The archive.

Automation can make shorter working hours possible without making workers more secure. In this 1957 journal article, Hans Bayer locates that contradiction not in machinery itself but in the economic arrangements governing its use. He tests the reassuring sequence by which lower costs supposedly yield lower prices, greater demand, and renewed employment, showing why each transition may fail. His standard is neither output nor consumption alone, but the material security and leisure needed for personal development. Advertising-driven replacement purchases and deliberately shortened product lifetimes sharpen his distinction between selling more and living better. The article offers a concrete way to examine technological progress: ask who receives its gains, who bears its displaced costs, and whether increased productive capacity actually enlarges human freedom.

Why does a country's current account normally settle back toward balance when money is neither inflated nor deflated? Mahr's answer, from 1957, discards purchasing-power parity—too blind to non-traded goods, tariffs, freight, and capital movements—and grounds external equilibrium in the budgets of individual households and firms, which cannot forever spend without income or receive without spending. From this micro-foundation, refined out of Wieser by shifting the emphasis from claims to actual receipts and expenditures, he traces how a passive balance depresses income and so curbs imports (the income effect), while falling prices and wages, where they are permitted, speed correction (the price effect). Where monopolies and rigid wages block the price effect, adjustment falls instead on output and unemployment; flexible exchange rates, he warns, breed uncertainty and protectionism.

Die Tendenz zum Gleichgewicht in der Zahlungsbilanz ist die Folge einer analogen Tendenz, die innerhalb der Budgets der Einzelwirtschaften wirksam ist.

English translation: “The tendency toward equilibrium in the balance of payments is the consequence of an analogous tendency operating within the budgets of individual economic units.”

A country may be poor with no promising resources to develop, or rich while sitting on vast undeveloped opportunities — 'how splendid to be rich and yet underdeveloped,' Machlup remarks, and the irony sets the tone for this 1957 map of development economics. Rather than treat 'economic development' as one measurable thing, he sorts the field's quarrels into disputes over definitions, objectives, recommendations, and theories, showing that total income, income per head, output per worker, and mass living standards can each move in opposite directions. Ends get confused with instruments: full employment, industrialization, and 'economic independence' harden into doctrines prized for their own sake. Behind the policy clashes he finds contested theories — autarky, infant-industry protection, balanced growth, terms-of-trade strategy — and asks of each exactly what exception to comparative advantage is being claimed.

The recommendation of labor-saving, capital-using investments in countries with abundant labor and scarce capital is a genuine paradox.

No accidental byproduct of capitalism, lasting mass unemployment is for Mises the predictable effect of wage rates held above what the market would clear—by minimum-wage law, or by unions that raise members' pay only by excluding outsiders. From marginal productivity and consumer sovereignty he builds toward a monetary argument: unwilling to confront union power, governments turned to currency devaluation to cut real wages by stealth, until unions learned to index their demands to the cost of living. Keynes enters as no true theorist but the man who gave old inflationism a fresh watchword. The only genuine cure for mass unemployment, Mises concludes, is the return of freedom to the labor market; sound money and free labor pricing stand or fall together.

All Keynes accomplished was to coin a new slogan — “full employment” — which became the motto of present-day policies of inflation and credit expansion.

In this brief reply to Gould, Shackle offers an endorsement rather than a counterargument: he praises Gould’s reasoning and supports the directions of inquiry proposed. Its interest lies in the research priority Shackle states with unusual directness—decision-making as perhaps the richest and most central problem in the human sciences. The note records that commitment and agreement without elaborating a theory or specifying the methods by which inquiry should proceed.

The Machlup-Hutchison quarrel over economic method, Rothbard contends, missed the alternative that mattered most: Misesian praxeology. Both disputants assumed economic theory must be validated against observed data as in the natural sciences—Machlup by defending unrealistic assumptions vindicated through prediction, Hutchison by demanding empirical testing. Rothbard reframes the question entirely. Because economics begins not from unknown ultimate causes but from the self-evident axiom that human beings act, employing means toward chosen ends, its laws are deduced rather than experimentally confirmed; historical statistics, the joint product of many causes, illustrate theory but cannot falsify it. Along the way he clarifies psychic profit, the limits of money-maximizing assumptions, and Robbins's place in a praxeological lineage—and denies that Mises smuggles laissez-faire values into pure science, since policy follows only once citizens choose peace and abundance as ends.

For human action is not like physics; here, the ultimate assumptions are what is clearly known, and it is precisely from these given axioms that the corpus of economic science is deduced.

Menger, Böhm-Bawerk, and Wieser shared marginal utility with Jevons and Walras, yet Kauder argues that Vienna gave the doctrine a shape found nowhere else. The distinguishing marks are not subjective value itself but philosophical realism and social ontology: an Aristotelian search for the essences behind economic appearances, a suspicion of equations and functional interdependence, and a genetic-causal method that unfolds complex phenomena from consumer valuation. Menger's rejection of Walras's mathematics becomes a symptom of this deeper conception of science. Kauder then reads the school's politics against its Habsburg setting: shaped by Aristotle, Aquinas, Josephinism, and Metternich's bureaucratic paternalism, all three admired competition without embracing Manchester liberalism, and Wieser drifted toward order, charity, and organized social power. Economic method, on this telling, carries an inherited philosophy of reality and society inside it.

For Menger and his followers the model is the photography of a reality behind the appearances of every day life.

Business cycles and foreign trade feed on one another, and Mahr maps their interaction across six combinations of domestic and foreign boom and slump: a home upswing leaks abroad through imports, a downturn is cushioned by exports and cheaper foreign goods. From this he weighs the modern, Keynesian case for protection—full employment defended against multiplier leakage—only to warn that in depression protectionism spreads faster than at any other time, tipping into beggar-my-neighbour escalation. His distinctive contribution, written in 1957, is the 'Defensivzoll,' a defensive tariff justified strictly up to the point where it offsets, rather than compounds, the productivity loss inflicted by foreign barriers. List's infant-industry argument is confined to agrarian latecomers; the standing ideal remains reciprocal free trade, and OEEC liberalization, through the accelerator, is read as broadly expansionary.

Vor allem aber wirkt der Protektionismus zu keiner anderen Zeit so ansteckend wie in der Depression.

English translation: “Above all, however, protectionism is at no other time so contagious as during a depression.”

Can feeling disclose objective values, and if so, why do moral cultures disagree? Alfred Schütz reconstructs Scheler’s answer by connecting his account of knowledge with his ethics of the Person. In this expanded version, the critique of Kant sharpens the central contrast: for Scheler, moral insight discovers concrete values rather than deriving goodness from formal law. Schütz shows why this position depends on distinguishing intentional feeling from subjective emotional states, and enduring values from the goods that embody them. His exposition brings a further tension into focus: an immutable value-order must remain accessible through historically changing perspectives. Readers can follow how Scheler makes love, participation in another person’s acts, and cooperation across generations bear on the possibility of moral knowledge.

Written as prison letters to a daughter, Jawaharlal Nehru's Glimpses of World History becomes, in Engel-Janosi's reading, a revealing experiment in universal history composed from outside the conventional Western centre. He grants the book's flaws—no developed system, uneven proportion, a heavy tilt toward the modern age—while arguing that its very subjectivity gives it significance: India, China, Islam, and the Mongol world stand contemporaneous with Europe rather than subordinate to it. Nehru's premises mix anti-imperial nationalism, a Marxian account of the distribution of wealth, secular ethical religion, and faith in science and progress, aligning him at points with Wells and Toynbee even as his interest in Asia is lived inheritance rather than detached comparison. The essay presents Glimpses less as a solution to universal history than as a document of world history turning genuinely global.

Von den ungefähr 1000 Textseiten beschäftigen sich 400 mit der Periode seit dem Ersten Weltkrieg, während die Zeitalter bis zum Ende des Mittelalters mit 240 auskommen müssen.

English translation: “Of the roughly 1,000 pages of text, 400 deal with the period since the First World War, while the epochs down to the end of the Middle Ages have to make do with 240.”

A city can discover standards of justice that its own pursuit of power destroys. This tension animates Eric Voegelin’s account of Greek order in the second volume of Order and History, presented here in the 1974 reprint. Reading poetry, philosophy, and historical narrative as expressions of lived experience rather than successive doctrines, Voegelin connects civic disorder with the condition of individual souls. His Homer finds political collapse in predatory nobles and a passive assembly; his Thucydides exposes the dissolution of trust and moral language under imperial ambition and faction. These readings make the emergence of philosophical insight something less reassuring than intellectual progress: a discovery whose survival depends on how people live. The reader encounters familiar Greek texts as competing attempts to understand—and sustain—the conditions of political judgment.

How much present consumption can justifiably be sacrificed to build future productive capacity? This question anchors Hans Bayer’s 1957 article on Chinese economic planning, electronically republished in 2007. Bayer examines arrangements that complicate a simple opposition between state control and markets: local initiative under central authority, and mixed enterprises retaining former shareholders while transferring control. His broadly affirmative assessment relies heavily on official Chinese statistics and policy reports, making it a contemporary interpretation rather than an independent audit of achievements. Distinctively, he connects investment and ownership reform with the “Bandung spirit” of Asian-African solidarity. Readers can discover how Bayer understood industrialization as both a practical problem of allocating resources and a political response to poverty and foreign domination.