The archive.

On the first day of April 1939, crossing into Switzerland before dawn, Engel-Janosi called himself a beggar and was told he was a proud beggar — he reached Zurich with six and a half francs. His memoir traces the long road there: a childhood in liberal Jewish bourgeois Vienna among Mahler, Bruno Walter, and the Freud circle; artillery service on the Isonzo and Piave; the collapse of the Lombard bank; two decades running a parquet factory while writing diplomatic history in the archives; and the Mises Seminar and Hayek's Geistkreis as intellectual homes. Exile carried him through wartime Cambridge to Johns Hopkins, Catholic University, and visits to the confined Ezra Pound, before the 1949 return to a poorer, younger Vienna. Belonging to the Central European lost generation, it composes a life from what fate and inheritance gave.

Was ich in den folgenden Blättern versuchen wollte: wahrhaftig zu sein über mich und über Menschen, denen ich begegnet bin — in verschiedenen Gegenden, in verschiedenen Situationen, während eines nicht kurzen Lebens.

English translation: “What I sought to attempt in the following pages: to be truthful about myself and about the people I have met—in various regions, in various situations, over the course of a not-short life.”

Two opposed criticisms of capitalism meet a single answer in this Hillsdale College lecture: that capital requirements shield incumbents from entry, and that a competitive order could retain its virtues with the state as sole supplier of capital. Kirzner's wedge is the Misesian separation of entrepreneur from capitalist—pure entrepreneurial profit is arbitrage across markets and time, earned by perceiving opportunity, never by ownership as such. Entry is blocked, he argues, only where the needed resources are monopolistically withheld, not merely because a newcomer lacks funds; the cost of proving one's competence to lenders is a real social cost, not an imperfection. Against the Berle-Galbraith thesis, the corporation emerges as an unplanned device joining entrepreneurial talent to large capital without requiring managers to own it.

We conclude, then, not only that private ownership of capital is not inconsistent with the competitive market process, but that it is in fact essential to the efficiency of the competitive market process.

Drafted in August 1973 for the German Council of Economic Experts and printed unchanged as a Kiel lecture, this expert memorandum asks whether the dollar was truly undervalued against the floating currencies, above all the D-Mark. Machlup turns a policy question into a methodological one: once rates are set by markets, expectations, capital flows, and official intervention, terms like “undervaluation” and “equilibrium exchange rate” lose any firm meaning, and calling a free-market rate wrong is merely a forecast of future correction. He rejects purchasing-power parity for small index movements, denies any clean statistical split between short- and long-term capital, and names capital flows the strongest of all forces on the exchange market. No durable, correct external value of the dollar, he concludes, can be computed at all.

Die Behauptung, der Dollar sei über- oder unterbewertet, drückt immer ein Mißtrauensvotum aus.

English translation: “The assertion that the dollar is over- or undervalued always expresses a vote of no confidence.”

Against the postwar faith in fiscal fine-tuning, Haberler binds together three things usually treated separately: economic growth, monetary stability, and personal freedom. Growth matters, he argues, because it widens the practical range of human choice, but the institutions that generate it demand discipline rather than activist management. Severe depressions, he judges, have become largely avoidable, so the live danger is now creeping inflation, and here his reassessment of the Phillips curve does the analytical work. Phillips's own mechanism, he notes, was demand-pull, not cost-push; any apparent trade-off between inflation and unemployment holds only while rising prices go unanticipated, and dissolves once expectations catch up. Set within a classical-liberal frame that reaches from the Club of Rome's Limits to Growth to wage-push unionism, the book narrows what stabilization policy can honestly promise: no durable bargain between jobs and inflation exists.

It is probably no exaggeration to say that severe depressions are a thing of the past.

What if inflation does not merely accompany unemployment but helps create it? In these two 1974 newspaper articles, combined in this republication, Hayek challenges employment policies that treat higher spending as a sufficient remedy for joblessness. His focus is the kind of work monetary expansion sustains: jobs that, he argues, become dependent on continuing or accelerating inflation. Ending that expansion then exposes a mismatch between available workers and viable activities. Yet Hayek distinguishes necessary adjustment from a destructive collapse in demand, calling for help with new employment rather than preservation of every existing job. The articles offer a concise route into his disagreement with Keynesian policy—and his qualified disagreement with Milton Friedman—over how monetary stability, wage flexibility, and political promises of full employment fit together.

Labor-market statistics and the recognition of trade unions belong to the same scholarly portrait in Emil Kauder’s brief Neue Deutsche Biographie entry on Ignaz Jastrow. Kauder emphasizes how this historically trained economist joined empirical inquiry to social reform: measuring labor supply, demand, and food costs while seeking to place social policy within administrative science. His assessment gives particular interest to Jastrow’s unfinished project and identifies his economic reporting as a precursor of business-cycle reporting. Yet Kauder reserves his highest praise for Jastrow’s late world history. The entry offers a compact account of the practical commitments and historical breadth by which Kauder judges this scholar’s achievement.

A market transaction is not the transport of goods but the transfer of a title; free-market economists, Rothbard insists, therefore cannot defend voluntary exchange without also defending the justice of the ownership behind it. His 1974 essay presses this against the utilitarians Coase and Demsetz, whose deference to whatever government defines as property collapses, he argues, into legal positivism—ready to endorse arbitrary redistribution or even slavery so long as it is legal. Against them he builds a natural-rights theory from two principles: self-ownership of one's body, and the homesteading of unused nature through labor, from which exchange, wages, saving, and bequest follow. Applied to real titles it cuts both ways, condemning holdings rooted in conquest or state grant, as with coercive Latin American landlords, while validating many others—making it as anti-conservative as it is anti-socialist.

Whichever way he decides, the economist cannot escape a judgment, a theory of justice in the ownership of property.

In this brief 1974 letter to the Times Literary Supplement, republished here in 2022, Hayek challenges a reviewer’s account of Austrian economics—not Shackle’s Keynesian Kaleidics itself. Against the attribution of timeless, mathematically defined general equilibrium to the Austrian tradition, he insists on its commitment to process analysis. His correction includes a revealing concession: he and other younger Austrians did sometimes use equilibrium concepts, but, he says, they learned them from Walras and Marshall rather than their Austrian teachers. The letter offers a compact distinction between a school’s inherited method and the tools its adherents later borrowed.

One unfinished project links Keynes's Treatise on Money and his General Theory: the attempt to make economics adequate to a future no agent can know. Shackle finds the sharpest tool not in the General Theory but in the Treatise's Fundamental Equations, which he reads as rudimentary sequence analysis—income as anticipated cost, profit as the gap between what was expected and what occurred. From this ex ante/ex post distinction he rebuilds liquidity preference and the marginal efficiency of capital as phenomena of speculative markets, confidence, and mood, not as stable schedules. Economic life becomes kaleidic: neither a march toward equilibrium nor a regular cycle, but a succession of temporary patterns that shifting expectations can shatter in an instant, leaving resources idle as asset-holders retreat into liquidity.

Income, in the Fundamental Equations, is a conjecture which can be wrong.

The rioting and near civil war in Northern Ireland gives Rothbard the occasion to argue that anti-statism need not mean indifference to peoples under occupation. Libertarians who scorn national liberation as merely the manufacture of new nation-states become, he warns, the objective defenders of today's bloated empires—as the Russian anarchists did in 1918 when they opposed Ukrainian and White Russian independence. His decisive distinction separates aggressive nationalism, which rationalizes conquest, from liberatory nationalism, which resists it, and he treats "collective security" as a swindle that sanctifies borders first drawn by aggression. Applying a property-and-aggression analysis to political geography, he proposes that the Catholic-majority districts of Northern Ireland—Western Derry, Tyrone, Fermanagh, southern Armagh and Down—revert to the South.

Nationalism is not a unitary, monolithic phenomenon. If it is aggressive, we should oppose it; if liberatory, we should favor it.

Writing after the 1973 oil embargo and OPEC's cartel price rise had transformed the monetary scene, Haberler sets out to calm the panic rather than amplify it. The oil shock, he grants, imposes a real transfer of purchasing power from the industrial world to the producers, but a large transfer is not an insoluble monetary crisis. Treated as a single bloc, the importing countries could bear it while output still expanded; the genuine difficulty is distributional, since exporters' spending and investment will not match each nation's oil bill, and exchange rates must apportion the adjustment. Because no authority can compute the correct new parities, floating is the least bad response to uncertainty. France's decision to let the franc float confirms the lesson, and he cautions Washington to welcome dollar appreciation rather than retaliate with tariffs or quotas.

If they keep their money in liquid form (fail to spend it), it is up to monetary management in the importing countries to neutralize a possible deflationary effect.

The moral claim that a person is entitled to what he has produced runs through traditions as opposed as Locke, Mill, Friedman, Marx, and J. B. Clark, yet all of them, Kirzner shows, quietly assume that production means output flowing from owned factors. On that reading pure entrepreneurship, which owns nothing at the outset, produces nothing and earns no ethical title to its gains. Against it he sets a second sense of production: the alert act by which someone perceives a possible plan and brings it into being. Re-reading Locke's labor theory, finders-keepers acquisition, and Samuelson's suspicion of speculative profit, he argues that the entrepreneur may be the producer in the ethically decisive sense. He offers no finished defense of capitalism, but clarifies the ground on which any such defense would have to stand.

The foundation of the whole is the right of producers to what they themselves have produced.