The archive.

"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.

Remembered chiefly as a moralist and forerunner of socialism, Simonde de Sismondi had his strictly theoretical economics undervalued for a century—an imbalance this first volume, offered as a belated centenary tribute, sets out to correct. Amonn reconstructs the 1803 De la richesse commerciale, in which capital governs production understood as a process of turnover, and translates key passages with commentary. He follows Sismondi's distinction of necessary from surplus wages, his national economic balance set against the mercantilist trade balance, his treatment of money as sterile wealth and credit as merely immaterial capital, and his consumer-centered case for free trade against tariffs, guilds, apprenticeship laws, and privileged companies. Throughout, he marks where Sismondi's labor-based reduction of land and capital anticipates the socialist value theories their author himself declined to draw.

«Die Regierung kann also» – so schließt Sismondi – «niemals in die Irre gehen, wenn sie in allen Fällen in Sachen der Handelsgesetzgebung nach dem wohlverstandenen Interesse des Konsumenten verfährt.»

English translation: “The government," Sismondi concludes, "can therefore never go astray if in all matters of commercial legislation it acts in accordance with the well-understood interest of the consumer.”

Rising output need not mean rising welfare: displaced workers may lose purchasing power just as mechanization expands productive capacity. In this 1945 essay, Alfred Amonn makes Sismondi’s attention to such disruptions central to a reassessment of his economic thought. He separates theoretical achievement from policy allegiance, challenging both the dismissal of the early liberal work as derivative of Adam Smith and the reduction of the later interventionist work to humanitarian protest. Amonn finds continuity in Sismondi’s analysis of capital, income, and consumption, while acknowledging weaknesses in his deductions. The distinctive issue is not merely whether an economy eventually reaches equilibrium, but what happens to employment and livelihoods along the way—a distinction through which Amonn connects Sismondi’s work to modern theories of crises and employment.

Social inquiry assumes that people understand one another’s actions—but what makes such understanding possible? In this essay, first published in 1945 and reprinted here in 1967, Alfred Schütz approaches Husserl’s phenomenology with that foundational concern in view. A perceived chair, a blossoming tree, and a learned theorem make technical distinctions concrete: experience includes unseen possibilities, remembered appearances, and knowledge whose original acquisition no longer needs to be repeated. Schütz explains why suspending judgments about the world’s existence is not denying the world, and why investigating essences need not invoke mystical intuition. His account gives social scientists a precise boundary as well as a resource: phenomenology does not replace empirical research, but examines the structures of consciousness and meaning that research takes for granted.

For the reigning doctrines of the age, conflict is the natural condition of intergroup relations: nations, races, and Marxian classes are read as groups whose gain must come at another's loss, so that war and civil war become the logical conclusion of what people already believe. Mises answers with the classical case for a harmony of rightly understood interests. Caste society, bound by inherited legal privilege, bred real antagonism; capitalism replaced it with equality under law, under which shoemakers are merely competitors, not enemies. The genuine conflicts of the day, tariffs, immigration barriers, pressure-group politics, spring not from the unhampered market but from interventionist policies that revive mercantilism, protectionism, and guild-style exclusion. Utilitarian ethics, he warns, stands or falls with the science of economics.

Mercantilism was a philosophy of war.

The stranger expects unfamiliarity; the homecomer expects to know where he belongs. In this essay, first published in 1945 and republished here in 1964, Alfred Schütz examines why that confidence can make return unexpectedly difficult. His central example is the veteran whose changed priorities and experience meet a household shaped by its own intervening life—and by public stereotypes of combat. Letters may sustain affection without preserving shared understanding; restoring an old job may fail to recognize newly acquired ambitions. Schütz’s distinctive contribution is to connect these practical failures of recognition with the way later experience alters the meaning of the past. Homecoming, he argues, requires preparation on both sides: renewed belonging cannot simply reproduce the life remembered.

A prediction can come true without having been justified when it was made. This distinction anchors Felix Kaufmann’s inquiry into what makes a scientific judgment warranted when every empirical claim remains revisable. In this 1945 article, he uses analogies with law and grammar to locate scientific correctness in procedural standards rather than guaranteed truth or eventual success. Yet rules themselves change, and observation is never free of interpretation. Examples drawn from relativity and the failed Harvard business-cycle barometer give these tensions concrete form. Readers can discover how Kaufmann defends objectivity without claiming an ultimate foundation for scientific method—and why, for him, distinguishing warranted belief from fortunate conjecture matters to social inquiry and honest public argument.

The economic problem of society, on Hayek's recasting, is not how a single mind might allocate resources it already knows, but how to make use of knowledge that no one possesses in full—dispersed, local, changing, and often tacit. Planning is not the issue, since every actor plans; the question is whether planning is centralized in one authority or divided among the many who hold knowledge of the particular circumstances of time and place. The price system is his answer: prices condense relative scarcities into signals that let people economize and substitute without grasping the underlying cause, as when a distant shortage of tin quietly prompts users everywhere to conserve it. Markets thus figure as epistemic institutions, a species of spontaneous order alongside language and law, and the socialist calculation debate turns on the impossibility of gathering that knowledge in one directing mind.

Or, to put it briefly, it is a problem of the utilization of knowledge which is not given to anyone in its totality.

What did an early coin’s stamp certify—weight, metal quality, or the place where it would be accepted? Alfred Amonn makes this concrete dispute a test of how economists and historians explain the origins of money. Defending Kaulla against Herbert A. Cahn’s criticism, he argues that surviving objects cannot establish their institutional meaning without interpretation: a mark on temple property need not mean what a mark on circulating coinage means. Yet practical plausibility is not historical proof, and money need not have emerged everywhere by the same route. The article offers a pointed encounter between documentary evidence and economic reasoning, showing both why conjecture is unavoidable and why an explanation of money’s usefulness cannot substitute for an account of its actual beginnings.

Can civilizations follow recurring patterns without obeying fixed historical laws? Emil Kauder’s 1946 article grounds comparison in the religious and imaginative inheritance he calls “myth”: convictions that connect generations and continue to shape ostensibly secular ideals. Drawing on Vico, he argues that intellectual clarification can exhaust the beliefs that sustain collective action. Yet he refuses to turn analogies into universal sequences: Homer and Dante may perform comparable poetic tasks without their societies repeating the same political history. The article’s central tension lies between this methodological restraint and Kauder’s conviction that civilizations decline as their myths disintegrate. His treatment of freedom and progress lets readers examine what cyclical history can explain—and where claims of historical necessity leave room for creativity, cultural inheritance, and uncertain renewal.

Two rival traditions have worn the name individualism, and Hayek's Twelfth Finlay Lecture, delivered at Dublin in 1945, sets them against each other. The 'true' individualism of Locke, Mandeville, Hume, Ferguson, Smith, and Tocqueville begins from the narrow limits of any single mind's knowledge; the 'false,' Cartesian strain of Rousseau and the Encyclopaedists imagines society as something reason can design whole—and, on Hayek's reading, drifts toward collectivism. Individualism is first a theory of society, not a licence for selfishness, and its cardinal discovery is spontaneous order: the institutions that arise from human action but not human design. Because no authority can know in advance who knows best, coercion must be bounded by general rules that mark out protected spheres rather than steered toward chosen collective ends.

Man in a complex society can have no choice but between adjusting himself to what to him must seem the blind forces of the social process and obeying the orders of a superior.

Orthodox theory said a fall in interest-rates should quicken investment by raising the present value of future returns; businessmen questioned by the Oxford Economists' Research Group flatly denied noticing any such effect. Rather than discard the doctrine, Shackle narrows it. A future receipt must be discounted twice, once for deferment through the pure interest rate and once for doubt, and the two work very differently: interest bites hardest on distant, secure returns, which is why housing and other long-lived, dependable assets remain rate-sensitive. But where invention, fashion, and obsolescence truncate an asset's useful life, a swelling 'marginal rate of risk' absorbs the far future before the pure rate can act, leaving valuations almost unmoved by a one-point change. Entrepreneurs, attending to shifting orders and markets, simply never register interest as the cause of their decisions.

It was until recent years an accepted doctrine that changes of interest-rates powerfully influence the pace at which enterprisers, all taken together, extend or improve their equipment.