The archive.

For the seller who feels himself one among very many, rivals are colleagues rather than threats—and it is this state of mind, not the sheer count of firms, on which Machlup rebuilds the theory of selling. He coins pliopoly for the pressure of potential newcomers, setting it beside polypoly, oligopoly, and monopoly, and defines a true monopolist by the triple absence of all three. Against businessmen who claim they price by average or full cost, he reinterprets such rules as competitive responses to expected demand elasticity, treating cartel ethics and break-even charts as evidence rather than refutation. The analysis ranges across perfect and imperfect polypoly, artificial scarcity and monopoly rents, and the kinked demand curve, always parting the economist's objective calculus from the trader's rough feel for the market.

The concept of the industry is nothing but an expedient device for ruling out negligible or too uncertain interdependence.

Positivism, by reducing science to method and ruling metaphysical questions out of bounds as mere "values," had hollowed out political science at its root — such is the charge these six Walgreen lectures level before setting out to restore the discipline. Voegelin recovers a classical and Christian concern with the order of the soul, distinguishing the constitutional sense of representation from the deeper existential sense by which a society first becomes capable of action in history. His central diagnosis of modernity is that ideological movements from progressivism to National Socialism revive gnosticism, converting Joachim of Flora's three ages into an immanentized eschatology that promises salvation within time. Hobbes and Puritanism supply his cases; the recovery of experience against method and revolutionary fantasy supplies his guarded hope.

The existence of man in political society is historical existence; and a theory of politics, if it penetrates to principles, must at the same time be a theory of history.

Critics had turned the Pigou effect into a crude prescription for curing depressions by driving wages and prices down; Haberler writes to rescue it from that caricature. Properly understood, he argues, it is not policy advice at all but a theorem about the internal consistency of the static Keynesian model. In a world of flexible competitive wages, the Keynes effect normally restores full employment through falling interest rates; the Pigou effect closes the extreme remaining cases — a liquidity trap, interest-insensitive investment — by letting rising real balances lift expenditure. This dismantles the one strict basis for a static competitive underemployment equilibrium and undercuts secular stagnation, even as Haberler concedes to Hansen and Metzler that real depressions demand monetary and fiscal action, not patient deflation.

For these two reasons it would be foolish to rely entirely on price and wage deflation to cure a depression through the Pigou effect.

Monopoly, in this account, is less a market form than an institutional problem: every arrangement by which alternatives are restricted — business combinations and buyer power, union control of labor markets, and above all government policies that shelter favored groups from competition. Machlup credits antitrust with making cartel agreements less secure, yet judges the law of monopolization, the prohibition of trusts and mergers, a dismal failure. His sharpest reversal is that monopoly is often a product of public permission, manufactured through licensing, tariffs, patents, and marketing orders. He carries the same logic into labor, rejecting the purchasing-power theory of wage increases and denying that union monopoly offsets business monopoly — their effects, he argues, are additive rather than compensatory. First published in 1952, it remains his most sustained brief for open entry.

The economic policies of government are far-flung and many-sided. On many fronts, therefore, could government fight for competition and against monopoly if it so desired. It has not seen fit to do so.

A machine’s purchase price is definite; its contribution to future profits is not. In this review essay, Alfred Amonn examines Friedrich and Vera Lutz’s The Theory of Investment of the Firm through the tension between exact investment calculation and workable business practice. Their approach evaluates durable equipment by discounting anticipated returns rather than allocating its cost through depreciation conventions. Amonn traces what this changes in decisions about replacement, financing, and valuation, while asking whether entrepreneurs can realistically perform the calculations the theory requires. Readers can discover why economic life need not coincide with technical service life, and why accounting rules may point toward different decisions from prospective-profit analysis. Amonn’s appreciation of the Lutzes’ analytical discipline remains tempered by questions about practical applicability and its contribution to broader economic theory.

Creating jobs is not the same as building an economy capable of sustaining them. In this 1952 article, Hans Bayer challenges both social policy that repairs market outcomes and Keynesian measures that stimulate demand without sufficiently attending to productive development. His distinctive concern is economic freedom understood as freedom from private concentrations of power, rather than exemption from obligations to the common good. Wage guarantees, redistribution and public expenditure become tests of a sharper distinction: does policy merely cushion insecurity, or change the conditions that produce it? Bayer’s account of social security as “dynamic stabilization” offers a particularly revealing tension: protecting workers need not mean preserving every existing job. Readers can discover why he locates lasting security in deliberately shaped economic development, while stopping short of a detailed planning blueprint.

Europe’s shortage of dollars is, for Hans Bayer, more than a payments problem: it tests whether a fragmented continent can become an economic partner rather than remain dependent on American predominance. In this 1952 article, he shifts attention from exchange rates and trade barriers to the location of factories, the allocation of investment, and Europe’s capacity to coordinate production. His criticism of Marshall aid is concrete: reconstruction funds could reinforce national divisions when they supported industries poorly placed from a European perspective. Bayer’s distinctive proposal is to begin investment cooperation within the sector serving collective economic purposes. The article offers a pointed account of how internal fragmentation sustains external dependence—and why, in Bayer’s view, European recovery requires more than higher national output.

Freedom from state interference can leave people subject to private economic power. This tension drives Hans Bayer’s 1952 article, which measures economic liberty not by the absence of public restrictions but by the real opportunity for self-directed personal development. Drawing on a common-good conception of social order, Bayer challenges neoliberal claims through the concrete problems of corporate concentration, inherited wealth and the separation of share ownership from effective control. His objection is not to economic coordination itself, but to coordination serving particular groups rather than society as a whole. The article offers a pointed way to reconsider the opposition between markets and planning: who already directs economic activity, and whose freedom does that direction secure?

Twentieth-century economics did not merely add topics to an old canon; it replaced the image of a system tending toward stable equilibrium with one shaped by uncertainty, hesitation, and breakdown. Out of that upheaval Shackle draws a map, sorting inherited doctrine by the kind of time and knowledge each theory assumes: perfect adjustment, calculable dynamics, aggregative comparative statics, and the economics of uncertain expectation. The organizing question is temporal—whether a model treats time as timeless adjustment, a dated sequence, or agents' conjectures about futures that cannot be known. Keynes straddles the categories, formally comparative statics yet substantively a theory of imagined futures. The chart doubles as a proposed curriculum and as a warning against teaching incompatible assumptions as though they belonged to one unified doctrine.

Imagined future events still form an entirely distinct category, since they do not constitute a unique series.

Ceremonial rather than argumentative, this brief closing note to a Review of Politics exchange isolates the one disagreement with Hannah Arendt that Voegelin judges decisive. The quarrel is not over the word totalitarianism but over method: how phenomena of the class 'political movements' are to be delimited and defined as theoretical units. Arendt draws her boundaries on the plane of historical fact, ready to accept complexes like totalitarianism as ultimate essential unities; Voegelin objects that the institutional and ideological self-formation of movements is not a theoretical formation. Inquiry starts from the phenomena, but must not take at face value the unities cast up in the stream of history. Once philosophical anthropology supplies the principles of interpretation, apparent enemies may share a hidden structure, and theory must refuse to let history's own groupings become its final ontology.

Es kann dann passieren, dass politische Bewegungen, die auf der Bühne der Geschichte einander bitter bekämpfen, sich auf der Wesensebene als nahe verwandt erweisen.

English translation: “It may then turn out that political movements which bitterly combat one another on the stage of history prove, on the level of essence, to be closely related.”

Higher farm prices can protect rural incomes while eroding workers’ purchasing power—and agriculture itself depends on industrial prosperity. In this 1953 article, Hans Bayer treats that tension as a problem of shared economic security rather than an inevitable conflict between farmers and workers. His distinctive emphasis is on changing productive conditions, not merely guaranteeing prices: fragmented holdings, unsuitable farm sizes and poorly coordinated output can defeat otherwise useful protections. Joint cultivation without changes of ownership offers one concrete alternative. Austrian examples and comparisons with Swiss policy allow readers to examine where cooperation and price regulation reach their limits, and why Bayer argues that agricultural planning must answer to consumers and the wider economy as well as to farmers.

Gemeinschaftliche Produktion (zum Beispiel gemeinsamer Anbau und gemeinsame Ernte ohne Änderung der Eigentumsverhältnisse) ist notwendig.

English translation: “Joint production (for example, joint cultivation and joint harvesting without changing ownership arrangements) is necessary.”

An equation may describe equilibrium without explaining how anyone arrives there. In this 1953 methodological essay, Ludwig von Mises presses that distinction against mathematical economics, asking what numerical precision can establish when people act on uncertain expectations. His examples give the dispute practical substance: observed demand concerns particular markets and periods, while inventory calculations cannot supply an entrepreneur’s judgment about the future. Yet Mises does not reject abstraction itself. He defends an imaginary economy of unchanging, repetitive production as a means of clarifying profit and loss. The resulting tension makes this essay more than a polemic against formal methods: it asks readers to distinguish a model that helps explain action from one that merely represents a state in which adjustment has ceased.