The archive.

An early German advocate of Adam Smith could also argue for restrictions on free competition. In this compact biographical encyclopedia entry, Karl Pribram presents Georg Sartorius von Walthershausen as both a teacher of Smithian economics and a selective critic of its premises. Sartorius’s rejection of an automatic harmony between private interests and public welfare led him to defend state intervention, especially in foreign trade. Pribram also credits him with separating the study of national wealth from governmental economic policy. The entry offers a precise glimpse of how Smith’s ideas were adapted in German university teaching, while resisting any easy identification of Sartorius’s historical scholarship with the later historical school of economics.

One word has been stretched to cover a family of unlike acts—postponed consumption, idle money holding, capital maintenance, investment, taxation, and the 'forced saving' manufactured by credit creation—and the confusion, Hayek argues, has misled theories of capital, interest, and depression. Borrowing Röpke's classification, the article separates saving in natura from monetary saving, and voluntary individual thrift from corporate, compulsory, and credit-driven kinds, insisting that only one answers to ordinary usage. Against underconsumptionist explanations of slumps, it admits only special cases: hoarding, violent swings in the rate of saving, and credit that simulates saving and provokes malinvestment. Hayek traces the modern machinery—banks, securities, insurance—by which abstention becomes command over resources, and ends on the determinants of saving, from income security to the rate of interest.

The original meaning of the term saving, keeping or preserving something for future use, has gradually been extended to cover a number of different activities more or less directly connected with the original sense of the word.

A manufacturer of ladies’ coats became a trusted leader of German Social Democracy: Emil Lederer’s compact biographical entry explains why Paul Singer’s bourgeois background helped rather than hindered his appeal. Lederer locates that appeal in Singer’s resemblance, in speech and appearance, to the respectable Berlin citizen, arguing that many skilled workers shared a lower-middle-class outlook. His portrait distinguishes the quiet authority of an organizer from August Bebel’s forceful oratory and uncompromising politics. In this entry, first published in 1934 and republished in 1937, readers encounter a concrete account of socialist leadership grounded less in revolutionary temperament than in practical judgment, willingness to compromise, and voters’ confidence.

Accepting Adam Smith’s economic laws did not necessarily mean accepting economic freedom. In this brief biographical encyclopedia article, Karl Pribram examines Soden’s attempt to reconcile Smith with German cameralism in his nine-volume Die Nationalökonomie. Property, grain trading and guilds expose the limits of that reconciliation: Soden defended existing social institutions when economic liberty threatened them, distinguishing universal economic laws from their administrative application. Pribram’s pointed assessment separates theoretical coherence from intellectual influence. He suggests that the very compromises that troubled orthodox Smithians may have helped stimulate German discussion of Smith—a concrete case of economic ideas gaining a hearing through adaptations that also altered their implications.

Price is not a peculiarly capitalist institution but a coefficient of economic choice — a quantitative index of preference among scarce alternatives that any organized society, socialist planners included, must somehow discover. That is the conceptual pivot of this compact essay reprinted from Economic Reconstruction, aimed at reformers who treated prices and profits as removable obstacles to abundance. Schumpeter carries the argument into a centralized socialist state, where planners would still need citizens to register wants with quantitative precision and would still impute values to means of production; producing whisky rather than bread from rye shows that no line divides the economic 'what' from the merely technical 'how.' Yet the essay withholds any laissez-faire comfort, preserving perfect competition only as a diagnostic instrument, since imperfect competition can yield the opposite of its promised results.

Hence rational production can never rest on exclusively technological considerations, at least not as long as all means of production are not at the command of a society in unlimited quantities.

Even a paradise of unlimited goods would leave one resource scarce: the time to enjoy them. In this 1934 article, Paul Narcyz Rosenstein-Rodan makes time an economic problem rather than merely a backdrop to choice. His distinctive move is to connect the limits of anticipation and consumption with the unequal speeds at which markets adjust. Knowing the conditions of equilibrium does not tell us whether an economy will reach it: prices, demand and supply may react at different rates, while fresh disturbances interrupt unfinished adjustments. These frictions, he argues, can change the outcome, not just postpone it. The article offers a precise way to distinguish a tendency towards equilibrium from an actual path through time—and to see what static analysis leaves unexplained.

A country can balance its overall payments while buying more from one partner than it sells in return. Erich Schiff’s 1934 essay asks why this ordinary feature of international specialization should be treated as a national disadvantage. Using Swiss watches, Czechoslovak cloth, and Yugoslav pigs, he traces how restricting imports can deprive exporters of customers—not merely through retaliation, but through the loss of purchasing power elsewhere in the trading network. His distinctive emphasis is on indirect effects: protected producers’ visible gains may conceal export opportunities forgone. Schiff also challenges the apparently milder policy of preserving established bilateral trade ratios, arguing that yesterday’s pattern can obstruct tomorrow’s productive improvements. The essay offers a concrete way to distinguish concerns about foreign indebtedness from the misleading demand for symmetry in every trading relationship.

Financing a longer production process is not the same as having the resources to sustain it. This distinction anchors Fritz Machlup’s 1935 joint review of Richard von Strigl’s Kapital und Produktion and Walter Eucken’s Kapitaltheoretische Untersuchungen. Machlup finds striking agreement in their treatment of capital as a fund maintaining productive factors until consumers’ goods become available, but tests their propositions rather than merely endorsing them. His criticism of Strigl turns on a concrete temporal problem: an unchanged quantity consumed over a longer period means less consumption per unit of time. In Eucken, he values the connection between production time, wages, and productivity. The review shows how shared capital-theoretical premises can illuminate these relationships without establishing agreement on credit expansion or economic fluctuations.

Depreciation can measure a loss in asset value or guide provision for replacement—but these are not the same task. In this review of R. F. Fowler’s book, Fritz Machlup shows why their separation matters for capital theory and business finance. He welcomes Fowler’s attention to the timing of investment and replacement, while questioning his terminology and identifying neglected changes in complementary costs. Machlup’s distinctive emphasis falls on capital’s time-structure: producing more durable equipment differs from making each piece last longer. The review offers a compact way to see how apparently technical accounting choices bear on investment requirements, dividends, and the contrast between an expanding firm and one maintaining a steady replacement cycle.

To make more durable goods is one thing, to make goods more durable is another.

What does a catalogue of definitions actually explain? In this brief review of Werner Brylewski’s study of capital, Fritz Machlup distinguishes the collection of meanings from the assessment of their theoretical use. He accepts Brylewski’s distinctions among definitions stressing capital’s origin, use, or outward appearance, but asks what this elaborate inventory achieves. His objection is concrete: the study analyzes hundreds of definitions without examining the explanatory purposes they serve, while overlooking several modern economists. The review offers no rival definition of capital. Instead, it gives readers a pointed criterion for judging conceptual scholarship: whether its distinctions help formulate hypotheses and interpret economic phenomena.

A currency can return to gold without recovering the trust once attached to it. That distinction drives Mises’s 1935 review of the third edition of T. E. Gregory’s The Gold Standard and its Future. Praising Gregory’s monetary analysis, Mises questions whether restored gold parities could revive international lending while governments remain willing to depreciate currencies in pursuit of domestic objectives. Protectionism, nominal-wage commitments, and policies favouring debtors enter his account as obstacles to credible monetary restraint. This short review offers a precise way to distinguish a formal monetary rule from the political willingness to honour it—and shows why Mises regards the latter, rather than the technical act of stabilization, as the decisive problem.

The label “Manchester School” obscures the social concerns of the Manchester Statistical Society, Hayek argues in this 1935 review of T. S. Ashton’s centenary history. Investigations into mortality, railway labourers’ conditions and public health supply his concrete counterweight to that familiar image: here were researchers making the problems of industrial towns visible with scant resources. Hayek also reads Ashton as a theoretical economist alert to neglected predecessors. He singles out William Langton’s and T. H. Williams’s discussions of banking and trade cycles, asking whether their work helped shape Jevons’s thinking about cycles and capital. This brief review offers both a corrective to an intellectual stereotype and a carefully conditional lead for tracing the transmission of economic ideas.