The archive.

Medicine can name and treat the body's diseases; the science of society, by contrast, has barely learned to diagnose the disorders of collective life. Rejecting cheap analogies from biology and mechanics and the abstractions of German philosophical sociology, Thurnwald makes personality the "atom" of social analysis, with character understood as a dynamic product of biological potential and environmental fate. From this unit he builds family, male associations, leadership, and the problem of fitting the right man to the right place through automatic or planned social sifting. American Prohibition serves as his cautionary case of law enacted without regard to social psychology, breeding illegal trade and corruption; race questions in Hawaii and Fiji become social-psychological problems, and Germany, he argues, needs social inventions to match its technical ones.

Wir werden vielfach irregeführt von dem Gedanken, daß Verordnungen, Gesetze, Vorschriften ausreichen, das Gesellungsleben zu regulieren.

English translation: “We are frequently misled by the notion that ordinances, laws, and prescriptions suffice to regulate communal life.”

A plot of fifteen hundred to three thousand square meters, enough for vegetables, potatoes, fruit, poultry, rabbits, perhaps a goat, anchors this Depression-era proposal for Vienna. The wager is that industry, even in recovery, will not again employ everyone eight hours a day, so the unemployed need a supplementary livelihood rooted in the soil rather than merely healthier housing. Mahr designs the whole settlement economy: land secured by lease or hereditary building right rather than costly purchase, construction cheapened through voluntary labor service, serial building, and local materials, even an industrial labor service in which future settlers make their own bricks and window frames against credited wage claims. Financed by domestic loans at roughly fifteen hundred Schilling per holding, Stadtrandsiedlung leaves a lasting productive asset where ordinary public works leave none.

Aus diesen Gründen erscheint die Behauptung durchaus gerechtfertigt, daß die Förderung der Stadtrandsiedlung gegenwärtig unter den Zielen der staatlichen Wirtschaftspolitik an erster Stelle stehen sollte.

English translation: “For these reasons, the assertion appears entirely justified that the promotion of suburban settlement should presently stand in first place among the aims of state economic policy.”

Read as an economic program rather than a devotional text, Pius XI's encyclical Quadragesimo anno becomes, in Bayer's hands, a diagnosis of the Depression. He begins from the paradox of apparent overproduction: goods stand abundant while unemployment destroys the income that would buy them, each production cut breeding fresh joblessness. Against this he defines the economy's rational goal as durable maximum value—rising output adapted to need, income tied to contribution, distribution as even as possible—and finds it confirmed in the encyclical. His remedy is neither socialist planning, which lacks price formation and calculation, nor unrestrained competition, which decays into destructive underbidding and then monopoly. Bayer locates the world crisis above all in monopoly pricing by finance-controlled cartels and in the 'Fehlrationalisierung' of misdirected investment, prescribing a flexible corporative order to hold competition within bounds.

Es ist also weder die freie Konkurrenz noch die mit ihr in ursächlichem Zusammenhang stehende Monopolgestaltung in der Lage, aus sich heraus eine Heilung der Volkswirtschaft herbeizuführen.

English translation: “Thus neither free competition nor the monopoly formation causally bound up with it is able, of itself, to bring about a healing of the national economy.”

Would restoring silver to monetary use revive trade—or chiefly rescue its producers and holders? Writing in 1933, Richard Kerschagl separates currency stability from support for a falling commodity price. His distinctive approach brings monetary institutions into contact with the stubborn economics of silver: much is mined as a by-product, while private hoards can return to market precisely when higher prices are meant to restore confidence. Giving competing reform proposals substantial space, he tests their promises against these constraints and the needs of silver-using economies. Readers can discover why credit expansion need not require silver, why official stock agreements cannot control private selling, and why Kerschagl objects to imposing obsolete monetary arrangements on Asian borrowers in the name of assistance.

Mandeville and Adam Smith showed that a market can turn private self-interest into social coordination; Strigl's 1933 offprint, printed for the Association of Austrian Banks and Bankers, denies that this licenses the state to grant favors to particular firms and trades. He tests the interventionist slogan that every branch of national labor has a claim to protection and finds it hollow: imports do not make employment vanish but merely shift it while raising costs, wages, and consumer prices, and rescuing loss-making firms diverts scarce capital from productive uses. Such policy he names anti-selectionist, since it freezes existing arrangements against necessary structural change, and he traces a self-reinforcing spiral in which crisis breeds intervention and intervention deepens crisis. Every measure, he insists, must face one objective test: whether it serves the whole or only a favored few.

Eine gefährliche Schraube ohne Ende.

English translation: “A dangerous screw without end.”

Can economics establish laws that hold across different societies without treating human beings like objects in a laboratory? In these methodological essays, presented in the 2003 third English edition, Ludwig von Mises grounds economic knowledge in purposeful choice rather than statistical regularity or psychological motives. His claim that action is rational does not mean that people are wise or selfish: pursuing honor, religious devotion, or political power also involves choosing ends and sacrificing alternatives. Against historicism, he argues that even accounts of unique events presuppose general concepts of exchange, cost, and value. The central tension is between the universality Mises claims for economic theory and the diversity he acknowledges in human purposes. His distinctions clarify what economics can explain—and why, on his account, it can neither prescribe ultimate ends nor predict numerical outcomes.

A gifted biographer can restore an economist’s reputation—and distort the distribution of intellectual credit. In this 1933 review of Keynes’s Essays in Biography, Schumpeter admires the intimacy and literary skill of the portraits while questioning the judgments they sustain. Keynes’s rehabilitation of Malthus, he argues, risks projecting contemporary objections to saving onto different historical conditions; his compelling account of Marshall leaves Edgeworth’s theoretical achievements comparatively obscure. Schumpeter writes as a fellow economist alert both to analytical invention and to the means by which it becomes memorable. The review offers a compact encounter between two ways of judging economic achievement, showing how personal allegiance, present concerns, and narrative power can shape the history of a discipline.

A factory bought cheaply can yield a profit while its depreciation allowances fail to cover eventual replacement. This divergence between a purchaser’s success and the maintenance of productive capacity anchors Martha Stephanie Braun’s Kapitalaufzehrung. Engaging with Erich Schiff’s research, Braun asks what balance sheets actually reveal about capital lost during a depression. She distinguishes write-downs that merely reflect lower replacement costs from losses that threaten physical renewal. Her accounting analysis also informs a contested policy position: she argues that price supports, rigid wages and taxes, and renewed inflation obstruct adjustment or create fresh imbalances. The article offers a concrete way to examine why monetary wealth, private profitability, and the preservation of productive resources cannot be treated as interchangeable measures.

The paired terms Kapitalbildung and Kapitalaufzehrung conceal an ambiguity: in a boom, a society may genuinely accumulate productive wealth or merely bid up the monetary valuation of assets it already holds. Pursuing that distinction drives Schiff's contribution to early empirical business-cycle research, issued through Vienna's Institute for Business Cycle Research with acknowledged help from Hayek, Morgenstern, and Machlup. Working in the Austrian tradition of Böhm-Bawerk, he treats capital not as a stock of things but as a value-form — the capitalized stream of expected returns — so the same plant signifies differently as interest rates and profit expectations shift. Vertical malinvestment in the upswing, over-lengthened roundabout production, and the crisis felt as capital shortage amid idle capacity organize an argument haunted by the fear of secular capital shrinkage.

Die Theorie, die das Wesen des Kapitalwertes als diskontierten oder kapitalisierten Ertrages vielleicht am meisten betont und die belangreichsten Folgerungen daraus ableitet, ist die Kapitaltheorie Fishers.

English translation: “The theory that perhaps most strongly emphasizes the essence of capital value as discounted or capitalized yield, and that draws the most significant conclusions from it, is Fisher's theory of capital.”

If the usefulness of each good depends on how other goods are used, how can anyone discover the best allocation? In this article, Rosenstein-Rodan treats complementarity not as a special relation between paired goods but as a general problem of economic planning. His decisive distinction is between describing an equilibrium and explaining how a person arrives at a plan. Reading mathematical utility theory alongside Austrian accounts of valuation, he argues that marginal utilities can be results of planning before they become guides to adjustment. The practical payoff is an account of abbreviated calculation: experience allows people to revise selected uses without reconsidering everything. Yet coordinated improvements that look disadvantageous one change at a time remain a revealing difficulty for this explanation.

Constitutional supremacy need not mean political command. In this signed encyclopedia contribution, supplied in its 1937 republication, William Emmanuel Rappard examines why Switzerland’s Federal Assembly exercises less independence than its extensive powers suggest. His explanation turns on the contrast between a continuously reelected, experienced executive and legislators whose parliamentary duties remain part-time. Popular referendums, he argues, both check government more effectively and reinforce parliamentary deference. The account also makes federalism concrete: equal representation for cantons sits alongside representation by population, while disputes over whether to count foreign residents expose competing regional interests. This compact institutional portrait offers a precise distinction between the authority a constitution assigns and the influence that tenure, expertise, and direct popular intervention allow.

The success of the referendum in Switzerland is both a cause and a consequence of this extreme parliamentary docility.

Can workers displaced by machinery count on new investment and cheaper goods to restore their employment? In this 1933 journal reply to Mentor Bouniatian, presented in French, Emil Lederer challenges the assumption that technical progress supplies its own remedy for unemployment. His distinctive concern is timing: even if each innovation eventually generates compensating employment, successive waves of displacement may leave unemployment continuous. He distinguishes labour-saving improvements from inventions that open new fields of production, and argues that credit expansion can conceal displacement during a boom only for depression to expose it. The article offers a precise way to question promises of automatic adjustment: which jobs are created, whose spending sustains them, and how long must displaced workers wait?