The archive.

Only the foreign, Richard Thurnwald insists, first opens a path to knowledge of ourselves — and from that premise unfolds a vast comparative anthropology of the human mind, tracing its awakening, growth, and errancy from the earliest Naturvölker through the archaic civilizations of Egypt, Peru, and Babylon. Against the older evolutionism that ranked cultures on a single ladder toward European reason, Thurnwald reconstructs a paleopsychology of participation, in which surrounding reality is lived personally rather than confronted as impersonal object. He works through Mittelpunktgefühl, mana, totemism, projection, sacrifice, and the slow emergence of high gods, arguing that error is no accident but built into the very symbolic powers — naming, analogy, projection — that make understanding possible. Rationalization of life, he warns, will never be complete.

Die Welt ist für sie ein erweitertes Selbst.

English translation: “For them the world is an extended self.”

The failures of American foreign lending in the 1920s had been blamed on the depression and the transfer problem of the 1930s, on conditions arising after the loans were made. Ilse Mintz relocates the fault to the moment of issue. Building a default index from the share of each year's foreign-government dollar bonds that later defaulted, she shows that loans floated early in the decade performed far better than those floated late, as lending shifted from sound areas toward Latin America and eastern Europe, and from cautious houses toward reckless ones. Risk premiums, meanwhile, fell just as quality collapsed. The mechanism she names is not dollar scarcity but investor delusion during a speculative expansion, and she ties it to business-cycle theories of over-optimism in Burns, Mitchell, Haberler, and Schumpeter.

The 1920’s were the defaultless era in foreign lending.

A bonus can reward cooperation, but can it create the trust cooperation requires? In this 1951 article, Hans Bayer examines workplace consultation and profit sharing through British institutions and an American Scanlon-plan example. His emphasis falls on what workers can know and influence: access to company information, participation in cost-saving decisions, and the union’s right to inspect accounts. Financial incentives, he argues, depend on these relationships rather than replacing them. Bayer also tests the limits of cooperation: committees can fail, employers can resist, and solidarity within an industry can work against the public interest. The article offers a concrete account of why productivity reform involves not only wages and managerial technique, but also workers’ standing within the enterprise and its obligations beyond the factory.

Der Mensch im Mittelpunkt der Wirtschaft ist Erkenntnis und Forderung zugleich.

English translation: “The human being at the centre of the economy is both an insight and a demand.”

Property law can remain unchanged while ownership becomes a radically different source of social power. This tension anchors Hans Bayer’s 1951 appraisal of Karl Renner as a social scientist rather than chiefly a political figure. Bayer follows Renner’s analysis of the separation between ownership and productive activity, asking how cooperatives, unions, credit and social insurance can alter economic relations without simply abolishing existing legal forms. His distinctive contribution is to connect this account with natural-law principles that subordinate private property to the common good. The article also makes a consequential distinction: socialist possibilities emerging within capitalism are not guarantees of socialism. Readers can discover an account of institutional change in which empirical inquiry and democratic organization matter more than historical inevitability.

What can economic calculation contribute to planning without claiming to predict everything? Reporting on the 1951 European meeting of the International Econometric Society in Leuven, Hans Bayer treats econometrics as a practical bridge between abstract theory and policy decisions. His advocacy is qualified: mathematical elegance matters only when it illuminates economic relationships, and models must acknowledge social constraints and uncertain outcomes. Dutch efforts to reconcile full employment with a reduced payments deficit provide a concrete test of coordinated policy. Bayer’s criticism of treating entrepreneurial risk as a game adds another measure of realism: workers may bear consequences they never chose. The article lets readers examine how quantitative tools can inform deliberate economic planning without displacing substantive judgment or political negotiation.

In May 1895 Kálnoky could describe Austria-Hungary's foreign relations as orderly while an American envoy judged the monarchy's future exceptionally bleak—and Engel-Janosi shows the two verdicts need not contradict each other. Reconstructing the foreign minister's resignation as a constitutional rather than merely personal crisis, he traces its trigger to the Agliardi affair, in which the papal nuncio's politically charged Hungarian visitation let Premier Bánffy turn a conditional diplomatic protest into a public fait accompli. Behind the rupture lay a structural defect of the 1867 Ausgleich: a common foreign ministry obliged to act for the Dual Monarchy without any command able to restrain Vienna and Budapest at once. Agliardi's later recall partly vindicated Kálnoky, but his fall came as European politics dissolved into a wider world crisis, Russia's gaze turning eastward after Japan's defeat of China.

Zwei Leistungen bestimmen die geschichtliche Rolle des Grafen Kálnoky: seine Politik des Abschlusses und der zweimaligen Erneuerung des Dreibundvertrages und seine Politik gegenüber Rußland, in der die Balkanfrage das Zentralproblem darstellte.

English translation: “Two achievements determine the historical role of Count Kálnoky: his policy of concluding and twice renewing the Triple Alliance treaty, and his policy toward Russia, in which the Balkan question was the central problem.”

Rename a cause as its effect, and blame for it dissolves: this, Mises charges, is the semantic trick by which governments escape responsibility for inflation. Properly understood, inflation is not the rise in prices but the state's expansion of money and bank credit—here to finance rearmament—which adds government demand to undiminished civilian demand and drives prices upward. Officials then claim to fight inflation while sustaining its cause, attacking only the visible symptom through price control. But ceilings cannot repeal scarcity: fixed below market-clearing levels, they force high-cost producers out and empty the shelves, as American experience under the Office of Price Administration showed. The one remedy, he insists, is to stop creating money for the Treasury; the cost of spending must fall somewhere, and inflation merely hides who pays.

This is a classical case of the thief crying “catch the thief.”

Reprinted from a 1951 newspaper column, this brief polemic reads the postwar boom as an artificial episode conjured by paper money, bank credit, cheap interest, and deficit finance rather than as genuine prosperity. Mises presses the Austrian distinction between real capital accumulation and its monetary substitutes: rising prices prove not new wealth but falsified entrepreneurial calculation, so every credit-driven boom carries its own reversal. His deeper warning is ideological. When the inevitable slump arrives, a public that blames capitalism instead of inflationary public finance—the New Deal, the Fair Deal—will convert the failure of intervention into an argument for central planning. Avoiding depressions therefore means refusing artificial booms beforehand, though Mises doubts that politicians, who reap present popularity and leave the crash to their successors, will ever exercise such restraint.

Worse than the crisis itself could prove the psychological and ideological consequences of an erroneous interpretation of its causes.

The era of financing government by taxing wealthy minorities has ended, Mises told a 1951 conference on the economics of mobilization; henceforth the masses must foot the bill. His target is the comforting belief that inflation offers a painless alternative to taxation. It works, he shows, only on public ignorance: while people expect prices to fall they hold cash, but once they grasp that depreciation is deliberate they rush to buy—the flight into real values that wrecks the currency. War means diverting real goods from civilian to military use, a cost no printing press can conjure away; the honest methods are taxation and genuine borrowing from savings. Inflation, by hiding costs and shifting popular anger onto merchants and 'profiteers,' is at bottom an antidemocratic evasion, not democratic generosity.

At the breakfast table of every citizen in wartime sits an invisible guest, as it were, a GI who shares his meal.

For a century, Mill's exalted tributes to Harriet Taylor were dismissed as the delusion of a besotted logician. Assembling letters, family testimony, and a scrupulous chronology, Hayek sets out to replace legend with evidence, tracing the friendship from Harriet's radical circle around W. J. Fox through scandal, chronic illness, concealed journeys to Italy, the 1851 marriage, and her death at Avignon in 1858. The documents present the bond as moral and intellectual discipline rather than romance: Harriet emerges as collaborator on the Principles of Political Economy and on the essays toward On Liberty, a judgment that reshaped Mill's rationalism. Hayek's method is his argument, letting dates and manuscripts do the work where gossip once ruled. What begins as archival restraint ends in bereavement, the edition closing on the widower's grief.

The spring of my life is broken.

How do musicians understand one another when what they share cannot be restated in words? In this essay, reprinted in 1964, Alfred Schütz uses musical performance to question whether common signs and conventions are enough to explain communication. A score cannot specify everything players must do: they anticipate one another’s phrasing, respond to bodily movements, and adjust their freedom to that of their partners. Schütz’s phenomenological perspective brings these ordinary acts of coordination into focus as a sharing of lived time, distinct from agreement on clock time. His account lets readers reconsider both ensemble playing and attentive listening as relationships constituted through unfolding experience. Music becomes a concrete test of his claim that communication presupposes a “mutual tuning-in,” rather than producing it through a shared code alone.

Music is a meaningful context which is not bound to a conceptual scheme.

Strip profit and loss from the market, Mises argues, and production loses its only compass - the point this 1951 pamphlet drives home. Profit, he explains, is no arbitrary surcharge but the reward for anticipating future prices better than one's rivals and correcting the market's maladjustments, while loss is the penalty for judging wrong; under perfect foresight neither could exist. He then meets the moral condemnation of profit head on, rebutting the slogan of production for use and not for profit, the schemes to abolish or cap entrepreneurial gains, and the demand for equality, which he treats as envy in the guise of justice. The alternative to consumer-directed enterprise, he warns, is not a gentler middle way but socialism - and with it the erosion of representative government and civil liberty.

The consumers by their buying and abstention from buying elect the entrepreneurs in a daily repeated plebiscite as it were.