The archive.

How did two reformers turn private conviction into institutional influence? Reviewing Beatrice Webb’s Our Partnership, Hayek admires the Webbs’ patient, often anonymous work through journalism, education, hospitality, and cross-party contacts while opposing the collectivist ends it served. His sharpest tension concerns independence: he argues that private resources enabled their socialist campaigning in ways their preferred society would not permit. The memoir’s accounts of Poor Law Commission work also prompt him to ask whether their research tested political commitments or assembled support for settled conclusions. This 1948 double review, closing with a brief, favourable assessment of Edgar Reichel’s study of Fabian socialism, offers a concrete account of intellectual influence alongside Hayek’s critical scrutiny of claims to disinterested expertise.

Thurnwald divides his science in two: ethnography gathers the facts, ethnology interprets their tangled connections of time, people, thing, and place. Writing in 1948, he defends German ethnology against the charge of having been mere colonial propaganda, then lays out the fieldworker's discipline—long residence, repeated checking, no suggestive questions smuggling in high-gods or the Oedipus complex. He weighs evolutionism, the Kulturkreislehre of Frobenius, Gräbner and Schmidt, and Malinowski's functionalism, and settles on two leading factors: the procurement of food and contact between cultures. The unilinear march from hunter to herder to farmer is rejected; cases such as the Iramba plateau and the colonial dissolution of Ngoni order show culture as an uneven, accretive process rather than a ladder of stages.

Der Weg des Fortschritts ist holperig.

English translation: “The path of progress is bumpy.”

The consumer faces a problem no equilibrium diagram quite states: how to bring an unrechenbarer Nutzen, a utility that cannot be counted, into the arithmetic of money. Schönfeld-Illy's answer reconstructs Wieser's marginal law, stripping away its accretions until the value it names turns out to be not an inner quantum of feeling but the consumer's demand price. Marginal utility becomes a rule of economical simplification: a disposition found admissible at the margin can be carried over to a whole stock without appraising each unit. From there the book turns on static equilibrium theory, rejecting the Walrasian Universalrechner that would solve prices and demand from outside the economy — whoever manages an economy calculates for himself — and substitutes a dynamic account built on expected data and forward-looking plans.

Die Preise werden durch die Nachfrage determiniert, die Nachfrage wird durch die Preise determiniert!

English translation: “Prices are determined by demand; demand is determined by prices!”

The transformation of a loose league of sovereign cantons into a modern federal state in 1848 is the pivot of this centenary study, commissioned by Pro Helvetia and read here in A. Lätt's German translation of Rappard's French original of the same year. He works backward from the French invasion of 1798 through the Helvetic Republic, Napoleon's Act of Mediation, the restorationist Pact of 1815, the Regeneration, and the Sonderbund War, then dissects the charter the revision commission assembled in six weeks—the American-inspired bicameral Assembly, the collegial Federal Council, the deliberately weak Federal Court. Three forces, he argues, made the federal state: the need for national security, for free economic development, and for political liberty and equality. It was, he insists, no foreign import but the act of a nation.

Die Einheit ohne Glieder ist eine leere Masse, die Glieder ohne Einheit sind ohnmächtig.

English translation: “Unity without members is an empty mass; members without unity are powerless.”

What divides this presentation from Stackelberg's popular textbook is method, not subject matter: modern theory, Amonn insists, must be learned as a mode of reasoning rather than gathered as a heap of results. He builds from supply and demand as functional relations through equilibrium and market price to monopoly, duopoly, and the imperfect competition of Joan Robinson and Chamberlin, grounding demand in marginal utility and supply in subjective cost. He rejects the marginal-productivity theory of factor values as circular, substituting his own principle that product prices must be differentiated by the quantities of factors each good requires, and derives wage, interest, and rent from it. The argument runs on through money and the quantity theory, business cycles, and comparative costs to a welfare doctrine that weighs competition's productive power against the inequality it breeds.

Der Preis keines Gutes ist unabhängig von denen der anderen bestimmt, sondern alle sind zugleich, «simultan» bestimmt.

English translation: “The price of no good is determined independently of the others; rather, all are determined at once, "simultaneously.”

A demand curve, in ordinary teaching, is a path along which buyers slide as prices change. That picture is the error Morgenstern sets out to dismantle. The curve, he argues, is first a schedule of mutually exclusive intentions at a single moment — alternative maximum bids, not a record of successive purchases. Once a buyer actually transacts, expenditure and possession change, and the remaining points no longer mean what they did; a one-variable curve is valid for exactly one transaction unless it is reconstructed through a fresh reaction function. Elasticity, price discrimination, monopolistic competition, and the cobweb theorem all inherit the flaw. What begins as immanent critique of Marshall and Schultz becomes a bridge toward a game-theoretic view of markets as strategic situations that shift with every trade.

Eine individuelle Nachfragekurve einer Variablen ist dann, ganz gleich, welches ihre Form ist, gültig nur für eine einzige Verwendung, d. h. für eine Transaktion.

English translation: “An individual demand curve of a single variable is then, whatever its shape, valid only for one single use, that is, for one transaction.”

Competition need not belong to capitalism: this is the premise Hans Bayer develops in his 1948 journal article on competitive socialism. Drawing on Lange and Lerner, he asks how prices and decentralized decisions might serve publicly determined goals without requiring comprehensive administrative control. His proposed safeguard is selective public ownership, especially of basic industries, where he locates the most dangerous investment disturbances. Postwar Britain gives this sympathetic theoretical account a practical test: economic budgets, flexible planning, and employer–worker cooperation promise coordination compatible with individual freedom. The article’s revealing tension lies in Bayer’s confidence that planning can contain competition’s harmful effects while retaining its advantages—a confidence set against the still-preliminary results and material constraints of British reconstruction.

Being caught looking through a keyhole and taking part in a conversation pose different problems for a theory of other people. In this essay, Alfred Schütz uses that difference to test Sartre’s account of the Other. He takes seriously Sartre’s descriptions of the gaze, shame, and the body, yet asks whether a relation defined by objectifying or being objectified can explain mutual understanding. Speaking and listening, Schütz argues, require participants to follow and co-perform meaningful activity—not merely encounter an alien perspective that limits their freedom. His critique identifies what Sartre’s analysis already presupposes: our ability to understand another person as acting within a situation. The essay offers a concrete point of entry into the tension between Sartre’s account of interpersonal conflict and Schütz’s concern with the conditions of ordinary social interaction.

Perfect competition, as the textbooks model it, assumes away nearly everything ordinary language means by competing: with homogeneous goods, complete knowledge, and prices already adjusted, there is nothing left to discover. Hayek's reversal is to treat rivalry as a dynamic process rather than a static end-state—the very means by which costs, consumer wants, and better substitutes come to be known. Advertising, undercutting, product differentiation, and reputation, dismissed by theory as imperfections, are for him the substance of competition and the ways buyers economize on ignorance. The right test of a market is therefore not its distance from an unattainable ideal but whether it improves on what would exist if competition were blocked by licensing or price-fixing. Competition, he concludes, is a process for forming opinion and spreading dispersed knowledge.

The practical lesson of all this, I think, is that we should worry much less about whether competition in a given case is perfect and worry much more whether there is competition at all.

Whether freedom or totalitarianism prevails, Mises writes in this 1948 memorandum to Leonard Read, will be settled in the democratic nations at the polls—but votes follow conviction, and conviction is formed long before any ballot. Anti-communism collapses, he warns, once its own spokesmen have absorbed socialist premises. The deeper obstacle is Marxian polylogism, the trick of judging an argument by the speaker's class instead of answering it, so that a defense of capitalism can be waved away as merely bourgeois. Economic education must therefore work first on intellectuals, whose ideas reach the masses only in simplified form. The essay ends by cataloguing ten dogmas of 'Progressivism'—abundance blocked by capitalism, depressions as inherent market failures, wealth endlessly taxable—that sound instruction has to unmask.

What matters is not to change the ideology of the masses, but to change first the ideology of the intellectual strata, the "highbrows," whose mentality determines the content of the simplifications which are held by the "lowbrows."

The mechanics of inflation are not obscure; what defeats every cure is the refusal of the groups who count politically to pay the price of stopping it. Reading the American inflation of 1948 through the post-1918 collapses of Austria, Germany, Italy, and France, Schumpeter defines inflation as means of payment rising faster than output and divides the disease into three stages: incipient, advanced, and wild. America, he judges, has reached the advanced phase, where full employment turns new money into general price increases and bank lending breeds secondary credit inflation, the national payroll serving as its chief conductor. His program rejects price rollbacks and direct controls in favor of credit restriction, budget surpluses, and taxes that reward saving, warning with a nod to Lenin that a debauched currency corrodes the very classes on which the social order rests.

So inflation runs on by common consent.

Scientific inquiry depends on results it must remain willing to withdraw. What, then, does it mean to call those results true? In Three Meanings of “Truth,” Felix Kaufmann argues that timeless truth cannot provide the methodological foundation for revisable empirical knowledge. His distinctive move is to separate a proposition’s meaning from the rules governing its acceptance: changing evidence can overturn an assertion without changing deductive logic. Disputes with Russell and Carnap sharpen the difference between technical obstacles to verification and the absence of applicable standards. The article offers a precise way to distinguish logical relations, warranted acceptance, and coherence as an ideal for revising methods—without assuming that successive scientific conclusions necessarily converge on a predetermined final truth.