The archive.

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."

Popular sovereignty can authorize government without restraining it: this distinction anchors Hayek’s review of Bertrand de Jouvenel’s Power, first published in 1948 and reprinted here in 2013. Hayek admires de Jouvenel’s account of how ordinary motives and rationalist schemes can concentrate authority, especially when a simplified political design displaces the many institutions and loyalties that sustain social order. Yet admiration does not mean agreement with the book’s pessimism. Hayek argues that de Jouvenel gives too little weight to opinion and belief as forces capable of checking power. This short review offers a sharp encounter between two defenders of liberty who differ over how inevitable political domination must be—and an unexpected endorsement of Rousseau’s understanding of the rule of law.

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.

Scarcity is the premise from which everything else unfolds, economic life understood as the disposition of limited goods toward the fullest possible satisfaction of needs. This comprehensive Viennese treatise, here in its substantially expanded second edition, moves from needs, goods, and marginal utility through a full theory of prices, competition, monopoly, oligopoly, bilateral monopoly, and the imputation of factor values from consumer demand, into money, credit, national income, and the business cycle. Mahr rejects the static claim that investment merely follows prior saving; in a growing economy, he argues, investment must exceed saving, the excess financed by monetary expansion. Against Hayek's neutral money he defends stabilizing a wholesale-price index; on foreign trade he is liberal but strategic, weighing reciprocity and defensive tariffs. Throughout, causal explanation takes priority over moral verdict, though moral judgment is never dismissed.

Keinesfalls erspart die ethische Bewertung eines wirtschaftlichen Vorganges die Mühe seiner kausalen Erklärung.

English translation: “Under no circumstances does the ethical evaluation of an economic process spare us the effort of its causal explanation.”

Economic planning need not mean an economy administered entirely by the state. In this 1948 article, Hans Bayer separates the existence of a plan from the institutions that carry it out, judging both by their capacity to secure the material conditions for personal development. His criticism cuts two ways: competition alone cannot reliably restrain economic power, yet nationalization and bureaucratic control are not ends in themselves. Individuals, private enterprises and cooperatives should retain scope wherever they can serve the plan’s purposes as well as—or better than—state agencies. The article offers a concrete way to examine the tension between collective provision and personal agency: economic institutions must create opportunities for people to cultivate their abilities, without pretending that institutions can do that cultivating for them.

A move in chess reshapes the whole board; so, Shackle insists, does a genuinely crucial economic decision, one that cannot be repeated because it alters the very conditions under which any later choice would occur. Replying here to critics of Expectation in Economics, he defends the distinction between unique, isolated, and crucial trials against those who would treat rival imagined futures as additive terms in a single statistical expectation. Mutually exclusive outcomes, he argues, cannot be summed like fractions drawn from an urn; the chooser confronts an act, a moment, and a set of hypotheses. Against Baumol and Graaff he deploys his focus-value method, the φ-function, and potential surprise, rejecting 'degree of belief' as any general rescue of probabilistic ordering.

Now when an experiment, a question about the future, is unique, isolated, or crucial, it does not make sense to add together its rival hypothetical outcomes or answers.

More productive farms do not necessarily mean more secure farmers—or better-fed consumers. In this 1949 article, Hans Bayer draws on a study visit to the United States to examine that tension: machinery saves labour and enlarges operating units, yet abundant harvests can depress farm income while nutritional needs remain unmet. His observations of farmers comparing their accounts with state averages give modernization a practical texture; his Austrian comparisons ask which improvements might travel across very different landholding systems. Bayer argues that technical efficiency cannot substitute for economic coordination. By weighing price supports and production controls against employment and purchasing power, he shows why agricultural prosperity depends on what happens beyond the farm gate, including whether industry can absorb the workers that mechanization releases.

Numerical probability divides a fixed unit of belief among rival hypotheses; that additive structure, Shackle contends, is exactly what makes it useless for describing genuine uncertainty, where several incompatible outcomes may each be perfectly possible with nothing known against them. The remedy proposed is potential surprise, a non-additive measure of disbelief that lets rival hypotheses coexist without competing for a common total. Dividing experiments into 'divisible' series, where frequency ratios can render an aggregate outcome knowable in advance, and unique 'non-divisible' acts, where such ratios are meaningless, he weighs an integrative decision rule, drawn via Ralph Turvey from Ingvar Svennilson, against his own focus-values solution and rejects the former as psychologically artificial. Expectation, he concludes, is an act of creative imagination, not rational calculation on incomplete data.

For a non-divisible, unique experiment it is plain that no frequency-ratio can have any meaning or relevance.

These are not the famous treatise but dense student notes from a 1949 Institute of World Affairs lecture, circulated by Arthur Smithies as the fullest exposition he knew of Schumpeter's late thought. Against Trotsky's claim that imperialism is capitalism's last stage, Schumpeter advances laborism: a society, exemplified by Britain, where labor's interests become the state's governing purpose. Higher wages, shorter hours, subsidies, and cheap money redirect the fiscal state away from capital renewal and defense toward present labor consumption. His feudal analogy is deliberately provocative, since modern redistribution does not abolish the class use of the state but inverts it. A laborist Britain, he predicts, cannot sustain great-power burdens and grows dependent on America, while a dictatorial Russia mobilizes for power politics Britain cannot match.

The working class has replaced Mme. du Barry, and we have the inverse of the feudal system.

A wage increase cannot protect living standards if rising food prices, utility charges and production costs absorb it. In this 1949 article, Hans Bayer treats Austria’s third wage–price agreement as a necessary emergency compromise, not a programme for recovery. His distinctive concern is what stabilization buys time to do: coordinate investment with export markets, redirect labour, and distinguish spending that expands productive capacity from spending that merely raises costs. He challenges both the dismissal of planning as hostile to private initiative and the promise that fiscal repair can burden the population without reducing its purchasing power. The article offers a concrete way to examine the agreement’s limits: not simply by asking who pays for reconstruction, but by asking whether economic policy makes those burdens smaller.

Italy’s factories could produce more without providing enough work for its unemployed. This tension drives Hans Bayer’s 1949 article, which moves from Rome’s fashionable Via Veneto to a working-class suburb and judges reconstruction by the livelihoods it promises. His sharpest example is steel: modernization could cut jobs while lowering costs for manufacturers who might then employ more people. Against projected industrial output growth of roughly 50 percent, Bayer sets anticipated employment growth of only 10–15 percent. His social-policy perspective makes visible what production targets conceal: recovery, competitiveness, and employment are distinct achievements. The article offers a concrete account of why industrial expansion seemed indispensable to postwar Italy—and why, in Bayer’s judgement, even successful expansion would leave its central social problem unresolved.