The archive.

Intellectual influence need not begin with agreement. In this 1956 commemorative address, reprinted here in 2013, Hayek recalls how Mises’s Socialism unsettled the socialist hopes of young economists, including himself, and forced them to reconsider convictions they were reluctant to abandon. Speaking as both pupil and former subordinate, he pairs that testimony with memories of Mises’s administrative competence in inflation-stricken Austria. The resulting portrait turns on a tension between expertise and authority: a thinker whom Hayek regarded as exceptionally clear-sighted often lacked the recognition or power to shape events. Rather than a systematic exposition of Mises’s economics, this contribution, collected in Margit von Mises’s My Years with Ludwig von Mises, offers Hayek’s personal account of argument as an uncomfortable, enduring force in intellectual life.

But to arouse contradiction, to force others to think out for themselves the ideas which have led him, is the main function of the innovator.

Why did Mises’s critique of policies between a market economy and socialism provoke such hostility among German-speaking economists? In this introduction to the 1976 reissue of Mises’s Critique of Interventionism, presented in its 2013 English translation, Hayek connects that controversy to Mises’s practical advisory work in Vienna and his break with prevailing academic doctrines. His portrait makes classical liberalism an acquired conviction, not an inherited allegiance: Mises began with sympathies for social reform before changing direction through Böhm-Bawerk’s seminar. Hayek defends the sharpness of Mises’s polemics while distinguishing the achievements of his different books. Readers encounter not a substitute for Mises’s economic arguments, but a colleague’s account of the intellectual independence, professional antagonism, and disrupted reception that shaped them.

Generations of textbooks credit Barone, Lange, and Lerner with solving Mises's challenge to socialist planning; Rothbard denies they ever touched it. Their demonstrations that a planning board could solve equations of prices and production presuppose a static world of perfect knowledge—precisely the conditions under which calculation would pose no problem. Real production, for Mises and Hayek, unfolds amid uncertainty, dispersed knowledge, heterogeneous capital, and entrepreneurial judgment, and demands genuine markets in the factors of production. Lange-Lerner 'market socialism' only mimics competitive pricing while abolishing the capital markets that generate prices; Soviet planning survived parasitically, on external capitalist prices. Developing a subjectivist theory of cost as forward-looking and unmeasurable, Rothbard extends the argument beyond socialism to any 'One Big Firm' that would swallow the very markets it depends on.

The fact that in a changeless world of perfect knowledge and general equilibrium a socialist planning board could “solve” equations of prices and production was for Mises a worse than useless demonstration.

Though capital and interest sit at the center of the Misesian system, Mises himself published little on either before 1940, leaving his theory scattered across Socialism, Human Action, and seminar remarks. Reconstructing it, Kirzner presents a radicalized Mengerian subjectivism that severs capital from capital goods: capital is not a physical stock but an accounting concept made possible by money prices and entrepreneurial calculation, while interest expresses the universal preference for present over future satisfaction rather than any productivity of machines or roundabout methods. This purifies Boehm-Bawerk of his residual objectivism, the average period of production and the productivity concessions, and rejects the Clark-Knight vision of capital as a self-perpetuating fund yielding automatic income. In real markets, Kirzner concludes, capitalist, entrepreneur, and factor owner are one, and observed returns blend originary interest with entrepreneurial gain or loss.

Knight correctly characterized Mises as taking an extreme Austrian position on interest by refusing to attribute any explanatory role to the objective, or physical, conditions governing production in a capital-using world.

When John von Neumann published his expanding-economy model in 1937, he gave economics one of its rare transformative events. Morgenstern and Thompson build on it here, synthesizing two decades of work into the KMT model, which removes von Neumann's restrictive assumption that every good figures in every process and admits multiple expansion rates, subeconomies, and game-theoretic solution methods. Across fourteen chapters they extend the framework to open economies that import and export at world prices, to consumption and savings, to trading blocks and a world model bound by a common expansion rate, and, pointedly, to contraction and compression, since resource limits make endless growth no longer self-evidently desirable. Throughout, they insist the models apply to any economy regardless of political organization, deliberately omit money and stochastic elements, and treat expansion, stationarity, and collapse as problems of structure, optimization, and computable linear programming.

Long before Menger, the ideas that would define Austrian economics—subjective value, scarcity, market price as common estimation—had been worked out by Aristotle, the medieval Schoolmen, and the theologians of Salamanca. Marshalling the revisionist scholarship of Marjorie Grice-Hutchinson, Raymond de Roover, and Emil Kauder, Rothbard overturns the familiar story that Adam Smith and Ricardo founded the science; in his telling they shunted it onto a wrong track, displacing a Continental subjectivism with labor and cost theories. He follows the thread from Buridan, Aquinas, and Covarrubias through Grotius, Turgot, and Say, contending that Menger revived a buried tradition rather than inventing one. The result is polemical historiography—a redrawn genealogy meant to restore forgotten predecessors and prove that marginal utility had roots centuries deep.

The just price is found not by counting the cost but by the common estimation.

Did OPEC's quadrupling of crude prices really cause the stagflation of the mid-1970s? Haberler's answer, developed as the lead paper of this symposium, is a firm no: the oil shock was costly but not the master cause. Dearer oil imposes a terms-of-trade loss that a flexible economy would absorb through a once-for-all fall in real income; only downward-rigid money wages convert it into unemployment or inflation. The shock, he argues, struck an economy already destabilized by an unsustainable boom. On the international side he deflates fears of the 'petrodollar,' since OPEC surpluses must return as purchases or investment and the Euro-dollar market had already recycled them. Rejecting official schemes that quarantine oil deficits from the rest, he insists each country confront its overall balance of payments through floating, IMF borrowing, or domestic monetary and fiscal measures.

The oil price rise was not a major factor in bringing on inflation and recession.

An economist who recommends a policy in the name of his science, Rothbard argues, has almost always cheated. Drawing a hard line between ethics—the study of which ends men ought to pursue—and value-free praxeology, he shows that appeals to majority preference, social consensus, or the merits of progressive taxation cannot turn a moral stance into a scientific finding. Demonstrated preference licenses only a narrow claim: voluntary exchange benefits its participants, while state coercion imposes at least one loser. That alone cannot prove laissez-faire. His closing target is Mises, whose utilitarian liberalism assumes men prefer peace and prosperity yet cannot answer those who knowingly choose equality, power, or nationalism. Liberty's defense, he concludes, requires an objective ethics that lies beyond economics.

That leaves him with the first choice: to make crystal clear that he is speaking not as an economist but as a private citizen who is making his own confessedly arbitrary and ad hoc value pronouncements.

Scarcity, valuation, time, uncertainty: Rothbard derives them all from a single axiom—that individuals act consciously toward chosen goals—unfolding an entire economics by verbal deduction rather than equations. Mathematical economics, positivist falsifiability, and econometrics he treats as misreadings of what human choice actually is. The essay's signature move is a friendly break with Mises: where Mises called the action axiom Kantian and a priori, Rothbard grounds it in Aristotelian-Thomist realism, self-evident yet empirical in a sense deeper than post-Humean empiricism allows. He marks praxeology off from psychology, ethics, technology, and history, defends methodological individualism, and denies that heterogeneous historical events can ever test an economic law—though theory remains indispensable for interpreting them.

In short, praxeological economics is the structure of logical implications of the fact that individuals act.

For all its scientific pretensions, socialism's real defence is to place its doctrine beyond criticism by treating every objection as a mere conflict of values. Hayek refuses the manoeuvre, insisting that socialism makes testable claims about means, effects, and institutional compatibility, and that they fail. Once any shared value is admitted, one may ask whether collectivist institutions actually preserve it. He distinguishes the hot socialism of nationalization from the cold socialism of taxation and benefits, restates the calculation debate against Marx, Lange, and planning in natura, and grounds the knowledge function of prices in marginal utility and changing rates of substitution no board can compute. Socialism, he concludes, fails morally, politically, and materially, while an omnipotent democracy that treats every grievance as an entitlement renders society ungovernable.

A society in which everyone is organised as a member of some group to force government to help him get what he wants is self-destructive.

What does an anomalous choice refute: a mathematical construction, its empirical reach, or the experiment used to test it? In this essay, Oskar Morgenstern defends the expected utility theory he developed with John von Neumann while acknowledging experiences its axioms may not capture. His objections to tests involving minute probabilities and imaginary fortunes turn on whether respondents can meaningfully assess the choices offered. Yet his defence leaves room for the pleasure of gambling, the effects of time, and preferences that resist a complete ordering. Writing as a co-architect rather than a detached commentator, Morgenstern exposes a productive tension between confidence in formal proof and uncertainty about human preference. Readers can discover why preserving an axiomatic achievement need not mean treating it as a finished account of decision-making.

A phrase can win moral authority precisely by escaping analysis, and social justice is Hayek's example. Read as a synonym for distributive justice, it presupposes a distributor, yet market incomes are assigned by no collective will, emerging instead from countless lawful actions whose combined result no one intends or foresees. Justice attaches to individual conduct, he argues, not to the aggregate pattern that many just actions produce. The demand for it he traces to atavism: moral instincts formed in the small face-to-face hunting band, admirable among intimates but maladapted to the extended order of strangers that property, contract, and catallaxy make possible. To impose a just distribution is to falsify the price signals that coordinate dispersed knowledge, revert to tribal sharing, and license coercion in the name of an undefined ideal.

The needs of this ancient primitive kind of society determined much of the moral feelings which still govern us, and which we approve in others.