The archive.

Does Catholic social teaching require a particular economic system, or does it leave institutional choices open to investigation? In this 1953 journal article, Hans Bayer separates binding ethical ends from contestable economic remedies. His target is Johannes Meßner’s confidence in socially supervised competition: representative price committees, Bayer argues, cannot by themselves prevent misinvestment, reconcile competing interests, or coordinate the economy as a whole. Drawing on Oswald von Nell-Breuning, he makes the case for deliberate economic coordination without equating it with centralized coercion. The article offers a concrete encounter between Catholic ethics and economic analysis, showing why commitments to dignity, freedom, and justice need not settle the dispute between market arrangements and freedom-oriented socialist proposals.

Historicism reaches its fullest force precisely when it dissolves every human form into a historically conditioned object—and at that same moment exposes its own insufficiency, as life, dogma, myth, and an 'Ur'-history press beyond mere appearance. Engel-Janosi stages the argument as a sequence of confrontations: Burckhardt's contemplative culture of remembering against Nietzsche's demand for an art of forgetting; Acton and Döllinger's historical method defeated by dogmatic reasoning at the First Vatican Council; Spengler's biological determinism against Toynbee's refusal to freeze history at the present. As the scale of comparison widens, factual narration yields to myth as a mode of truth, and the overcoming of historicism becomes a search for a history behind history—an ideal eternal history in Vico's sense, closing on Burckhardt's hope of hearing the valley's dissonances as harmony.

Acton hat den Gegensatz richtig gefühlt, als er notierte: „Le dogme a vaincu l'histoire.“ Für ihn war es ein großes Unglück.

English translation: “Acton sensed the antithesis correctly when he noted: "Le dogme a vaincu l'histoire" [Dogma has vanquished history]. For him it was a great misfortune.”

A straight-line demand curve makes calculation possible—but what does it leave out? Gerhard Tintner’s textbook trains the prospective econometrician to connect mathematical convenience with economic interpretation and statistical evidence. Economic problems motivate the techniques: income distributions introduce logarithms, marginal costs give derivatives their meaning, and family-income sampling exposes the consequences of selection bias. Represented here by its 1954 second printing, the book joins elementary mathematical instruction to the practical judgment required for estimation and testing. Readers can discover how an economic relationship becomes a calculable model, while learning why an approximation is not an exact description and a significance threshold does not eliminate the possibility of error.

A large, rent-controlled apartment can cost less than a smaller new one: for Alfred Amonn, this disparity helps explain why housing shortages persist even when construction resumes. His 1953 article on Swiss housing argues that frozen rents discourage shrinking households from moving, protecting established tenants while leaving newcomers to bear higher costs. Yet he separates rent reform from the removal of security of tenure: insufficient vacancies still justify protection against termination. This distinction gives his case for market restoration its particular shape—gradual rent increases, continued supervision, and assistance directed towards need rather than possession of a controlled tenancy. Readers can examine a concrete tension between protecting current occupants and making fuller use of scarce housing, without treating all emergency safeguards as equally necessary or equally obsolete.

The entrepreneur who sinks his fortune into a single plant makes a choice no lottery can model — and it is mathematical expectation, the workhorse of investment appraisal, that Shackle attacks in this sequel. Multiplying outcomes by probabilities and summing them, he argues, is legitimate only where an experiment is divisible or seriable, so that a spread of results can be possessed as a statistical aggregate; one business commitment has no such structure. The textbook urn and the game of chance are closed worlds that bar by rule the very unknowns constituting reality. In their place stand focus-values — the strongest gain one can plausibly hope for and the gravest loss one must plausibly fear — standardized on a gambler's indifference map, where a steeper feared loss demands a larger promised gain. The framework recasts Kalecki's principle of increasing risk without objective probability.

When the course of action is a non-divisible non-seriable experiment, such an additive procedure loses entirely the relevance it has for a divisible experiment, and has only one claim to fall back on: that of being a compromise.

Scientific concepts can become more effective while their experiential foundations grow less clear. This tension gives Alfred Schütz’s review of Husserl’s Ideas III, presented here in its 1970 republication, a focus beyond exposition. Through the case of psychology, Schütz traces Husserl’s distinction between studying consciousness as the experience of embodied individuals and investigating its essential structures. Such clarification is meant to ground empirical inquiry, not replace it. Schütz also keeps the manuscript’s early, unrevised status in view, resisting an easy reconciliation with Husserl’s later work. The essay offers readers a precise approach to a foundational question: what must a science already understand about its objects before observation and experiment can yield intelligible knowledge?

Can government help capital cross borders without deciding where it should be invested? In this 1953 article, Hayek proposes replacing American intergovernmental aid to Europe with temporary guarantees for private investment against political risks such as blocked transfers, discriminatory taxation, and expropriation. Investors would still choose borrowers and bear commercial losses. His objection to continued aid is not simply its cost: he argues that making recipient governments the chief suppliers of capital strengthens their control over business. The proposal exposes a tension within his preference for limited government: political uncertainty may require public protection if private investment is to resume. Readers can examine the precise boundary he draws between insuring against state action and directing economic activity.

How could Lord Acton praise the American Revolution while condemning the French? For Hayek, this contrast expresses a distinction between traditions of liberty, not an inconsistency. In this 1953 review, reprinted in 2013, he assesses Gertrude Himmelfarb’s account of Acton’s intellectual development alongside G. E. Fasnacht’s reconstruction of his political philosophy. Hayek’s own allegiance to English Whiggism shapes both his praise and his reservations: he welcomes Himmelfarb’s explanation of apparent contradictions but questions how far she places Acton from his earlier commitments. The review offers a compact encounter with Hayek as a reader of liberal history, showing how biography and unpublished manuscripts can clarify a thinker whose projected History of Liberty remained unwritten.

For a hundred years the interventionists foretold capitalism's final collapse; Mises answers, in this 1953 essay, that the crisis actually underway belongs to the welfare state itself. He traces its doctrine to Ferdinand Lassalle's exalted image of the state and to Bismarckian Sozialpolitik, then presses a single arithmetical objection: government can spend only what it taxes, borrows, or inflates away, and the wealth of the 'nabobs' cannot fund mass benefits forever. From confiscatory taxation he moves to nationalized railroads, telegraphs, and New York's subway deficits—enterprises that devour revenue instead of yielding it. Low fares and generous programs are politically irresistible, but scarcity, he insists, returns as chronic deficits and decaying service. The essay ends less as treatise than as an object lesson addressed to the American voter.

They are not taxpayers, but tax-eaters.

'Profit,' Shackle observes, names two quite distinct things: the realized figure an accountant records and the forward-looking conjecture that induces an enterpriser to commit resources at all. Because production takes time, those resources must be specialized before the future market is known, and it is this unavoidable uncertainty that creates the enterpriser's double role as decision-maker and uncertainty-bearer. Written for accountants but aimed at economic theory, the essay dismisses both the rough 'best guess' and mathematical expectation, whose frequency ratios describe repeatable series but say nothing about founding a firm or building a factory. In their place stands potential surprise: ventures compared through focus-gain and focus-loss rather than a single maximized number. Timeless Walrasian equilibrium, he charges, excludes the very time, novelty, and monopoly from which profit springs.

In all production, because it takes time, there is an ineradicable uncertainty.

Business can stall not because the news is bad, but because people cannot make intelligible pictures of what might happen. In this 1953 article, Shackle approaches that economic problem through an apparent contradiction: can someone expect to be surprised? He distinguishes outcomes considered and rejected from outcomes never imagined, introducing a “residual hypothesis” to acknowledge possibilities whose details remain unspecified. A nineteenth-century physicist confronted with an electronic computer illustrates how one might anticipate an explanation while being unable to conceive its content. The economic consequence, Shackle argues, is that recognised gaps in imagination can make holding cash preferable to acting. The article offers a precise distinction between pessimism about known possibilities and hesitation before possibilities one cannot yet describe.

Marginal utility was discovered long before it was believed. Kauder's puzzle is the gap: French, Italian, and Swiss writers had utility and scarcity, Bernoulli its mathematics, Lloyd its marginal insight, yet British classical economics clung to objective labor and cost value. His boldest explanation is theological. The seventeenth- and eighteenth-century split was not ignorance but the antagonism of two moral worlds—Calvinist culture, which placed work at the center of social order and made labor value morally compelling, against an Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition that oriented economic life toward need, satisfaction, and the good life. For the nineteenth-century delay Kauder shifts ground, rejecting hedonism, neo-Kantian revival, and bourgeois apologetics alike: what blocked marginalism was the prestige of Ricardian value and the anti-theoretical climate of the historical school, until Menger, Jevons, and Walras wrote where theory still had standing.

Before 1870 the history of the theory of value shows rather strange features, not easily paralleled in the history of any other science.