The archive.

Why are peaceable peoples so thoroughly organized for war? Rappard, invited by A. Lawrence Lowell to lecture as a second war broke out, sets that paradox against the wreckage of the first peace. He follows the Wilsonian ideal of organized peace from the Fourteen Points into the Covenant's three great instruments—arbitration, collective security under Articles 10 and 16, and disarmament—and charts their erosion across the Geneva Protocol, Locarno, the Kellogg-Briand Pact, and the Disarmament Conference that Germany abandoned in 1933. The League could judge, he argues, but not police; the Aaland Islands were peacefully settled while Abyssinia was left to conquest. Behind each failure stands American abstention and, in Pascal's phrase, a justice never armed with force. His one remaining hope is federation.

A venture may promise substantial gains yet remain unthinkable if failure would end the entrepreneur’s capacity to try again. In this 1941 article, G. L. S. Shackle connects that asymmetry to a concrete proposal: a public Board would guarantee partial recovery of investment costs when equipment is surrendered, financed by a levy on successful ventures. His distinctive concern is not average expected returns but the imagined extremes of success and disaster that command an investor’s attention. The scheme tests how far public protection can encourage private initiative without removing responsibility for loss. Its uncomfortable provision for scrapping surrendered equipment sharpens the tension between preserving productive assets and opening new investment opportunities. Readers encounter an institutional application of Shackle’s thinking about uncertainty, explicitly offered for experiment rather than as a proven remedy.

Would Marshall's message fade like Mill's or Smith's? This semi-centennial appraisal, read here in G. Bombach's German translation, answers with a deliberate doubleness: Marshall's specific tools, methods, and results are no longer ours — obsolete much as older physics was superseded — yet his influence endures because he built research instruments rather than a closed system. Schumpeter reconstructs the originality behind the Principles: partial equilibrium chosen over Walrasian generality, and the apparatus of elasticity, quasi-rent, consumer surplus, internal and external economies, and the representative firm. He argues that Marshall understated his own debt to mathematics, traces his paternity of imperfect-competition theory through Sraffa and Joan Robinson, and credits him with designing an economics open enough to be revised — and measured — by the discipline that followed.

Seine Vorstellung vom Wirtschaftsablauf, seine Methoden und seine Ergebnisse sind nicht mehr die unsrigen.

English translation: “His conception of the economic process, his methods, and his results are no longer ours.”

One God in heaven, one lord on earth: the Mongol letters and edicts of 1245–1255 turned that cosmic analogy into a working juridical doctrine of world conquest. Voegelin collects and classifies the documents carried between the papal and French courts and the khans—two khan letters, two edicts, two commanders' letters—reconstructing their preambles after Pelliot and reading them as formal legal instruments rather than mere barbarian arrogance. The empire they proclaim is an imperium mundi in statu nascendi, a world-empire-in-the-making in which every ruler, upon contact, must submit and enter as vassal or be destroyed as rebel. What lifts the study above orientalist antiquarianism is Voegelin's closing move, comparing the Mongols' sacral literalism—killing and conquest proclaimed as divine judgment—to the peace rhetoric of modern communist regimes.

Das Opfer der Aggression ist der Aggressor.

English translation: “The victim of aggression is the aggressor.”

Austria's long transformation from the Ottomans' frontier antagonist into their guarantor, the price of holding Russia back from Constantinople, frames this account of how Vienna met the birth of the Greek kingdom. Engel-Janosi weighs Metternich's reluctance, who saw in the war of independence only a rebellion, against King Ludwig of Bavaria's dynastic investment in his son Otto, and gives Prokesch-Osten, Austria's envoy in Athens, the central role: a conservative trying to shore up an independent Greek monarchy amid the rivalry of Britain, France, Russia, and Bavaria. Through the Armansperg and Rudhart ministries, the constitutional revolution of 1843, and the duel of Maurokordatos and Kolettis, the project decays. Austrian passivity, great-power intrigue, Greek factionalism, and Otto's weakness, he concludes, made an independent conservative Greece untenable.

Staaten hat noch niemand geschaffen; sie schaffen sich selbst.

English translation: “No one has ever created states; they create themselves.”

'I am not running a drug store,' Schumpeter told the Economic Club of Detroit in the spring of 1941 — no pills to hand out, only a diagnosis. Wartime defense spending, he warned, could be the catalyst that turned America's excess reserves and government-monopolized gold stock into inflation, no greenbacks required. The deeper argument is constitutional: gold was never essential to money, but like Supreme Courts and constitutions it restrained the freedom of action of government, telling the truth, like a naughty child, about a nation's finances. Planned economies resent exactly that discipline, so gold's old function is gone — though he allows it a narrower postwar life within an Anglo-American convention or bullion standard, if governments will accept limits on their own sovereignty.

Gold has no function, for planned economy has come to stay.

How does a thought retain its meaning while its content continually changes? In this essay, supplied in its 1970 republication, Alfred Schütz brings William James’s stream of thought into conversation with Husserl’s phenomenological psychology. His focus is the often-overlooked fringe of experience: the felt relations, expectations, and receding impressions that make a present thought more than an isolated mental event. Schütz shows how James’s descriptions can illuminate Husserl’s accounts of horizons and temporal continuity without making James a phenomenologist or claiming historical influence. The comparison gives readers a concrete approach to a difficult problem: how an object remains identifiable across changing experiences, and how the conclusion of a train of thought can remain available after its intermediate steps have faded.

What can economic analysis establish about monopoly, and where must political judgment begin? In this 1942 review of E. A. G. Robinson’s Monopoly, Fritz Machlup admires the handbook’s integration of institutional detail and theory while testing the precision of its claims. He questions the basis for comparing one person’s satisfaction with another’s burden and identifies the constant-marginal-cost assumption needed for Robinson’s claim about demand elasticity and monopoly output. His appreciation is equally discriminating: breaking a monopoly into a few firms need not restore competition, and opportunities for firms to combine complicate equilibrium. The review offers a compact example of sympathetic criticism, showing how accessible applied economics can remain answerable to explicit assumptions and clearly acknowledged value judgments.

When a household buys a car on monthly instalments, does that credit drive the business cycle or merely ride it? This National Bureau study, completed as Regulation W brought consumer credit under wartime control, argues firmly for the second view. Haberler defines instalment credit narrowly — scheduled repayment, finance charge, short maturity, a negotiable instrument — and shifts attention from the stock of debt outstanding to the flow of net credit change, the excess of new lending over repayments, which he takes as its direct contribution to effective demand. Durable-goods purchases, especially automobiles, make that flow cyclically volatile and, through the acceleration principle formalized in Samuelson's appendix, magnify swings in output. Yet credit follows income rather than leading it; between the oversaving arguments of Keynes and Hansen and the Austrian warnings of Hayek and Mises, Haberler places credit as amplifier, not motor.

The dog wags the tail and not the tail the dog.

Machinery and labour, Ricardo wrote, are in constant competition; from that maxim Hayek builds a tight reconstruction of the 'Ricardo effect,' the proposition that a general shift in wages relative to product prices alters the comparative profitability of methods combining labour and capital in different proportions. Writing in German in 1942, he makes turnover velocity—Umschlagsgeschwindigkeit—his gauge of capital intensity: a price rise adds the same margin at each sale, lifting the internal rate far more on fast-turnover, labour-heavy methods than on slow, machine-heavy ones. Firms redirect current outlay toward direct labour, even generating unemployment among machine-makers amid strong consumer demand. Testing the extreme of perfectly elastic credit and answering Kaldor and Wilson, Hayek insists that cheap money can obscure real scarcity but never abolish it.

Solange ungenützte Reserven von Arbeitern zu unveränderten Preisen zur Verfügung stehen, bedeuten unbegrenzte Geldmittel unbegrenzte Verfügungsmacht über die Produktionsmittel.

English translation: “So long as unused reserves of workers are available at unchanged prices, unlimited monetary means signify unlimited command over the means of production. But these are not the conditions relevant in a state of full employment, which will prevail near the peak of a boom.”

Rarely taken seriously in Germany and often dismissed for its ties to monetary crisis theory, the Wicksellian process — the claim that an interest rate departing from equilibrium sets off a cumulative movement in prices, investment, and the structure of production — receives here a searching capital-theoretic defense. Writing in 1942 for Kiel's Weltwirtschaftliches Archiv and taking Erik Lindahl's Studies as his occasion, Strigl runs the process through four models and reaches a single stubborn conclusion: new capital requires a restriction of consumption before, during, or after investment, even where productive capacity sits idle. He rejects the old quantity theory's view of money as a mere price multiplier, and faults Lindahl for treating the necessary saving as an automatic by-product of the process rather than its precondition.

Eine spezifische Selektionsfunktion des Kapitalzinses besteht nun in der Begrenzung der Produktionsumwege.

English translation: “A specific selective function of interest on capital consists in limiting the roundaboutness of production.”

Anton von Prokesch-Osten carried Vienna's cause first to Berlin and then to the Frankfurt Bundestag, where he faced the young Bismarck across a table neither man respected. Through these missions between 1849 and the Crimean War, Engel-Janosi reconstructs the struggle over whether Germany would become an enlarged Prussia or Prussia be sacrificed to a unified German nation. Schwarzenberg's design—that Vienna become the centre of a Habsburg-led Mitteleuropa—runs up against a Prussian Borussianism strong enough to thwart every Austrian plan while still too weak to build its own. In quarrels over the federal fleet, fortresses, and procedural privilege, a decade emerges when unification was not yet inevitable and Austria's federal alternative was still a living idea—one strategically defeated long before 1866.

Dank der überlegenen Taktik Bismarcks und der Furcht der kleineren Staaten triumphierte Preußen im Bundestag.

English translation: “Thanks to Bismarck's superior tactics and the fear of the smaller states, Prussia triumphed in the Federal Diet.”