The archive.

Fusionism, the conservative synthesis that promised to reconcile traditionalist moral order with libertarian freedom, is dismantled here as a myth that cannot stand as a philosophy in its own right. Reading Frank S. Meyer's arguments closely, Rothbard finds that on every decisive issue the mediation dissolves into libertarianism. Virtue cannot be coerced, since a compelled act is mere motion, not moral choice; community holds no rights above the persons who compose it; order arises from voluntary interaction, not state command. Meyer's real quarrel, Rothbard argues, is with utilitarian liberalism and the Chicago law-and-economics that swaps justice for efficiency — not with a rights-based libertarianism grounded in natural law. Only his appeal to tradition, which cannot judge itself without some standard beyond it, marks a true inconsistency. Fusionism emerges as a Sorelian coalition myth, not a coherent third way.

Unless he can choose his worst, he cannot choose his best.

A single word—“despite”—is the target of Hayek’s brief letter to The Times, republished here in 2022. A headline treats deepening recession as surprising when inflation is falling; Hayek counters with an analogy to worsening withdrawal symptoms as drug intake declines. His comparison suggests that reducing inflation may bring immediate distress rather than immediate recovery. The letter offers no evidence or developed economic explanation, but its compressed challenge makes visible the causal expectation hidden in a newspaper headline: removing a harmful influence and escaping the costs of adjustment need not happen together.

Knowing how to produce something does not establish whether producing it is worth the resources consumed. In this introduction to the 1981 special issue An Economic Critique of Socialism, Don Lavoie makes that distinction the starting point for a question about how economic knowledge is generated. His reading of Mises and Hayek shifts attention from prices as numbers available to planners to competition as the process that makes prices informative. On this account, instructing socialist managers to imitate competitive outcomes leaves the central problem unresolved. The short essay offers a pointed orientation to the calculation debate and explains why Lavoie regards it as a challenge not only to comprehensive planning but also to economists who claim to know how market prices should be corrected.

Forty years after Schumpeter predicted that capitalism would perish of its own success, Haberler measures the prophecy against the postwar record. Schumpeter, he stresses, was no socialist: his forecast was diagnostic, resting on the claim that capitalism's economic triumphs corrode the cultural and political institutions that shelter it, from aristocratic leadership and the family firm to a bourgeois order steadily undermined by a rising class of resentful intellectuals. Haberler preserves that insight while pressing three corrections. Schumpeter oversold monopoly, much of which lives on state protection rather than creative destruction; his case for socialism's efficiency belonged to the 'logic of blueprints,' which paired comparisons of West and East Germany or Taiwan and China have since demolished; and his gloom about capitalist resilience underrated the growth the postwar decades delivered. The question, Haberler concludes, is how far public planning can go within democratic limits.

“Can capitalism survive? No. I do not think so.”

Hayek remembers encountering Mises’s critique of socialism not as confirmation of settled beliefs, but as a blow to his own hopes for a more rational and just society. This foreword to Ludwig von Mises’s Socialism, published in 1981 and reprinted here in 2013, combines that personal reckoning with a precise clarification: economic calculation concerns how production is coordinated, not merely how managers are held accountable. Its distinctive tension lies in Hayek’s allegiance to Mises’s achievement alongside his resistance to Mises’s rationalist account of social cooperation. Readers can discover how Hayek separates understanding an institution’s benefits from deliberately creating it—and how intellectual gratitude can coexist with substantial philosophical disagreement.

Socialism promised to fulfil our hopes for a more rational, more just world. And then came this book. Our hopes were dashed.

Does aid to a government necessarily help the people it governs? In this newspaper opinion article, first published in 1981 and republished here in 2022, Hayek challenges the Brandt Report’s case for large-scale transfers to poorer countries. He supports capital flows but argues that government-directed assistance can prolong policies that obstruct growth. His distinctive alternative separates political from commercial risk: public guarantees would protect private foreign investment against specified government interference, while investors would remain responsible for economic losses. The article offers a compact encounter with Hayek’s development politics, including his sharply asserted contrast between market-oriented and socialist economies. Its most concrete contribution is a proposal that makes the allocation of risk, rather than the volume of aid alone, central to the dispute.

Keynes was, at bottom, an inflationist, and this compact essay works to convert that charge from insult into mechanism. Keynesian stimulus, Hazlitt argues, cannot rest on spending financed by taxation, since taxes cancel the purchasing power the spending was meant to add; what matters is the deficit. Once government spends beyond its revenue, the gap must be closed either by borrowing, which merely postpones contraction, or by creating new money, which means inflation. Every downturn thus becomes an argument for another dose of the same expedient, making Keynesianism less a theory of demand than a political technology for normalizing permanent fiscal imbalance. Reaching back to Roman debasement and John Law's paper schemes, Hazlitt warns that no inflation on record produced sound expansion, only depreciation, arbitrary redistribution and economic demoralization.

The lessons of inflation are soon forgotten.

Divisions of knowledge are neither timeless truths nor mere administrative convenience: they are historical settlements, shaped by intellectual expansion, cultural purpose, and institutional power. Tracing the ordering of learning from Aristotle's theoretical-practical-productive triad and Porphyry's tree through Bacon's division into History, Poesy, and Philosophy, Dewey's decimal notation, and the four-faculty structure of the medieval and modern university, Machlup shows how branches split, fuse, vanish, and reappear as erudition grows. He restores science to its broad continental sense against the narrow Anglo-American restriction to natural science, and defends intellectual knowledge pursued for understanding, culture, or delight rather than utility. The second volume of his Knowledge project makes the map of learning itself the object of study, insisting that every classification is provisional and that no partition should be mistaken for the essence of what it orders.

But knowing for fun is a respectable human activity; and having fun need not be judged useless.

Not administrative regulation, not Coasean bargaining, not judicial balancing of 'social' costs—only a strict law of property, Rothbard argues, should govern air pollution. Reconstructing environmental tort law from libertarian first principles, he holds that coercion is justified solely against an overt physical invasion of another's person or justly held property: smoke, odor, dust, or excessive noise crossing a boundary, proven by strict causation beyond a reasonable doubt. His most distinctive move ties pollution to homesteading—a factory or airport that first emitted over unused land may acquire a prescriptive easement, leaving later arrivals to 'come to the nuisance.' From this follow his rejections of a general right to clean air, the ad coelum doctrine, statutory clean-air rules, vicarious 'deep pocket' liability, and binding class actions, and his proposal to collapse criminal law into a tort law prosecuted only by victims, heirs, or assigns.

In sum, no one has a right to clean air, but one does have a right to not have his air invaded by pollutants generated by an aggressor.

Not refutation but neglect scattered the Austrian economics that Mises and Hayek had led around 1930; exile, the Anschluss, and the rise of Keynesian thought did the rest. Ludwig Lachmann treats the later revival as a rescue: because the earlier concepts were forgotten or linguistically transformed, they must now be actively retrieved. He reopens Hans Mayer's causal-genetic account of how real market prices actually form, Hayek's problem of knowledge at once dispersed and diffusable, and the Knight-Austrian capital controversy, arguing that capital theory must be rebuilt from individual decision-making rather than from social aggregates that presuppose one evaluating mind. Offered as a birthday tribute to Terence Hutchison, the essay makes technical knowledge itself a weapon in competition.

Where the storage of ideas failed we must at least make an attempt at their salvage.

Knowing how a mind works need not mean being able to predict what it will do. In this retrospective conference essay, first published in 1982 and reprinted here in 2017, Hayek revisits his account of perception as neural classification, sharpening it through the idea of disposition: each stimulus enters an already active system whose history shapes its interpretation. His perspective combines intellectual autobiography with a willingness to revise his earlier exposition and question the adequacy of his proof that the brain cannot fully explain itself. A hypothetical mechanical rat gives the problem concrete form: understanding its mechanism is not the same as reproducing its accumulated experience. The essay offers a compact encounter with Hayek’s effort to explain mental qualities physically without promising exhaustive prediction of thought or action.

The fratricidal European war of 1914 ended a liberal international order of free trade, gold, open migration, and passport-free travel, and, in this survey prepared for the Antonio Feltrinelli Prize, becomes the starting point for sixty years of upheaval in the world economy, macroeconomic theory, and policy. Haberler reads the interwar catastrophe as the product of monetary destruction, delayed devaluations, and protectionism rather than any inherent flaw of capitalism; the postwar great surprise of prosperity he credits to sound finance, GATT liberalization, and Marshall Plan aid. Tracing the Keynesian revolution and the monetarist counterrevolution, he arrives at the stagflation of the 1970s, arguing that inflation is no permanent cure for unemployment and that monetary restraint must be joined to fiscal discipline and competitive, deregulated markets.

We now know that money had a lot to do with the Great Depression.