The archive.

Written from New York in November 1961 to thank Alfred Müller-Armack for birthday wishes, this short letter turns quickly to a correction Mises wanted on record: he had been misunderstood as rejecting all political compromise. Theory and program, he insists, must be built consistently and without contradiction, yet the politician who cannot move the majority to adopt them must settle for whatever the given circumstances make attainable. The concession costs him nothing doctrinally—he restates his standing verdict that middle-of-the-road interventionism, in every variety, necessarily ends in full socialism. Writing as a European rather than American liberal, he closes by praising Müller-Armack and Ludwig Erhard for the postwar German recovery, a liberal achievement he can admire without endorsing its every interventionist remnant.

In der praktischen Politik kann man nur selten das Vollkommene erreichen. Man muss sich in der Regel damit begnügen, das kleinere Übel zu wählen.

English translation: “In practical politics one can only rarely attain the perfect. As a rule one must be content to choose the lesser evil.”

Ranking satisfactions is not the same as measuring them. This distinction drives Alfred Amonn’s critique of the first volume of Robert Liefmann’s Grundsätze der Volkswirtschaftslehre, which promises to rebuild economics on psychological foundations. Amonn tests that promise against definitions of utility and cost and numerical examples of choice: can subjective feelings legitimately be added, subtracted, or expressed as ratios? His defence of marginal-utility theory is qualified by a willingness to challenge its practitioners when they use the same questionable arithmetic. He also develops a concrete alternative to treating cost as pain: cost is the benefit forgone when resources are used elsewhere. The review offers a focused encounter with the limits of numerical representations of preference—and with the distinction between a genuinely new explanation and a change of theoretical vocabulary.

A tax assessed on yesterday’s prosperity may fall due in a year of hardship. Such practical difficulties give substance to Siegmund Feilbogen’s portrait of Robert Meyer, the Austrian finance administrator and scholar commemorated in this July 1914 obituary, introduced by Yves Guyot. Feilbogen connects Meyer’s conceptual precision with his concern for fair treatment of taxpayers, while acknowledging his inability to overcome privileges enjoyed by great landowners. Particularly striking is Meyer’s argument, as presented here, that progressive taxation rests primarily on fiscal productivity rather than justice. The tribute offers a compact encounter with the uncertain boundaries of taxable income—and with Feilbogen’s understanding of conscientious public service, where sound definitions matter but political constraints remain.

Equal legal capacity offers little to a worker who lacks the means to acquire property: this is the problem Friedrich von Wieser foregrounds in his dictionary portrait of Anton Menger. Wieser credits the jurist with exposing how the draft German Civil Code misunderstood the circumstances of the propertyless, even where reform need not challenge private ownership. Wage contracts and family law become concrete tests of whose circumstances legal rules accommodate. Yet admiration has a boundary: Wieser praises Menger’s knowledge of socialist literature while finding his economic theory inadequate. This brief entry lets readers examine that distinction between legal insight and economic explanation, and encounter a socialist criticism of law that could work within existing property institutions as well as challenge their foundations.

Market reporting, rather than withdrawal from practical affairs, supplies the origin of abstract value theory in Friedrich von Wieser’s dictionary portrait of Carl Menger. Wieser traces Menger’s attention to human needs to pricing practices that prevailing economics failed to explain, then connects his discoveries to his defence of theory against the German historical school. This is also a founder’s account of how intellectual credit should be divided: Wieser defends Menger’s independence from Gossen while assigning much of the theory’s subsequent development to Böhm-Bawerk and himself. The brief entry offers both a concrete account of the relation between market observation and subjective value and a participant’s revealing distinction between founding a school and extending its work.

When technical improvements lower prices, does the increased purchasing power of existing cash balances count as saving—and does it justify credit expansion to keep prices stable? In this 1935 comment, reprinted in 1993, Karl Bode and Gottfried Haberler challenge Harrod’s affirmative case by separating deliberate cash accumulation from the appreciation of money already held. Their objection is not to monetary expansion in all circumstances, but to deriving a policy requirement from inconsistent definitions of saving and investment. They also question whether anticipated income growth necessarily induces people to hold more cash rather than spend more freely. This tightly focused dispute offers a concrete lesson in monetary reasoning: an accounting relationship cannot establish how people will behave, and revalued wealth cannot be compared uncritically with expenditure on new capital.

Marginal utility becomes a farewell-party joke in Felix Kaufmann’s song for Stonier and Sweezy, presented here in Arlene Oost-Zinner’s 2010 English translation. Sweezy plans to convert Harvard to the ideas he has encountered in Vienna, only to stumble over the difficulty of deciding what things are worth; Stonier voices his suspicions but promises to return for more argument. Kaufmann affectionately teases both intellectual conversion and resistance, setting theoretical vocabulary to a folk melody. The pleasure of this small occasional work lies in its tone: disagreement, uncertainty, and ambitious claims become reasons for laughter and a shared toast rather than obstacles to friendship.

A machine’s future services and the labour committed to making it describe capital from opposite directions. In this 1934 article, Hayek asks how these perspectives—discounted output and investment through time—can be joined without losing what each explains. His distinction between goods still in production and durable goods already yielding services makes timing central to valuation: neither physical quantities nor a single average production period can adequately measure capital. The interest rate is largely taken as given, allowing the analysis to focus on how it connects commitments with returns. Readers can discover why inherited equipment constrains new investment without dictating its form, and why maintaining output requires attention to when existing services expire and replacements become available.

When does an economic theory explain conduct, and when does it merely redescribe the assumptions built into it? Felix Kaufmann’s 1933 essay makes this distinction the test of methodological claims. His central case is subjective value theory: ordering a consumer’s preferences is not yet explaining how those preferences arose. He treats marginal utility as a guide to investigating economic plans, whose usefulness must be demonstrated rather than secured by deduction alone. At the same time, he distinguishes economics’ subject—social exchange—from its explanatory instrument, the individual plan. Readers can discover why accepting preference analysis need not mean defining all purposive action as economic, and how conceptual precision exposes claims of empirical certainty that definitions and formal reasoning cannot support.

A price can explain what someone will pay without establishing what serves their well-being. In this December 1920 sequel article, Frank Albert Fetter challenges the claim that contemporary economics is converging on money and prices as its governing framework. His criticism is pointed because he defends price theory as a legitimate analytical undertaking while refusing to make market valuations standards of welfare. Reading Marshall and Mitchell against their own qualifications, he exposes the tension between monetary precision and humanitarian purpose. Capitalized property rights sharpen the problem: their value may depend on restricting services rather than satisfying needs. The article offers a concrete way to distinguish explaining economic choices from judging their consequences, without discarding the tools of price analysis.

Data may feed inquiry, but can they produce theory? Felix Kaufmann turns this methodological dispute into a three-stanza song, here in Arlene Oost-Zinner’s 2010 English translation with an accompanying score. His satire respects the labor of collecting evidence while rejecting its claim to generate theory unaided; an obscure appeal to “natural value” fares no better. Yet the joke also reaches Professor Mises’ seminar, where evening argument promises certainty until dinner asserts a more bodily demand. The song’s distinctive pleasure lies in this double edge: theoretical conviction and affectionate mockery share the same table, allowing readers to encounter methodological loyalties in the lighter register of seminar sociability.

Abolishing the employer does not by itself give workers a stake in collective life. This distinction anchors Emil Lederer’s review essay on Walther Rathenau’s proposals for economic and social reconstruction. Welcoming Rathenau’s turn toward expropriation, Lederer asks what would make self-government more than a change of administrators: participation in production, municipal affairs, and communal housing must make solidarity an everyday experience. His criticism also reaches Rathenau’s fear that economic equality would impoverish culture. Why should the disappearance of wealthy patrons entail the disappearance of creative initiative or diverse audiences? Rather than promise socialist flourishing, Lederer challenges the projection of wartime deprivation onto a future social order. The essay offers a concrete account of what ownership reform leaves unresolved: motivation, cultural freedom, and the institutions through which people acquire shared responsibility.