The archive.

When Walter Reuther pressed his 1958 wage demands on behalf of the United Automobile Workers, Hayek seized on them as a test case for a broader warning about legally privileged group power. Modern unions, he argues, owe their strength not to freedom of association but to the tolerated coercion of workers willing to accept other terms, and their wage pressure turns inflationary only once monetary authorities feel bound to supply whatever credit full employment demands at any wage. Distinguishing average output from the marginal productivity of labour, he brands the claim on productivity gains generated by capital an attempted expropriation, and reads Reuther's profit-sharing scheme as a step toward syndicalism—not public ownership, but the seizure of enterprise returns by closed groups of incumbent workers who supply none of the capital.

Inflation-born prosperity has never been and never will be lasting prosperity.

Because dependent earners form the majority of the population, Bayer treats their place in economic policy not as a workplace detail but as the pivot on which democracy either becomes real or lapses into empty form. He defines the workforce broadly, as all dependent earners for whom being ruled outweighs ruling, and maps three routes of participation: the occupational, running from firm-level codetermination up through branch committees; the common-economy route of cooperatives, municipal enterprise, and the nationalized sector; and the political route of elections and referenda. Firm-level co-ownership and profit-sharing in monopoly firms he rejects as blind alleys. Grounding the whole case in the economy's purpose, the securing of material foundations for personality development, he warns of a negative accelerator in which absent institutions dampen interest, and absent interest blocks the institutions.

Es geht darum, die Gefahren einer bloß formalen Demokratie zu vermeiden und lebendige Demokratie sicherzustellen.

English translation: “The task is to avoid the dangers of a merely formal democracy and to ensure a living democracy.”

Switzerland, Amonn argues, has accumulated so many collectivist interventions that it can no longer honestly be called a market economy, whatever its constitution's guarantees of commercial freedom. Dedicated to Fritz Marbach, this critical survey turns a sharp eye on Swiss cartels, on the milk regime whose guaranteed prices breed gluts, on cost-covering agricultural prices that capitalize into ever-rising land values, and above all on wartime rent control, which he indicts at length for freezing the housing market, privileging sitting tenants over young families, and letting the building stock decay. He leans on the Federal Price Formation Commission's report and its standard of "possible competition," traces recent price rises to imported inflation, and warns that permanent rent control amounts, in Otto Bauer's own terms, to socialization by other means.

When does a promise of human emancipation become a prohibition on asking questions? In Wissenschaft, Politik und Gnosis, Eric Voegelin examines systems that, in his reading, protect their claims to liberating knowledge by excluding inquiry into their premises. Marx’s account of human self-production and Hegel’s promise of completed knowledge become tests of the boundary between philosophical inquiry and intellectual domination. Voegelin’s distinctive argument is theological as well as political: he contends that projects of human self-salvation require the speculative abolition of an order humanity did not create. His comparison of medieval Golem legends with modern self-creation sharpens the stakes—whether makers can acknowledge limits and undo their work. Readers encounter both a diagnosis of ideological closure and the demanding conception of transcendence on which that diagnosis rests.

Foreign-exchange controls can undermine the balance they are meant to protect: cheap official foreign currency encourages imports while penalizing exporters. In this 1959 article, Richard Kerschagl traces that contradiction through compulsory surrender, rationed allocations, clearing arrangements, and blocked capital transfers. His attention to administrative detail shows how traders adapt to controls through invoice prices and third-country transactions, shifting monetary distortions into trade. Yet his case for realistic exchange rates is not a promise that markets alone will secure stability. Liberalization, he argues, requires credible restraint on inflation and effective coordination of economic policy, with a substantial role for the central bank. The article offers a concrete account of why removing restrictions and establishing durable convertibility are different tasks.

Claims that economic theory scarcely influences policy may depend on what has been excluded from the category of theory. In this contribution to a 1960 discussion, Fritz Machlup tests the boundaries behind Stigler’s and Wilcox’s conclusions: do applied economists, dissenting doctrines, and ideas inherited from earlier generations count? He resists both an academic definition so narrow that it conceals influence and one so broad that every policy choice proves it. His sharper political observation is that disputes over theory’s “unrealism” may concern whose welfare matters—identifiable constituents now or dispersed consumers later—rather than analytical competence. The contribution offers a compact way to distinguish disagreements about economic reasoning from disagreements about its scope, its historical transmission, and the people whose interests it serves.

For Gerhard Tintner, mathematical economics proves its worth through contact with data and the risks of practical advice. His 1960 review of Jan Tinbergen’s Selected Papers praises precisely this combination, pointing to Tinbergen’s willingness to leave concrete policy recommendations open to later scrutiny. Yet Tintner also highlights results that unsettle easy policy assumptions: economic integration can, under specified conditions, lower real income, and increased productivity need not produce desirable outcomes. His strongest interest lies in Tinbergen’s analysis of the optimum economic regime, where formal welfare reasoning encounters ethical choices between capitalism and collectivism. This short review offers a focused account of what Tintner values in economic analysis—and where he sees its mathematical tools clarifying, rather than settling, questions of policy and institutions.

Gerhard Tintner’s brief 1960 review of Harry M. Markowitz’s Portfolio Selection focuses on a concrete trade-off: greater average return cannot be obtained from an efficient portfolio without accepting greater dispersion of returns. Tintner reads this criterion as an application of newer mathematical economics, contrasting its tools with the calculus and mechanical models of the classical tradition. His interest lies in the connection between formal reasoning and practical use: quadratic programming, computational methods, and utility theory promise an analysis that financial analysts can use. The review offers a concise account of why Tintner welcomed Markowitz’s approach, especially its combination of mathematical innovation with exposition accessible to readers lacking extensive mathematical preparation.

By the late 1950s American economists were split over whether rising consumer prices sprang from excess demand or from the wage and price decisions of unions and corporations, and Machlup thought both camps were arguing with blunt concepts. He rebuilds the vocabulary, separating autonomous demand from the induced and supportive kinds, and responsive cost increases from defensive and aggressive ones, then shows that cost-push cannot persist without monetary accommodation while demand-pull can stall against fully administered prices. Reading the postwar record through these lenses, he classes 1945 to 1952 as demand-pull and 1955 to 1959 as cost-push, with aggressive wage-push a likelier culprit than profit-push. His remedy is unfashionable: stable prices require that industries enjoying productivity gains be allowed to cut prices rather than pocket them.

A search of the learned literature would yield scores of definitions of inflation, differing from one another in essentials or in nuances.

Does eliminating successive monopoly mark-ups require merging the firms that impose them? Fritz Machlup and Martha Taber’s article separates the pricing case for vertical integration from technological economies and asks what independent firms can accomplish through contracts. The crucial distinction is concrete: bargaining over price alone differs from agreeing on both price and quantity. Where firms can negotiate the joint-profit-maximizing output, common ownership need not lower consumer prices further; where they cannot control quantities, the result may differ. By connecting economic models to firms’ actual capacity to bargain and commit, the authors clarify when integration can remove output restrictions—and why that gain does not settle the policy question. A merger that improves pricing within an existing monopoly structure may also make that structure harder to challenge.

Why has logic remained perpetually contested? Because, argues this late essay, written in 1957 when its author was seventy-seven, it has confused correctness with truth, judgments with sentences, and genuine judgments with norms and postulates. Logic, Engliš counters, is the science of the order of thought, and thought divides into three irreducible orders: the ontological, which explains what simply exists through cause and effect; the teleological, which explains what is willed through means and ends; and the normological, which explains what ought to be. Mathematics becomes a logic of quantity that asserts nothing about reality, while the paradoxes of the logisticians dissolve once one sees that not every grammatical sentence is a judgment. Economics and law, he holds, first exposed the two non-causal orders that traditional logic had missed.

Nur die Erfahrung ist wahr oder unwahr; deshalb können nur die empirischen Wissenschaften beurteilen, was wahr ist.

English translation: “Only experience is true or untrue; therefore only the empirical sciences can judge what is true.”

Can an enterprise chasing only its own advantage still steady the wider economy? This first volume, restricted to the large firm, answers a cautious yes. Bayer begins where the free-competition model breaks down: its assumptions of perfect transparency, capital mobility, and timeless adjustment are complementary, so that when one fails the whole equilibrium mechanism fails, a disequilibrium he illustrates with the cobweb theorem. Large firms, he argues, narrow the gap to the model through forecasting, long-run planning, and above all diversification, preserving the core stability of market share and employment. Profit, in many cases, ceases to be the goal and becomes a margin of safety that permits growth. Yet he concedes that some firm-level stabilizing merely shifts risk onto suppliers and competitors, so market power must remain checked by competition.

So zeigt sich, daß durch die Stabilisierungsmaßnahmen des einzelnen Unternehmens Kräfte einer Ordnung von unten her eingesetzt werden, die im Sinne einer Gesamtstabilisierung der Wirtschaft wirken können.

English translation: “Thus it becomes evident that through the stabilizing measures of the individual enterprise, forces of an order emerging from below are set in motion which can operate in the direction of an overall stabilization of the economy.”