The archive.

Temporary tariff cuts promise a useful bargain during rearmament: more civilian goods for Americans and more dollar earnings for their allies. Karl Pribram’s 1952 article asks whether that promise survives the constraints of actual trade. Foreign factories also face military demands, scarce materials, and limited investment capital; uncertain access to the American market gives them little reason to expand. Combining attention to import composition with scrutiny of executive authority, Pribram distinguishes the case for lower tariffs from the case for continually adjustable ones. His alternative—selective, negotiated reductions of indefinite duration—makes dependable market access part of Atlantic defense cooperation. The article offers a concrete account of how an apparently flexible emergency measure can undermine the investment and international commitments needed to make it effective.

The conditions that make freedom possible can also become instruments of domination: tools impose new necessities, commerce turns means into ends, and representatives acquire interests distinct from those they govern. In this review essay, republished in 1964, Alfred Schütz examines how Santayana’s Dominations and Powers understands these reversals through humanity’s dependence on nature and social arrangements. He takes Santayana’s philosophical ambition seriously without accepting its biological foundation as an adequate explanation of social meaning. The resulting tension gives the essay its particular interest: Schütz preserves Santayana’s account of embodied, constrained agency while questioning his treatment of economic life and activities beyond subsistence. Readers can discover precisely where recognition of human dependence becomes, in Schütz’s judgement, an unwarranted reduction of human possibilities.

Can a tax intended to reduce inequality instead protect established wealth against new competitors? In this review essay, presented in its 1953 English translation, Friedrich August von Hayek uses Walter J. Blum and Harry Kalven Jr.’s examination of progressive taxation to challenge its claims to justice. His distinctive objection concerns the treatment of identical services: annual progression can leave two people with different net rewards for the same work because their earlier earnings differ. He also argues that restricting new fortunes can obstruct upward mobility. Yet his position is not an unconditional demand for flat income-tax rates: he allows progression where it offsets indirect taxes borne by poorer people. The essay makes that distinction central, exposing the tension between redistribution, equal treatment, and political power over a taxpaying minority.

When the prestige of physics and biology tempts social thinkers to borrow their methods wholesale, the result, Hayek argues, is not science but scientism: a prejudiced approach that decides how to study society before examining it. This volume gathers his studies on that abuse of reason, first defending a subjectivist, compositive method in which institutions such as money, law, and markets exist only as the beliefs and purposes of those who use them, and collective terms like 'society' name patterns of individual conduct rather than agents. It then narrates the counter-revolution historically, from the École Polytechnique and Saint-Simon's engineers through Comtean sociology and its convergence with Hegel, tracing how impatience with evolved orders turned science into a model for social command. The through-line is epistemic: planning fails because dispersed knowledge exceeds any single directing mind.

So far as human actions are concerned the things are what the acting people think they are.

For the seller who feels himself one among very many, rivals are colleagues rather than threats—and it is this state of mind, not the sheer count of firms, on which Machlup rebuilds the theory of selling. He coins pliopoly for the pressure of potential newcomers, setting it beside polypoly, oligopoly, and monopoly, and defines a true monopolist by the triple absence of all three. Against businessmen who claim they price by average or full cost, he reinterprets such rules as competitive responses to expected demand elasticity, treating cartel ethics and break-even charts as evidence rather than refutation. The analysis ranges across perfect and imperfect polypoly, artificial scarcity and monopoly rents, and the kinked demand curve, always parting the economist's objective calculus from the trader's rough feel for the market.

The concept of the industry is nothing but an expedient device for ruling out negligible or too uncertain interdependence.

Positivism, by reducing science to method and ruling metaphysical questions out of bounds as mere "values," had hollowed out political science at its root — such is the charge these six Walgreen lectures level before setting out to restore the discipline. Voegelin recovers a classical and Christian concern with the order of the soul, distinguishing the constitutional sense of representation from the deeper existential sense by which a society first becomes capable of action in history. His central diagnosis of modernity is that ideological movements from progressivism to National Socialism revive gnosticism, converting Joachim of Flora's three ages into an immanentized eschatology that promises salvation within time. Hobbes and Puritanism supply his cases; the recovery of experience against method and revolutionary fantasy supplies his guarded hope.

The existence of man in political society is historical existence; and a theory of politics, if it penetrates to principles, must at the same time be a theory of history.

Critics had turned the Pigou effect into a crude prescription for curing depressions by driving wages and prices down; Haberler writes to rescue it from that caricature. Properly understood, he argues, it is not policy advice at all but a theorem about the internal consistency of the static Keynesian model. In a world of flexible competitive wages, the Keynes effect normally restores full employment through falling interest rates; the Pigou effect closes the extreme remaining cases — a liquidity trap, interest-insensitive investment — by letting rising real balances lift expenditure. This dismantles the one strict basis for a static competitive underemployment equilibrium and undercuts secular stagnation, even as Haberler concedes to Hansen and Metzler that real depressions demand monetary and fiscal action, not patient deflation.

For these two reasons it would be foolish to rely entirely on price and wage deflation to cure a depression through the Pigou effect.

Monopoly, in this account, is less a market form than an institutional problem: every arrangement by which alternatives are restricted — business combinations and buyer power, union control of labor markets, and above all government policies that shelter favored groups from competition. Machlup credits antitrust with making cartel agreements less secure, yet judges the law of monopolization, the prohibition of trusts and mergers, a dismal failure. His sharpest reversal is that monopoly is often a product of public permission, manufactured through licensing, tariffs, patents, and marketing orders. He carries the same logic into labor, rejecting the purchasing-power theory of wage increases and denying that union monopoly offsets business monopoly — their effects, he argues, are additive rather than compensatory. First published in 1952, it remains his most sustained brief for open entry.

The economic policies of government are far-flung and many-sided. On many fronts, therefore, could government fight for competition and against monopoly if it so desired. It has not seen fit to do so.

A machine’s purchase price is definite; its contribution to future profits is not. In this review essay, Alfred Amonn examines Friedrich and Vera Lutz’s The Theory of Investment of the Firm through the tension between exact investment calculation and workable business practice. Their approach evaluates durable equipment by discounting anticipated returns rather than allocating its cost through depreciation conventions. Amonn traces what this changes in decisions about replacement, financing, and valuation, while asking whether entrepreneurs can realistically perform the calculations the theory requires. Readers can discover why economic life need not coincide with technical service life, and why accounting rules may point toward different decisions from prospective-profit analysis. Amonn’s appreciation of the Lutzes’ analytical discipline remains tempered by questions about practical applicability and its contribution to broader economic theory.

Creating jobs is not the same as building an economy capable of sustaining them. In this 1952 article, Hans Bayer challenges both social policy that repairs market outcomes and Keynesian measures that stimulate demand without sufficiently attending to productive development. His distinctive concern is economic freedom understood as freedom from private concentrations of power, rather than exemption from obligations to the common good. Wage guarantees, redistribution and public expenditure become tests of a sharper distinction: does policy merely cushion insecurity, or change the conditions that produce it? Bayer’s account of social security as “dynamic stabilization” offers a particularly revealing tension: protecting workers need not mean preserving every existing job. Readers can discover why he locates lasting security in deliberately shaped economic development, while stopping short of a detailed planning blueprint.

Showing that monetary expansion can cause inflation is not the same as explaining how to sustain employment. In this brief review of Albert Hunold’s edited volume, Josef Herbert Fürth accepts its contributors’ warnings about inflation and restrictive controls but challenges the sufficiency of their case. Postwar experience, he observes, includes high employment under expansionist policies and idle resources under policies prioritizing monetary stability—though American aid and shortages of real capital complicate the comparison. His distinctive contribution is this refusal to let either side’s principles settle an empirical question. The review offers a compact example of economic criticism that asks not simply whether a policy can fail, but under what conditions it fails and what a workable alternative requires.

Europe’s shortage of dollars is, for Hans Bayer, more than a payments problem: it tests whether a fragmented continent can become an economic partner rather than remain dependent on American predominance. In this 1952 article, he shifts attention from exchange rates and trade barriers to the location of factories, the allocation of investment, and Europe’s capacity to coordinate production. His criticism of Marshall aid is concrete: reconstruction funds could reinforce national divisions when they supported industries poorly placed from a European perspective. Bayer’s distinctive proposal is to begin investment cooperation within the sector serving collective economic purposes. The article offers a pointed account of how internal fragmentation sustains external dependence—and why, in Bayer’s view, European recovery requires more than higher national output.