behaupte, jede Epoche ist unmittelbar zu Gott.

English translation: “But I maintain: every epoch is immediate to God.”

Bureaucracy is a symptom, not the underlying evil: this distinction anchors Frank Albert Fetter’s 1945 review of Ludwig von Mises’s book. Fetter locates its real target in the transfer of decisions about prices and production from private enterprise to government. His distinctive contribution is to connect that argument to an older dispute over price theory, presenting Austrian subjective valuation as a basis for consumer sovereignty and political liberalism. Yet his endorsement has limits: he questions whether Mises sufficiently distinguishes bureaucratic administration from the system it serves, and whether capitalism deserves so much credit for scientific and cultural progress. This brief review shows where a sympathetic defender of free enterprise qualifies Mises’s claims—and why Fetter does not read the book as a demand for unrestricted laissez-faire.

Six and a half centuries of Swiss survival amount, in Rappard's reading, to one sustained experiment in mutual defense—and thus to a rehearsal of the problem the League of Nations and the United Nations inherited: how sovereign units, unequal in wealth and divided by creed, can shield one another without a common command. Prepared in English at Lionel Curtis's urging as an abridgment of his French Cinq siècles de sécurité collective, the book separates the law of the Swiss alliances—from the 1291 pact of Uri, Schwyz, and Unterwalden through the Covenant of Stans and the Defensional of Wyl—from the messier facts of Morat, the Musso War, and the Catholic secession of 1680. Federalism, he concludes, reconciles unity with diversity, and stands as the alternative to anarchy.

It might delight the patriot to believe, but it would discredit the historian to assert, that the present Swiss federal state was born of the love of the Swiss cantons for each other.

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.

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.