The archive.

The social Wunschbild, the anticipatory image of what economy and society ought to become, is treated in this 1947 rectoral address as an active economic factor rather than escapist fantasy. Because all economic processes take shape from the willing of living human beings, Kerschagl argues, economics cannot be a mechanics of things; yesterday's utopia may become today's reality, even as fulfilled ideals cease to press as ideals. He reads mercantilism, physiocracy, classical economics, Marxism, and the Austrian marginalists as mixtures of contradictory wishes, each torn between freedom and binding order—a plurality that turns destructive whenever one doctrine is enforced as total truth. Applied to postwar Austrian policy the thesis is austere: distribution can complement production but never replace it, and social aims must be judged by persuasion and human dignity, not coercion.

Es kann auf die Dauer nur das verteilt werden, was erarbeitet ist, und alle Verteilungssysteme können nur eine wichtige und notwendige Ergänzung der Erzeugung, aber kein Ersatz für diese selbst sein.

English translation: “In the long run only what has been produced by labor can be distributed, and all systems of distribution can only be an important and necessary complement to production, but never a substitute for it.”

Five lectures, delivered to Innsbruck workers in 1946, confront a ruined economy and ask whether Austria can be saved at all. Bayer's answer refuses fatalism: smallness did not doom the First Republic and need not doom the Second—Switzerland shows a small economy can prosper—but recovery must be planned, coordinating production, exports, credit, investment, and income rather than trusting automatic markets or monetary tricks. The lectures range across money and credit, the wage-price-currency tangle, social policy through unions and cooperatives, and socialization, defended here against Hayek's fear that planning must lead to serfdom. Real wages, Bayer insists, depend on the social product and not on nominal claims; money stays a servant, never wealth. Above all, the policy errors of 1918 to 1938 must not be repeated.

Sozialisierung ist mehr als die Summe einzelner Maßnahmen zur Verstaatlichung der Produktionsmittel, sie ist aber auch nicht, wie es manchmal dargestellt wird, gleichbedeutend mit der Durchsetzung einer sozialistischen Planwirtschaft mit völliger Aufhebung der Funktion von Geld und Markt.

English translation: “Socialization is more than the sum of individual measures for the nationalization of the means of production; nor is it, however, as it is sometimes portrayed, equivalent to the imposition of a socialist planned economy with the complete abolition of the functions of money and the market.”

The 'execution' of the 1856 Paris treaty, Engel-Janosi argues, was precisely the process by which the post-Crimean order came apart. Following the Eastern Question from that settlement to the Franco-Sardinian war of 1859, the essay makes Cavour's schemes over Moldavia and Wallachia inseparable from his Italian designs, with Napoleon III—hostile to a merely preserved Ottoman Empire, drawn to Balkan nationality, never wholly clear in plan—as its hinge. The Constantinople chapters read as a prosopography of policy: Stratford de Redcliffe's anti-Russian reformism, Prokesch-Osten's defence of Ottoman individuality, Thouvenel executing a French line he privately distrusted. The manipulated Romanian elections of 1857 and Cuza's double election bind Ottoman decline, Romanian unification, and Italian nationalism into a single crisis of legitimacy—inherited legality hammered by a ruthless new politics.

Wenn dies, wie wir allen Grund haben zu hoffen, das Ende der Welt sein soll, wird alles irgendwie geregelt werden. Wenn dies jedoch nicht das Ende der Welt ist, wird alles noch viel schlechter werden.

English translation: “If this, as we have every reason to hope, is to be the end of the world, then somehow everything will be settled. But if this is not the end of the world, then everything will become much worse.”

A tariff concession means little when a state trading monopoly can exclude foreign goods simply by declining to buy them. This problem of reciprocity gives Richard Schüller’s 1947 article a concrete entry into the tensions of postwar trade policy. He argues that Soviet resistance to American nondiscrimination stems less from bilateral commercial conflict than from the dependence of Soviet neighbors on markets beyond Moscow’s control. His defense of multilateral trade is nevertheless critical of the compromises made in its name: British demands for import quotas and elaborate charter provisions may weaken the system they are intended to secure. The article offers a way to distinguish political ambitions from trading necessities—and to understand why neither a sterling bloc nor a ruble bloc could readily replace wider commercial exchange.

The gap between theoretical competence and usable economic analysis shapes Gottfried Haberler’s brief review of Hans Böhi’s study of postwar equilibrium exchange rates, prepared for the Swiss government. Haberler credits Böhi’s command of international trade theory and his recognition that price-and-cost comparisons cannot provide an unrestricted purchasing-power-parity rule. Yet he questions an exposition that treats quantitative relationships entirely in words, omits references, and gives familiar terms such as elasticity unusual meanings. Written without knowledge of the Keynes and White plans, the study also stands apart from the monetary debates its subject demands. The review offers a compact example of Haberler’s critical standards: sound theory must also make its reasoning accessible and establish its policy bearings.

Higher wage rates need not mean higher earnings for workers as a whole: employment, prices, and bargaining power can pull in different directions. In this 1947 lecture, Alfred Amonn asks what wage policy can accomplish once those differences are taken seriously. He challenges the assumption that competition automatically secures productivity gains for labour, emphasizing workers’ limited ability to wait, move, or obtain information. Yet he also argues that wage increases can cost jobs—a constraint collective bargaining cannot abolish. His distinctive emphasis falls on changing the conditions of wage determination through labour protection, organization, and informed state mediation rather than simply fixing rates. The lecture offers a concrete way to examine whose income a wage measure protects, and whether a nominal gain represents greater purchasing power.

Preventing depression without making economic security depend on compulsory controls is the tension at the centre of Shackle’s 1947 review of William J. Fellner’s Monetary Policies and Full Employment. Shackle examines Fellner’s distinction between timely action against recession and an unconditional employment guarantee that could encourage inflationary wage and price demands. His particular interest lies in uncertainty: larger expected profits need not be more dependable, and lower wages need not improve investment prospects. This compact review lets readers see why the composition and reliability of demand matter alongside its volume. Shackle’s approval remains discriminating: he praises Fellner’s practical judgement while challenging an interest-rate analysis that, in his view, confuses planned and realised quantities, stocks and flows.

Do scientists really inhabit an ivory tower, indifferent to a world their theories now visibly reshape? Kaufmann takes the postwar reproach seriously, made newly awkward by the political engagement of atomic physicists, and sorts it into four charges: impractical topics, excessive abstraction, inaccessible prose, and refusal to judge values. Practical value, he answers, is often indirect: Maxwell's electromagnetism and Einstein's mass-energy formula were merely theoretical before they proved decisive. Abstraction he splits into generalization, idealization, and mediate construction, defending each while insisting on the return to concrete phenomena. On Weber's ethical neutrality he grants that science cannot fix ultimate values, yet argues that value judgments are elliptical only until their standards are named. The essay's closing defense is of veracity itself, the philosopher's task of keeping disagreement clear and discussable, even at the cost of the tower.

To foster the spirit of veracity is the foremost educational task of the philosopher. Should the fulfilment of this task relegate him to the ivory tower, then he need not be ashamed of his abode.

In April 1947, with liberalism discredited by war, nationalism, and totalitarianism and its scholars scattered and out of contact, Hayek opened the founding conference at Mont Pèlerin with a plea for reconstruction over nostalgia. Reviving the liberal ideal, he insists, demands a great intellectual task, not fidelity to an inherited creed—least of all from the old liberal who clings to formulas because they are old. Political philosophy cannot rest on economics alone; the crisis of freedom is equally legal, moral, historical, and religious, and the proposed agenda ranges across the rule of law, competitive order, liberalism's relation to Christianity, Germany's future, and European federation. He conceives the gathering not as a propaganda machine but as a closed learned society, its members admitted by election and bound to candid mutual criticism.

The old liberal who adheres to a traditional creed merely out of tradition, however admirable his views, is not of much use for our purpose.

Useful measurements can confirm economic expectations without adequately explaining the relationships they record. This distinction drives Gerhard Tintner’s review of Frederick C. Mills’s study of prices and quantities in business cycles. Tintner acknowledges the study’s suggestive findings, including stronger cyclical patterns in prices than in quantities and marked differences between farm products and capital equipment. Yet he questions the National Bureau’s reference-cycle methods and warns that Mills’s measures of elasticity and flexibility differ from their usual meanings in economic theory. The review offers a compact example of methodological criticism that does not dismiss empirical results: Tintner’s demand is for a more explicit theoretical foundation and more refined statistical techniques, not merely additional measurements.

When Richard Lester marshalled questionnaire evidence to argue that businessmen do not think at the margin, Machlup answered with this compact 1947 reply, reprinted here, that concedes almost nothing. Lester’s executives said employment depends chiefly on sales and orders; Machlup responds that sales expectations were always part of marginal productivity reasoning, not an antimarginalist discovery. He works through Lester’s six conclusions on wage rates, variable costs, factor substitution, and multiprocess plants, insisting that marginal analysis never required rising unit costs and that firms can reckon in incremental rather than average terms. His deeper charge is that Lester mistakes the proximate vocabulary of managers — orders, morale, sales effort — for a refutation of the causal structure economists actually analyze.

Incremental costs and revenues can be known without any knowledge of average costs and revenues; the reverse is not true.

When defeated Austria's socialists revived their demand for socialization in 1947, Bayer insisted the slogan meant nothing unless productive means were lifted from private hands and bound into one national economic plan. Isolated, firm-by-firm nationalization he dismissed as primitive and doomed, recalling the failed German and Austrian experiments after 1918. The argument then plunges into the socialist calculation debate: he rehearses Mises's claim that without a capital-goods market prices cannot rank higher-order goods, weighs Barone, Lange, and Taylor on trial-and-error pricing, and answers Hayek's Road to Serfdom charge that planning breeds arbitrary coercion. Crucially, he enlists Austrian marginal-utility theory as valid for any economy, socialist ones included, to conclude that a price-guided planned order is both theoretically and practically possible.

Der Ordnung der Wirtschaft kann nur zugrunde liegen, entweder das Prinzip der Selbstregulierung oder der bewußten volkswirtschaftlichen Entscheidung.

English translation: “The ordering of the economy can rest only on one of two principles: that of self-regulation, or that of conscious economic decision.”