The archive.

Social inquiry assumes that people understand one another’s actions—but what makes such understanding possible? In this essay, first published in 1945 and reprinted here in 1967, Alfred Schütz approaches Husserl’s phenomenology with that foundational concern in view. A perceived chair, a blossoming tree, and a learned theorem make technical distinctions concrete: experience includes unseen possibilities, remembered appearances, and knowledge whose original acquisition no longer needs to be repeated. Schütz explains why suspending judgments about the world’s existence is not denying the world, and why investigating essences need not invoke mystical intuition. His account gives social scientists a precise boundary as well as a resource: phenomenology does not replace empirical research, but examines the structures of consciousness and meaning that research takes for granted.

A mountain watershed may look like a natural frontier without being either a military barrier or a boundary between communities. In this December 1945 letter to The Times, Hayek challenges the proposed return of South Tirol to Italian administration by separating these questions. His case for reunion with Austria rests on enduring regional ties rather than a demand to unite all German-speaking peoples; his strategic argument distinguishes the easily crossed high Alps from the rugged ranges enclosing the historical Tirol. Drawing on the Italian historian Gaetano Salvemini, Hayek asks whether postwar reconstruction will repair or perpetuate an earlier territorial injustice. This brief intervention offers a concrete instance of his attention to historically formed communities—and to the damage political boundaries can inflict on them.

For the reigning doctrines of the age, conflict is the natural condition of intergroup relations: nations, races, and Marxian classes are read as groups whose gain must come at another's loss, so that war and civil war become the logical conclusion of what people already believe. Mises answers with the classical case for a harmony of rightly understood interests. Caste society, bound by inherited legal privilege, bred real antagonism; capitalism replaced it with equality under law, under which shoemakers are merely competitors, not enemies. The genuine conflicts of the day, tariffs, immigration barriers, pressure-group politics, spring not from the unhampered market but from interventionist policies that revive mercantilism, protectionism, and guild-style exclusion. Utilitarian ethics, he warns, stands or falls with the science of economics.

Mercantilism was a philosophy of war.

The stranger expects unfamiliarity; the homecomer expects to know where he belongs. In this essay, first published in 1945 and republished here in 1964, Alfred Schütz examines why that confidence can make return unexpectedly difficult. His central example is the veteran whose changed priorities and experience meet a household shaped by its own intervening life—and by public stereotypes of combat. Letters may sustain affection without preserving shared understanding; restoring an old job may fail to recognize newly acquired ambitions. Schütz’s distinctive contribution is to connect these practical failures of recognition with the way later experience alters the meaning of the past. Homecoming, he argues, requires preparation on both sides: renewed belonging cannot simply reproduce the life remembered.

A prediction can come true without having been justified when it was made. This distinction anchors Felix Kaufmann’s inquiry into what makes a scientific judgment warranted when every empirical claim remains revisable. In this 1945 article, he uses analogies with law and grammar to locate scientific correctness in procedural standards rather than guaranteed truth or eventual success. Yet rules themselves change, and observation is never free of interpretation. Examples drawn from relativity and the failed Harvard business-cycle barometer give these tensions concrete form. Readers can discover how Kaufmann defends objectivity without claiming an ultimate foundation for scientific method—and why, for him, distinguishing warranted belief from fortunate conjecture matters to social inquiry and honest public argument.

The economic problem of society, on Hayek's recasting, is not how a single mind might allocate resources it already knows, but how to make use of knowledge that no one possesses in full—dispersed, local, changing, and often tacit. Planning is not the issue, since every actor plans; the question is whether planning is centralized in one authority or divided among the many who hold knowledge of the particular circumstances of time and place. The price system is his answer: prices condense relative scarcities into signals that let people economize and substitute without grasping the underlying cause, as when a distant shortage of tin quietly prompts users everywhere to conserve it. Markets thus figure as epistemic institutions, a species of spontaneous order alongside language and law, and the socialist calculation debate turns on the impossibility of gathering that knowledge in one directing mind.

Or, to put it briefly, it is a problem of the utilization of knowledge which is not given to anyone in its totality.

Military withdrawal might leave Austria independent in name yet dependent in practice. Writing after an extended visit to Vienna in 1946, Hayek examines how occupation charges, distorted prices, industrial confiscations and blocked trade frustrate reconstruction—and turn material scarcity into political vulnerability. His diagnosis rejects the claim that Austrians simply lack initiative: productive effort cannot restore prosperity when the conditions of production work against it. The article also shows Hayek advocating transitional foreign credit and economic advice, rather than expecting private investment to overcome political insecurity unaided. Its central tension is concrete: occupation must end, but outside assistance must continue if sovereignty is to acquire an economic foundation. Readers encounter an argument that connects Austrian recovery with the struggle over who will control its industries and supplies.

What did an early coin’s stamp certify—weight, metal quality, or the place where it would be accepted? Alfred Amonn makes this concrete dispute a test of how economists and historians explain the origins of money. Defending Kaulla against Herbert A. Cahn’s criticism, he argues that surviving objects cannot establish their institutional meaning without interpretation: a mark on temple property need not mean what a mark on circulating coinage means. Yet practical plausibility is not historical proof, and money need not have emerged everywhere by the same route. The article offers a pointed encounter between documentary evidence and economic reasoning, showing both why conjecture is unavoidable and why an explanation of money’s usefulness cannot substitute for an account of its actual beginnings.

Can civilizations follow recurring patterns without obeying fixed historical laws? Emil Kauder’s 1946 article grounds comparison in the religious and imaginative inheritance he calls “myth”: convictions that connect generations and continue to shape ostensibly secular ideals. Drawing on Vico, he argues that intellectual clarification can exhaust the beliefs that sustain collective action. Yet he refuses to turn analogies into universal sequences: Homer and Dante may perform comparable poetic tasks without their societies repeating the same political history. The article’s central tension lies between this methodological restraint and Kauder’s conviction that civilizations decline as their myths disintegrate. His treatment of freedom and progress lets readers examine what cyclical history can explain—and where claims of historical necessity leave room for creativity, cultural inheritance, and uncertain renewal.

Two rival traditions have worn the name individualism, and Hayek's Twelfth Finlay Lecture, delivered at Dublin in 1945, sets them against each other. The 'true' individualism of Locke, Mandeville, Hume, Ferguson, Smith, and Tocqueville begins from the narrow limits of any single mind's knowledge; the 'false,' Cartesian strain of Rousseau and the Encyclopaedists imagines society as something reason can design whole—and, on Hayek's reading, drifts toward collectivism. Individualism is first a theory of society, not a licence for selfishness, and its cardinal discovery is spontaneous order: the institutions that arise from human action but not human design. Because no authority can know in advance who knows best, coercion must be bounded by general rules that mark out protected spheres rather than steered toward chosen collective ends.

Man in a complex society can have no choice but between adjusting himself to what to him must seem the blind forces of the social process and obeying the orders of a superior.

Orthodox theory said a fall in interest-rates should quicken investment by raising the present value of future returns; businessmen questioned by the Oxford Economists' Research Group flatly denied noticing any such effect. Rather than discard the doctrine, Shackle narrows it. A future receipt must be discounted twice, once for deferment through the pure interest rate and once for doubt, and the two work very differently: interest bites hardest on distant, secure returns, which is why housing and other long-lived, dependable assets remain rate-sensitive. But where invention, fashion, and obsolescence truncate an asset's useful life, a swelling 'marginal rate of risk' absorbs the far future before the pure rate can act, leaving valuations almost unmoved by a one-point change. Entrepreneurs, attending to shifting orders and markets, simply never register interest as the cause of their decisions.

It was until recent years an accepted doctrine that changes of interest-rates powerfully influence the pace at which enterprisers, all taken together, extend or improve their equipment.

Written weeks after Keynes's death, this memoir refuses to separate the theory from the man who made it: a Cambridge and Eton mind, mathematically gifted yet impatient with technique that did not bear on public action. Schumpeter reads the whole career as the slow forging of a single vision, first glimpsed in The Economic Consequences of the Peace, that laissez-faire capitalism had ended in 1914 and that thrift no longer served accumulation. The General Theory supplies that vision its machinery, reducing the economy to three schedules: the consumption function, the marginal efficiency of capital, and liquidity preference. Admiring the elegance yet insisting on the narrowness, Schumpeter accepts Hicks's verdict that this is the economics of depression, and grants Keynes a genuine school rivaling the Physiocrats and Marxists.

It does not make us Keynesians, it makes us better economists.