The archive.

Kerschagl's 1938 inaugural lecture surveys Austria's contribution to modern economics as both doctrinal history and methodological self-portrait, and its verdict is pointed: scientific economics on Austrian soil begins not with cameralism or mercantilism but with the marginal-utility school. Menger supplies the foundations of subjective value and imputation; Böhm-Bawerk extends them into capital, interest, and taxation; Wieser gives the theory a broader social cast—before Mises, Hayek, Schumpeter, Morgenstern, and Haberler enlarge the field. What unites them, he argues, is not uniform doctrine but an elastic analytical core, and he plays down the Methodenstreit with the German historical school as an exaggerated quarrel. Universalist organic economics, associated with Spann, earns cautious respect: valuable for recalling economists to society, but unable to replace causal explanation with metaphysical totality.

Die Ökonomie kann daher auch selbstverständlich keine größere Sicherheit bieten, als eben die beschränkte der Erfahrung selbst.

English translation: “Economics can therefore of course offer no greater certainty than the limited certainty of experience itself.”

National Socialism cannot be grasped as mere immorality, propaganda, or institutional power; it is a religious phenomenon, and a satanic force cannot be beaten by ethics and humanity alone. From that 1938 provocation Voegelin builds a morphology of sacred-political symbols reaching back to Echnaton's Aton cult, where a world-god and god-son king bind cosmos and empire. His decisive concept is the Realissimum: whatever is experienced as holy becomes the most real center around which collective life crystallizes. When secularization lets worldly contents — people, race, class, nation — swell until God vanishes behind them, these become innerworldly apocalypses, and the Führer becomes the point at which the sacred substance of the people speaks. Judged from a Christian standpoint, such divinization of collectives is apostasy.

Wo immer ein Wirkliches im religiösen Erlebnis sich als ein Heiliges zu erkennen gibt, wird es zum Allerwirklichsten, zum Realissimum.

English translation: “Wherever a reality reveals itself in religious experience as a sacred one, it becomes the most real of all, the realissimum.”

Does the equality of saving and investment express an economic fact, or follow from how the terms are defined? In this brief 1938 reply, Gottfried Haberler challenges Copeland’s claim that consistent definitions necessarily produce equality, while defending Robertson’s terminology against an alleged contradiction. His approach is neither to reject accounting identities nor to impose one vocabulary, but to distinguish what definitions establish from what requires economic explanation. The concrete test is timing: today’s earned income is not the same as today’s disposable income when the latter means yesterday’s earnings. Following this distinction, readers can see how spending from hoards or newly created money enters the account—and how shifting the meaning of “income” can manufacture a contradiction.

The vocabulary of freedom, Hayek warns, has been turned inside out — "liberalism" now names the restrictions that collectivists promise will free men from want. Written on the eve of war and anticipating The Road to Serfdom, this Chicago pamphlet argues that comprehensive planning threatens the liberties it claims to enlarge. Its logic is institutional, not conspiratorial: directing all economic life requires agreement on a ranked scale of social ends that plural societies simply lack, so planners must impose values and then manufacture belief in them. Prices, by contrast, combine dispersed knowledge no single mind commands. Because whoever controls the means controls the ends they serve, economic dictatorship cannot stay merely economic — propaganda and the suppression of dissent become essential parts of the system. Only competitive capitalism, he contends, keeps democracy from having to decide everything, and so from destroying itself.

Freedom and liberalism have become terms that are used to describe the exact opposite of their historic meaning.

If saving and investment are equal by definition, what can their equality explain? In this 1938 essay, Gottfried Haberler separates an accounting identity from the monetary processes and changing plans that business-cycle theory must explain. His engagement with Keynes is discriminating: he accepts the saving–investment identity while challenging its use as an explanation of adjustment. The same concern for conceptual precision shapes his treatment of national income as a welfare measure. More medical spending need not mean better health, and government services cannot all be counted alike without risking duplication or misleading valuation. Readers can discover why welfare appraisal, causal explanation, and statistical estimation require different definitions—and why a discrepancy between measured saving and investment need not establish economic disequilibrium.

Every government that gathered at Geneva professed the Cobdenite creed that commerce breeds peace; every government, called to concrete concessions, reached instead for the tariff, the quota, and the bargaining duty. Delivered as the Cobden Lectures at the London School of Economics in February 1938, these three lectures reconstruct two decades of League conferences—Brussels, Genoa, the bold 1927 resolution to halt and reverse the rise of tariffs, the wrecked London gathering of 1933—and ask why they failed. Rappard sorts the protectionist arguments by purpose rather than chronology, weighing infant-industry claims and agrarian defenses, and locates the deepest cause not in ignorance or private greed but in the fear of war, which drove nations toward autarky. From Geneva, he warns, no honest message of optimism can come.

Thus those who could, will not, and those who would, cannot.

What makes an annotated statute useful as a record of legal change? In this brief review, Helene Lieser singles out the earlier Austrian laws appended to Edmund Prochaska’s edition of the new Czechoslovak instalment-transactions law. Her approval rests on that juxtaposition: current legislation becomes clearer when its predecessors are available alongside it. The notice records a concise judgment about legal documentation rather than an assessment of particular statutory provisions.

Confusion about the calculus, the authors contend, usually springs not from calculus itself but from shaky command of the algebra, geometry, and limits beneath it. Written for beginners rather than as a treatise on mathematical economics, this primer builds from graphing total cost against output toward the ideas an economist must handle to read the published literature: the limit, the derivative, marginal cost and marginal utility as special cases of it, maxima and minima, Lagrange multipliers for constrained cost minimization, Euler's theorem and the exhaustion of product under competition, least-squares regression, and Cramer's rule for market equilibrium. W. L. Crum credits Joseph Schumpeter with the volume's major additions, and the economic example — never abstract rigor for its own sake — governs every step.

The derivative of $y$ with respect to $x$ is the instantaneous rate of change of $y$ with $x$.

Can an economy hoard money even when its total cash holdings remain unchanged? In this reply to R. F. Kahn’s review of Prosperity and Depression, Gottfried Haberler argues that it can: expenditure and income may fall without any reduction in the money stock. This distinction anchors his defence of a monetary account of economic fluctuations against Kahn’s criticisms. Haberler’s distinctive concern is to separate differences of vocabulary from differences of explanation—especially where saving–investment identities threaten to substitute for accounts of how adjustment occurs. His qualified acceptance of public works sharpens the stakes: additional government spending must increase total demand, not merely displace expenditure elsewhere. The reply offers a focused encounter with the contested boundary between monetary circulation, effective demand, and the financing of recovery.

Confident opinion at the turn of the century assumed democracy's advance was as irreversible as the tide; by 1938 Bolshevism, Fascism, and National Socialism had made that assumption look naive. Across six lectures given on the Harris Foundation at Chicago, Rappard defines democracy not by its etymology but by the paired ideals of liberty and equality, then traces its uneven rise from Athens through Britain, France, and his native Switzerland. He reads the three great dictatorships as offspring of the World War—Lenin's from defeat, Mussolini's from disappointed victory, Hitler's from Versailles and slump—and diagnoses the strain within surviving democracies as a crisis of parliamentarism rather than of democracy itself. The remedy he presses is unfashionable: a retreat of the state from economic life, without which self-government becomes an illusion.

Democracy thrives on peace, and dictatorships on war.

The double meaning of the word Volk, Amonn contends, has quietly corrupted the foundations of economics by fusing the pure theoretical categories of the exchange economy with the practical concepts of Volkswirtschaftslehre. This introduction to economic thinking—second edition of 1944, essentially unchanged from the 1938 original—treats concepts frankly as instruments made by thought and defines each by the problem it is meant to solve. Moving from economic goods, scarcity, and Wohlstand through the production factors, prices, money, credit, and comparative costs, he denies that Volkswirtschaft is any real unit like a household, insisting it is only an ideational association of separate economies. Four appendices turn the method against Max Weber, Sombart, Gottl, and Englis, whose definitions he finds either candidly stipulative or objective merely in appearance.

Begriffe sind Denkwerkzeuge.

English translation: “Concepts are tools of thought.”

To analyze business cycles, this first volume of Schumpeter's 1939 study contends, is to analyze the whole economic process of the capitalist era, not some detachable pathology bolted onto an otherwise placid system. Progress itself unstabilizes: innovation, carried out by new firms drawing on bank-created credit, repeatedly knocks the economy away from equilibrium and forces the recessions that absorb it. Weaving theory, statistics, and history, he organizes the record around three superimposed waves, Kondratieff, Juglar, and Kitchin, and reads railroadization as the paradigm of long-gestation innovation. A secondary wave of speculation and debt, engaging Fisher's debt-deflation, explains why some depressions turn abnormal and destructive. The volume closes with dense historical outlines from 1787 to 1913 across England, Germany, and the United States, following cotton, steam, steel, and electrification.

Revival is the last and not the first phase of a cycle.