The archive.

Knowing how to get across a city is not the same as knowing how to map it. In this essay, first published in 1943 and republished here in 1964, Alfred Schütz uses the native, stranger, and cartographer to distinguish practical understanding from scientific explanation. His central question is what happens when social scientists judge everyday action by standards of knowledge and consistency developed for theory. Ordinary actors rely on workable recipes; theoretical actors possess motives and information stipulated by their creators. Schütz defends such models without confusing them with living people. Readers can discover both why routine conduct need not be irrational and why a logically coherent explanation must still answer to the meanings an action has for those involved.

How can expectations enter a science of action when the future is uncertain and every observable fact admits rival readings? The answer here refuses two easy paths: against Keynes, Morgenstern, and Myrdal, Lachmann denies that expectations are ultimate data like tastes and resources; against Lundberg and Schumpeter, he denies they can be deduced from objective business situations. A price rise may signal reversion or inflation, so meaning arrives only through the actor's interpretation, and economics needs ideal types and historical understanding rather than deterministic law. From this he builds a theory of plan-guided action and tests it on Hicks's elasticity of expectations and on interest-rate formation, concluding that an Austro-Wicksellian crisis requires a particular expectational climate. The essay makes intelligibility, not determinateness, the proper aim of social science.

The Social World consists not of facts but of our interpretations of the facts.

Can competitive price theory be taught convincingly before students encounter monopoly and imperfect competition? In this 1943 review of the preliminary edition of George J. Stigler’s The Theory of Competitive Price, Fritz Machlup weighs that pedagogical choice while testing the precision of definitions, diagrams, and explanations. His detailed corrections coexist with admiration for Stigler’s concise exposition: a demanding textbook can clarify theory without making it easy. The review offers a concrete view of what Machlup expects from economic instruction—analytical distinctions that hold up under scrutiny, assumptions whose purpose students understand, and technical tools connected to actual problems. His closing disagreement with Schumpeter over the book’s level turns on students’ mathematical preparation, leading to an insistence that advanced theory belongs in the undergraduate curriculum.

What should a textbook in the new field of econometrics teach—and which difficulties should it refuse to evade? In this 1943 review of Harold T. Davis’s The Theory of Econometrics, Gerhard Tintner weighs classroom usefulness against original research. He praises the exposition of economic statics but locates Davis’s strongest contributions in dynamics, particularly the treatment of serial correlation and forecasting, problems he considers too often avoided in economic statistics. His judgement draws on teaching experience: students with some calculus can, he argues, work through the book’s problems and acquire a substantial grounding in the subject. This compact review offers a concrete view of Tintner’s standards for econometric education, joining mathematical theory to the complications of observed economic data.

Openness to new economic ideas need not mean surrender to intellectual fashion. In this brief 1944 review of Oscar R. Hobson’s Can We Afford It?, Hayek praises a financial journalist who states an argument fairly before explaining why it leaves him unconvinced. Hayek’s almost complete agreement with Hobson is explicit, but his judgement also rests on the craft of making difficult questions intelligible in a few paragraphs. The review offers a compact statement of what he values in public economic discussion: attention to immediate policy problems, sensitivity to the ideas behind them, and resistance to treating either yesterday’s paradoxes or today’s commonplaces as final wisdom.

Can a decentralized competitive order modeled on Switzerland answer the problems of a Europe transformed by war? In this 1944 review, Karl Pribram tests Wilhelm Röpke’s proposed “third way” against the historical conditions it must confront. He appreciates Röpke’s scholarship and his effort to reconcile competition, social cohesion, and political liberty, but questions a diagnosis that traces modern upheaval to earlier revolutions while giving insufficient attention to National Socialism. Pribram’s distinctive contribution is to separate the appeal of an institutional ideal from its practical reach: independent farmers, skilled artisans, and decentralized industry may offer an attractive model without providing a transferable remedy. This brief review sharpens the question of what economic reconstruction requires when war has altered the society a reform program presupposes.

The question may be raised whether Röpke's analysis will still be applicable to the conditions of post-war Europe.

Policies suited to a general depression may fail when unemployment is concentrated in particular places. This distinction anchors Gottfried Haberler’s 1944 review of Robert R. Nathan’s Mobilizing for Abundance, a popular exposition of the Keynes–Hansen theory of oversaving. Haberler accepts that preventing a deflationary spiral helps governments address local economic troubles; he objects to treating aggregate demand as a sufficient diagnosis of postwar difficulties. His criticism turns on what Nathan leaves out: resource maldistribution, wage and price rigidity, labor mobility, and inflation. The review offers a pointed account of the difference between making economic policy accessible and making it deceptively simple—and of how prescribing demand stimulus under unsuitable conditions could discredit that policy when it is genuinely needed.

An elegant economic model need not be a convincing explanation. In this 1944 review of Kalecki’s Studies in Economic Dynamics, G. L. S. Shackle examines the distance between the two with admiration and exacting scrutiny. He praises an interest-rate theory whose statistical test could genuinely have counted against it, but presses the business-cycle model on its assumptions about timing and entrepreneurs’ knowledge of cyclical regularities. His objections remain concrete: inventories and working capital cannot contract below zero, a limit that matters for explaining recovery from a slump. This short review offers a focused encounter with Shackle’s standards of explanation—what evidence tests, what algebra conceals, and when simplifying assumptions require further defence.

James Wilson’s relative neglect beside Walter Bagehot gives Hayek’s brief review of two Economist centenary publications its sharpest edge. Why, he asks, does the journal’s founder receive no comparable portrait, and so little attention for his views on the trade cycle? Hayek welcomes the essay volume’s readability under wartime conditions—its archives destroyed and space restricted by paper shortages—without accepting every claim it makes for the journal’s political continuity. His judgments reveal an economist attentive both to neglected theoretical contributions and to the documentary needs of historians. The separate, identically titled pamphlet receives chiefly a bibliographic warning: it contains different material. This is a compact encounter with Hayek as a critical reader of institutional commemoration, balancing appreciation against omissions and evidential limits.

Economic self-sufficiency promised security to the Danubian successor states; in Richard Schüller’s reading of Antonín Basch, it instead weakened their markets and exposed them to German pressure. This 1944 review is especially revealing where approval becomes correction: Schüller calls Basch’s criticism of Czechoslovak protectionism too mild, pointing out that a country dependent on regional export markets was restricting imports from its own customers. He values Basch’s practical knowledge while testing his proposals for postwar reconstruction against the costs of agricultural protection, the limits of administrative control, and the prospects for modest cooperation rather than federation. The closing comment on Western and Russian influence adds a pointed wartime qualification: economic plans cannot be separated from the political power under which they must operate.

Periodically, in the open air and by collective oath, the Swiss cantons swore their federal pacts anew—an institution Rappard studies under its German name, Beschwörung und Erneuerung der Bünde, from Rudolf Brun's Zurich charter of 1351 to its extinction in 1798. Born of one magistrate's fear of his enemies, the periodic public oath spread through the perpetual alliances and the Covenant of Stans until it formed part of Swiss public law. Then the Reformation turned a rite of unity into a confessional battlefield: Catholics would swear before God and the saints, the Reformed before God alone, and no formula could reconcile the two. The ceremony returned for a single day at Aarau, on the eve of the old Confederation's collapse—the oath, Rappard argues, being the very cement of the Eidgenossenschaft.

Une fois de plus les saints se dressèrent donc entre les Confédérés, non pour les bénir, mais bien pour les empêcher de renouveler leurs promesses de fidélité mutuelle !

English translation: “Once again the saints thus stood between the Confederates—not to bless them, but rather to prevent them from renewing their pledges of mutual fidelity!”

Putting workers back into familiar jobs is not necessarily the same as creating lasting employment. In this 1944 newspaper article, republished here in 2022, Hayek accepts monetary action against a deflationary spiral but questions expansion that preserves an unsustainable distribution of labour. With postwar adjustment in view, he directs attention to expanding industries whose established employers and workers restrict entry, taking increased demand in higher profits and wages rather than opening opportunities to newcomers. His distinctive claim is that persistent unemployment concerns access and mobility, not merely insufficient spending. The article offers a compact way to examine the tension between immediate relief and durable employment—and to assess Hayek’s warning that postponing adjustment can deepen dependence on state intervention.

The struggle against unemployment is in the last resort the same as the struggle against monopoly.