The archive.

'Equilibrium,' in Machlup's hands, is a word doing too many jobs at once: a literal accounting balance, a methodological device for isolating cause, a description of durable historical states, and a smuggled value judgment. The confusion, he argues, comes from sliding among these senses unawares. To label a situation observed in the world an equilibrium commits what he calls the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, since the same facts fit rival models as equilibrium or disequilibrium; to build full employment or price stability into the definition is disguised politics. He carries the critique into international trade theory, praising Joan Robinson's relativism while faulting Nurkse, Ellsworth, and Kindleberger for defining the equilibrium exchange rate through the very policies they happen to favor.

Equilibrium is not a Good Thing, and disequilibrium is not a Bad Thing.

Once policy accepts that no major group's money wages can ever fall, inflation stops being an accident and becomes the standing instrument of adjustment. Hayek's target is a practical conviction he attributes to the Keynesian revolution: because economic development constantly alters the wage relations needed among regions, trades, and skills, and because no nominal cut is permitted, every downward relative adjustment must be engineered by raising other wages instead, so the aggregate level climbs faster than real wages, which is inflation. And inflation stimulates only while it surprises; once expected, costs rise in advance, so the dose must accelerate to keep working. His conclusion reverses the accommodationist premise: the stream of money expenditure must be the fixed datum to which wages adapt, not the passive supply that ratifies whatever unions demand.

A society which accepts this is bound for a continuous process of inflation.

A smaller firm may be able to buy automated machinery yet lack the dependable orders needed to use it profitably. In this 1958 article, Hans Bayer makes that gap central to the question of whether medium-sized enterprises can automate without losing their independence. Flexible production lines, modular equipment, and shared computing facilities offer practical possibilities; dependence on large customers introduces new vulnerabilities. Bayer approaches automation as a problem of economic organization, arguing that coordinated credit, specialization, and public safeguards must accompany technical change. His analysis exposes a difficult bargain: preserving independent firms may require arrangements that limit their freedom of action. Readers encounter a concrete account of why access to machinery alone cannot secure either enterprise autonomy or broadly shared productivity gains.

Joan Robinson's The Accumulation of Capital drew admiration for its rigour, but Lachmann reads its 'Generalisation of the General Theory' as neither Keynesian nor Marxist so much as a Ricardian revival—distribution, accumulation, and technique handled through class categories rather than marginal choice. His critique fastens on what he calls the integrability condition: Robinson must treat the capital stock as the summed total of past net investment, and her 'golden age' is the moving-equilibrium device that keeps that stock measurable under change. But technical progress defeats it. Innovation brings failed experiments, fossilized equipment, and capital gains and losses the model cannot house. Behind the technical objection lies an epistemological one: Robinson's stylized workers, rentiers, and entrepreneurs suppress the divergent judgments and market process through which industrial progress actually occurs.

Homogeneity and progress are at bottom incompatible with each other.

Neither Rome's obedient arm nor a secularizing enemy: the Habsburg monarchy appears in this first volume as a great Catholic power whose dynastic and geopolitical interests repeatedly limited its usefulness to the papacy. Built largely from previously unused diplomatic correspondence out of Vienna and Paris, Engel-Janosi's study runs from the conclave of 1846 through the pontificates of Pius IX and Leo XIII to 1903, tracing the papacy's passage from reformist hope to defensive sovereignty across the revolutions of 1848, the flight to Gaeta, the 1855 Concordat, papal infallibility, and the fall of Rome in 1870. The Italian question sharpens every tension, for temporal power was Rome's own condition of freedom—yet Vienna, defeated and isolated, could not indefinitely subordinate raison d'état to papal restoration. What emerges is a study of mutual dependence in which each side wanted from the other what the other could not give.

William B. Lloyd, Jr. crossed to Switzerland after the Second World War to answer a question historians of great powers seldom pose: how so small and cantankerous a nation, divided in speech and faith, had held itself together and at peace while Europe tore itself apart. Rappard's short preface to Lloyd's book honors the American for mining the arid minutes of the old Diet for an answer of real use. The secret, on Lloyd's telling, lay not in institutions but in temper—conciliation and mediation pursued with patience, a mutual defense accepted only with reluctance, and a neutrality upheld in the wider service of peace. In a few pages Rappard folds another man's inquiry back into the study of Swiss unity that had absorbed his own career.

Here in the heart of the Old World was Switzerland which, throughout the centuries, had succeeded in maintaining within her own narrow borders the peace that her infinitely more powerful neighbors had constantly striven for in vain.

Monetary reform may not deserve first place in European integration, but does that justify postponing it? In this brief 1958 review of Geoffrey Crowther’s Zwei Welten? Oder zwanzig?, Richard Kerschagl welcomes the practical case for abolishing exchange controls in continental Europe and Britain, even while reserving judgement on its theoretical basis. Crowther’s proposal promises limited convertibility rather than an end to the dollar shortage. Kerschagl’s distinctive judgement is that an excessive emphasis on currency reform can still correct its neglect—a compact distinction between endorsing a policy’s priority and recognising the value of pressing it.

What should an account of automation offer beyond technical explanation? In this brief 1958 review, Richard Kerschagl praises the German translation of Georges Hartmann’s book for combining clear concepts with little-known numerical data, reserving particular approval for its treatment of economic and social consequences. His notice offers no examples or detailed critique; its interest lies in the standards of usefulness it articulates and its explicit recognition of French scholarship as a resource for German-speaking readers.

How much can readable monetary journalism achieve when its historical claims do not withstand scholarly scrutiny? In this brief review of Rudolf Mühlfenzl’s Interview mit dem Geld, Richard Kerschagl questions statements about the Lydians and John Law and faults a bibliography restricted to books published in Germany. Yet he distinguishes these weaknesses from the book’s usefulness to lay readers. His qualified endorsement offers a compact example of critical judgement that values accessibility without confusing it with scholarly authority: an entertaining introduction may foster understanding and prompt readers to seek more rigorous work.

Governmental honors need not silence a scientist’s remorse over helping to produce atomic weapons; legal condemnation need not extinguish a sense of duty. In this brief essay, Schütz uses such conflicts to distinguish being held responsible from feeling responsible—and responsibility for an act from accountability to an authority. Drawing on Max Weber’s distinction between an actor’s meaning and an observer’s interpretation, he argues that external judgment cannot exhaust responsibility’s subjective dimension. His distinctions clarify why accepting responsibility for a deed need not mean recognizing the right of a government to judge it, and why the same duty can mean different things to those who impose it and those who live under it.

Duty has a different meaning as defined by me autonomously and as imposed on me from outside.

When an economist calls a country's troubles 'structural,' Machlup suspects he is more often excusing a policy than analyzing a problem, and here he puts the word on trial. He sorts its economic uses into three piles: clear senses worth keeping, such as the structure of production or econometric structural equations; vaguer senses better avoided, where structure means the slow-moving or the merely institutional; and a crypto-apologetic group in which structural imbalance props up cartels, price controls, exchange restrictions, and import barriers. Diagnosing a situation as structural disequilibrium, he argues, usually substitutes terminology for analysis. In a candid postscript he concedes that his least favorite examples happen to be policies he dislikes, an admission that his own politics may color which meanings he finds clear.

Structure, I am afraid, is often a weaselword used to avoid commitment to a definite and clear thought.

How can freedom be justified when its results cannot be predicted? In this 1958 contribution to Essays on Individuality, Friedrich August von Hayek makes uncertainty the basis of his answer: nobody knows in advance whose experiments will yield discoveries useful to others. Knowledge resides not only in scientific propositions but also in skills, habits, tools, and institutions that people use without fully understanding. This perspective connects ordinary practical initiative with intellectual discovery—and explains why a freedom exercised by very few may benefit many. The essay offers a pointed account of the tension between rational control and learning: attempts to admit only demonstrably beneficial activities may suppress the unforeseen experiences through which accepted knowledge, practices, and values can change.

Freedom granted only where it can be known beforehand that its effects will be beneficial would not be freedom.