The archive.

Can an enterprise chasing only its own advantage still steady the wider economy? This first volume, restricted to the large firm, answers a cautious yes. Bayer begins where the free-competition model breaks down: its assumptions of perfect transparency, capital mobility, and timeless adjustment are complementary, so that when one fails the whole equilibrium mechanism fails, a disequilibrium he illustrates with the cobweb theorem. Large firms, he argues, narrow the gap to the model through forecasting, long-run planning, and above all diversification, preserving the core stability of market share and employment. Profit, in many cases, ceases to be the goal and becomes a margin of safety that permits growth. Yet he concedes that some firm-level stabilizing merely shifts risk onto suppliers and competitors, so market power must remain checked by competition.

So zeigt sich, daß durch die Stabilisierungsmaßnahmen des einzelnen Unternehmens Kräfte einer Ordnung von unten her eingesetzt werden, die im Sinne einer Gesamtstabilisierung der Wirtschaft wirken können.

English translation: “Thus it becomes evident that through the stabilizing measures of the individual enterprise, forces of an order emerging from below are set in motion which can operate in the direction of an overall stabilization of the economy.”

Intelligent diplomats cannot substitute for an institution that prepares them to decide. In this 1960 article, Oskar Morgenstern asks what the United States State Department needs to turn information and expertise into workable foreign-policy alternatives. His case for decision theory begins with practical shortcomings: language skills unrelated to assignments, negotiators without relevant preparation, and military contingencies lacking an advance political framework. He advocates developing analytical methods specifically for diplomacy, rather than simply importing military techniques or expecting mathematics to deliver immediate answers. The revealing tension is between his confidence in systematic analysis and his acknowledgment that applications may fail. Readers can discover a concrete institutional argument for game theory: its value may begin in how officials frame choices, before it yields solutions.

Liberalism cannot be isolated as a fixed doctrine with a tidy history of its own; it has meaning only within the wider Western revolutionary movement, and its sense shifts with each front it faces. The word itself enters politics with the Spanish Liberales of 1812, beside the new symbols 'conservative' and 'restoration.' From there Voegelin reads liberal reform as a moderated permanent revolution, a way of pursuing the revolution by less destructive means, and takes Auguste Comte as his test case, the thinker whose assault on theology disclosed itself as a replacement religion of humanity. Surveying liberalism's political, economic, religious, and scientific aspects, he warns that successfully driving Christianity out of people produces not rational liberals but ideologues. Toleration and church-state separation survive as sediments; the nineteenth-century bourgeois-capitalist form, he judges, is dead.

Aus der Revolution kann man nicht aussteigen.

English translation: “One cannot opt out of the revolution.”

Macroeconomic reasoning did not begin with Keynes: in this German-language essay Machlup runs the pedigree back through Quesnay, Ricardo, Cournot, Böhm-Bawerk, and Wicksell, then asks what really separates macro- from microtheory. Rejecting viewpoint and aggregation as the decisive test, he favors the absence of relative prices as the mark of a macro model, and insists that macro-relations like the consumption function rest on hidden micro-relations and unstable aggregations. He punctures the claims made for macrotheory's superiority, that it is more measurable, more dynamic, closer to policy, and warns against wringing causal conclusions from ex post identities. The firm of price theory, he reminds readers, is an ideal type, not a real enterprise. His verdict on the contest is deliberately anticlimactic: neither side wins, though microanalysis keeps a philosophical primacy.

Dennoch muß mein Urteil so lauten: kein Sieger und kein Unterlegener.

English translation: “Nevertheless my verdict must be as follows: neither victor nor vanquished.”

When does a promise of political improvement become a promise of salvation? In this essay, presented in its 1968 English translation, Eric Voegelin argues that modern ideologies inherit religious expectations while relocating fulfillment from transcendence to history. His category of “gnostic” movements links otherwise opposed doctrines through their claim to possess the knowledge needed to overcome the defects of existence. The distinctive tension lies in his account of their appeal: systems promising mastery may offer imaginary certainty precisely where faith requires endurance of uncertainty. His readings of More, Hobbes, and Hegel ask what a construction of social or historical order must exclude to appear complete. Readers can examine both the force and the demanding premise of his critique: that political action must acknowledge limits it cannot abolish.

Stable money alone does not secure the freedom to act. In this 1960 article, Hans Bayer connects monetary policy to the distribution of practical opportunities: who can obtain an education, start an enterprise, or participate in self-government. His distinction between protecting money’s value and sustaining its broader functions makes concentrated financial power a problem for both democracy and economic management. Large firms’ reliance on self-financing, he argues, can weaken capital-market allocation and the reach of monetary instruments. Yet his answer is not simply to oppose large enterprise. It is to combine monetary and fiscal measures with democratic counterpower built from below. The article offers a concrete account of why economic security and access to resources matter to freedom—and why monetary technique cannot replace them.

Against the socialist promise that collective ownership will deliver both abundance and perfect freedom, this 1960 review of Hayek's The Constitution of Liberty rebuilds the liberal meaning of liberty from the ground up. Freedom, Mises insists, is not escape from scarcity or natural necessity but a social relation: voluntary contractual cooperation set against authoritarian command, in which one will subordinates all others and moral agency decays into obedience. Crediting Hayek's argument that control of the means is control of every end, he concludes that economic direction cannot be quarantined from the rest of life. His sharpest turn is against Hayek himself—the welfare state, Mises argues, is not a stable middle way but a gradual method for transforming the market economy step by step into socialism, ending, like outright nationalization, in the authoritarian state.

Tyranny is the political corollary of socialism, as representative government is the political corollary of the market economy.

Einstein's definition of simultaneity, and Bridgman's attempt to turn it into a general rule that a concept means nothing more than the operations measuring it, set the stage for Machlup's defense of the unobservable. Physics itself, he shows, cannot do without freely invented constructs, from mass and inertial frames to Schrödinger's wave function, and neither can economics. Supply and demand curves, price, output, the industry are idealizations no statistic cleanly captures, muddied by heterogeneous goods, discounts, and quality changes; a model's weak fit with the data often indicts the data, not the model. Drawing on Menger's contrast of exact and empirical-realistic analysis, he defines a mental construct precisely and argues that a theory's concepts need not be realistic to be relevant, only its deduced consequences testable.

A mental construct is a concept designed for purposes of analytical reasoning that cannot be adequately defined or circumscribed in terms of observables or in terms of operations with recorded data derived from observation.

When Cardinal Puzyna pronounced the Habsburg emperor's veto against Rampolla in the conclave of 1903, he closed one era of Catholic great-power rivalry and opened another. This second volume follows Austro-Vatican relations from that Exclusiva through the pontificates of Pius X and Benedict XV to the monarchy's collapse in 1918. Engel-Janosi's paradox is that an "unpolitical" pope, hostile to statecraft, drew the Vatican closer to Vienna than his predecessors ever had—until the First World War exposed the limits of papal mediation. Reconstructed from nuncios, cardinals, and crisis files, the narrative turns on the Roman Question, Italy's demand for the Trentino, Benedict XV's peace note of 1917, and above all Belgium, the moral test the Central Powers let become the war's insoluble knot.

Das Konklave von 1903 erscheint in manchem wie der letzte Nachhall des jahrhundertelangen Ringens zwischen Bourbon und Habsburg, zwischen Frankreich und Österreich, um die Vorherrschaft in Italien, im Kirchenstaate und schließlich an der Kurie.

English translation: “The Conclave of 1903 appears in many respects like the last echo of the centuries-long struggle between Bourbon and Habsburg, between France and Austria, for supremacy in Italy, in the Papal States, and ultimately at the Curia.”

The gravest danger to American freedom, this 1960 essay warns, is neither military conquest nor open revolution but the interventionist policies embraced by mainstream parties that denounce communism while cherishing planning. Mises collapses the distinction between socialism, communism, and planning—each substitutes one government plan for the plans of individual citizens—and insists economic control cannot be walled off from press, employment, and assembly. Inflation is planning's most insidious ally: the expansion of money and money substitutes creates no wealth, only a hidden redistribution toward first receivers. Its subtlest victim is the thrifty householder, whom capitalism had deproletarianized into a creditor through savings, insurance, and pensions, and whom inflation reproletarianizes by dissolving those very claims. Sound money thus becomes a constitutional safeguard—and, Mises argues, a frontline defense against the appeal of communism.

If somebody says he is opposed to communism, but cherishes socialism, he is no more consistent or logical than a man who declares that he is opposed to murder but cherishes assassination.

Confine the corporation to a single task, the profitable use of the capital its stockholders entrust to management, and you limit its power to where it does good; license it to pursue 'social responsibility,' and you create centres of uncontrollable authority never intended by those who supplied the funds. That is the thesis Hayek presses in this 1960 essay, testing in turn each rival claimant to corporate purpose: management, labour, stockholders, and the public. A firm run for its existing employees becomes a closed interest against consumers; a management spending on culture or politics becomes an unaccountable ruler. Because limited liability is a privilege granted by law, he argues, democratic society may redesign corporate rules, letting stockholders decide annually whether to reinvest and stripping voting rights from corporate-held shares. He closes with Milton Friedman's warning that managerial social responsibility is fundamentally subversive.

Power, in the objectionable sense of the word, is the capacity to direct the energy and resources of others to the service of values which those others do not share.

A moral command means nothing addressed to a slave: this premise opens Mises's 1960 argument that freedom is a postulate not only of politics but of every morality, since only an agent who can weigh alternatives and restrain impulse can be held responsible. From moral anthropology the essay builds outward to the market, where the consumer is sovereign and private property functions as a revocable public mandate rather than feudal privilege. Its decisive claim is the indivisibility of freedom: because every human act requires material means, a state that controls production also controls the paper, presses, halls, and broadcasting through which conscience and dissent must speak. Constitutional liberties, Mises warns, become empty once economic independence from government disappears.

He who monopolizes all media of communication has full power to keep a tight hand on the individuals' minds and souls.