The archive.

May an economist honorably use a theory he does not fully believe? Shackle answers that the alternative would abolish the discipline, since every usable theory remains partial, contestable, and interesting precisely because it is not final knowledge. Sincerity thus becomes disciplined awareness of a theory's limits rather than abstention from theory. The essay runs a sequence of tests—on the arbitrary boundaries that wall economics off from psychology and politics, on the incompatible pictures rival abstractions paint, on equilibrium as a mechanical borrowing, on econometrics and its dangerous phrase 'incomplete information.' Because its subject matter learns, imagines, and invents, economics can never treat fitted equations as eternal truths, and its practitioners, Shackle urges, should form an open craft rather than a guarded mystery.

Economics is not physics, it is psychics, the study of men with all their capacity for learning and experimenting and inventing and imagining.

Can communication explain how a shared social world arises if communicating already requires shared signs and reciprocal understanding? This difficulty sharpens Alfred Schütz’s review of Husserl’s Ideas II, first published in 1953 and presented here in its 1970 republication. Reading from the standpoint of the social sciences, Schütz follows Husserl’s movement from bodily perception to the meaningful environments in which people act, interpret motives, and understand one another. He values the accounts of embodiment and habitual experience without smoothing over the manuscripts’ unresolved tensions. His criticism locates a precise explanatory gap: apprehending another person does not yet explain mutual understanding, and communicating individuals do not automatically constitute a collective subject. The review shows both what phenomenology offers social inquiry and where its account of social relations still needs argument.

Fear built cathedrals and greed built banking houses: across Brooks Adams's Law of Civilisation and Decay runs a single contest between the imaginative type—warrior, saint, priest—and the economic type of merchant, usurer, and financier. Engel-Janosi rescues this neglected American philosophy of history, written before Spengler and Toynbee, from the oblivion it met in optimistic America, reconstructing Adams's formation through the family inheritance, Harvard, Darwin, Spencer, and Guizot. Adams's narrative runs from Rome and Byzantium through the Crusades, Venice, the Reformation, England, and India to modern finance, everywhere charting centralization and the triumph of money power. Engel-Janosi finds the determinism crude beside Max Weber, yet preserves the severity of Adams's question: what governs civilization once belief in progress has collapsed?

Der Titel des geschichtlichen Hauptwerks von Brooks ist Beweis an sich: The Law of Civilisation and Decay.

English translation: “The title of Brooks's principal historical work is proof in itself: The Law of Civilisation and Decay.”

Broader education, stronger professional preparation, shorter degrees: Richard Kerschagl’s 1953 pamphlet asks which promises of Austrian university reform can actually coexist. Drawing on economics and experience of Austrian, British, and American universities, he insists that educational ambitions require staffing, funding, and credible qualifications. Small-group discussion and simulated ministries, businesses, and courts interest him as teaching methods—but not as cost-free improvements. Student hardship, he argues, calls for financial support rather than reduced requirements. His openness to pedagogical experiment sits alongside strict boundaries around admission and academic credentials. Particularly revealing is his treatment of degree reform: a qualification below the doctorate changes little if public employers still demand doctorates. The pamphlet makes university reform a concrete negotiation between educational purposes, institutional resources, and graduates’ occupational standing.

By the mid-1950s managed paper money, deficit spending, and Keynesian full-employment policy had convinced most observers that metallic money was a relic. Mises answers that fiat currency can never be a permanent order, because its stimulus depends on surprise and delay: once prices and wages catch up, the boom dies, and to prolong it governments must accelerate depreciation until the public flees cash for real values. The case for gold, he insists, is not reverence for metal but distrust of political discretion over purchasing power—a supply fixed by nature rather than pressure groups. He rebuts the balance-of-payments objection, recalls the Continental Currency and other inflations, and concludes that restoring gold depends less on mines or conferences than on surrendering the belief that prosperity can be printed.

Most people take it for granted that the world will never return to the gold standard.

No final classification of taxes is possible, Amonn concedes at the outset, because real tax systems are the residue of historically uneven practice. What follows is a concise study aid to the special theory of taxation, tracing each levy—land, building, trade, capital-rent, labour, income, wealth, inheritance, consumption, and turnover taxes—through its object, assessment base, and above all its Überwälzung, the shifting and incidence that determine who truly bears the burden. He distinguishes objective yield taxes from the subjective income tax geared to ability to pay, judges the old yield taxes fit as principal taxes only in economically backward countries, and extends the analysis to public credit, the structure and conversion of state debt, and the fiscal equalization between a federation and its member states.

Eine Zwangsanleihe vereinigt die Nachteile sowohl einer Anleihe wie einer Steuer, ohne die Vorteile einer Anleihe bzw. die Vorteile einer Steuer zu bieten.

English translation: “A forced loan combines the disadvantages of both a loan and a tax without offering the advantages of either a loan or a tax.”

Historicism reaches its fullest force precisely when it dissolves every human form into a historically conditioned object—and at that same moment exposes its own insufficiency, as life, dogma, myth, and an 'Ur'-history press beyond mere appearance. Engel-Janosi stages the argument as a sequence of confrontations: Burckhardt's contemplative culture of remembering against Nietzsche's demand for an art of forgetting; Acton and Döllinger's historical method defeated by dogmatic reasoning at the First Vatican Council; Spengler's biological determinism against Toynbee's refusal to freeze history at the present. As the scale of comparison widens, factual narration yields to myth as a mode of truth, and the overcoming of historicism becomes a search for a history behind history—an ideal eternal history in Vico's sense, closing on Burckhardt's hope of hearing the valley's dissonances as harmony.

Acton hat den Gegensatz richtig gefühlt, als er notierte: „Le dogme a vaincu l'histoire.“ Für ihn war es ein großes Unglück.

English translation: “Acton sensed the antithesis correctly when he noted: "Le dogme a vaincu l'histoire" [Dogma has vanquished history]. For him it was a great misfortune.”

A straight-line demand curve makes calculation possible—but what does it leave out? Gerhard Tintner’s textbook trains the prospective econometrician to connect mathematical convenience with economic interpretation and statistical evidence. Economic problems motivate the techniques: income distributions introduce logarithms, marginal costs give derivatives their meaning, and family-income sampling exposes the consequences of selection bias. Represented here by its 1954 second printing, the book joins elementary mathematical instruction to the practical judgment required for estimation and testing. Readers can discover how an economic relationship becomes a calculable model, while learning why an approximation is not an exact description and a significance threshold does not eliminate the possibility of error.

A large, rent-controlled apartment can cost less than a smaller new one: for Alfred Amonn, this disparity helps explain why housing shortages persist even when construction resumes. His 1953 article on Swiss housing argues that frozen rents discourage shrinking households from moving, protecting established tenants while leaving newcomers to bear higher costs. Yet he separates rent reform from the removal of security of tenure: insufficient vacancies still justify protection against termination. This distinction gives his case for market restoration its particular shape—gradual rent increases, continued supervision, and assistance directed towards need rather than possession of a controlled tenancy. Readers can examine a concrete tension between protecting current occupants and making fuller use of scarce housing, without treating all emergency safeguards as equally necessary or equally obsolete.

The entrepreneur who sinks his fortune into a single plant makes a choice no lottery can model — and it is mathematical expectation, the workhorse of investment appraisal, that Shackle attacks in this sequel. Multiplying outcomes by probabilities and summing them, he argues, is legitimate only where an experiment is divisible or seriable, so that a spread of results can be possessed as a statistical aggregate; one business commitment has no such structure. The textbook urn and the game of chance are closed worlds that bar by rule the very unknowns constituting reality. In their place stand focus-values — the strongest gain one can plausibly hope for and the gravest loss one must plausibly fear — standardized on a gambler's indifference map, where a steeper feared loss demands a larger promised gain. The framework recasts Kalecki's principle of increasing risk without objective probability.

When the course of action is a non-divisible non-seriable experiment, such an additive procedure loses entirely the relevance it has for a divisible experiment, and has only one claim to fall back on: that of being a compromise.

Scientific concepts can become more effective while their experiential foundations grow less clear. This tension gives Alfred Schütz’s review of Husserl’s Ideas III, presented here in its 1970 republication, a focus beyond exposition. Through the case of psychology, Schütz traces Husserl’s distinction between studying consciousness as the experience of embodied individuals and investigating its essential structures. Such clarification is meant to ground empirical inquiry, not replace it. Schütz also keeps the manuscript’s early, unrevised status in view, resisting an easy reconciliation with Husserl’s later work. The essay offers readers a precise approach to a foundational question: what must a science already understand about its objects before observation and experiment can yield intelligible knowledge?

For a hundred years the interventionists foretold capitalism's final collapse; Mises answers, in this 1953 essay, that the crisis actually underway belongs to the welfare state itself. He traces its doctrine to Ferdinand Lassalle's exalted image of the state and to Bismarckian Sozialpolitik, then presses a single arithmetical objection: government can spend only what it taxes, borrows, or inflates away, and the wealth of the 'nabobs' cannot fund mass benefits forever. From confiscatory taxation he moves to nationalized railroads, telegraphs, and New York's subway deficits—enterprises that devour revenue instead of yielding it. Low fares and generous programs are politically irresistible, but scarcity, he insists, returns as chronic deficits and decaying service. The essay ends less as treatise than as an object lesson addressed to the American voter.

They are not taxpayers, but tax-eaters.