The archive.

Citizens must judge claims whose technical foundations they cannot fully master. Alfred Schutz’s essay locates this difficulty between specialized expertise and the practical recipes that ordinarily let people get on with their lives. His distinctive question is not simply how much we know, but how we decide what deserves attention—and what happens when other people’s purposes make unfamiliar matters consequential for us. The expert, the everyday actor, and the would-be informed citizen are attitudes one person can adopt in different domains, not separate social classes. By examining both the perspectives of informants and the authority conferred by group approval, Schutz gives readers a precise distinction between knowledge received from others and knowledge warranted merely by social acceptance. His account makes informed judgment a task of scrutinizing relevance as well as evidence.

Trieste could change sovereigns without recovering the trade that sustained it. Writing in December 1946, Richard Schüller examines the disputed port through its railways, shipping companies, tariffs, and links to the Danube rather than through national claims alone. His experience as an Austrian economic official gives the article a practical institutional focus, alongside an acknowledged attachment to Austrian administration. An exclusively Austrian free zone that failed through delays and added costs offers a pointed example of the limits of nationally bounded solutions. Schüller argues that international status likewise cannot guarantee prosperity without cooperation across borders. The article lets readers distinguish the struggle to possess Trieste from the harder task of making its commercial networks function amid Italian–Yugoslav antagonism and Soviet–Western rivalry.

To fix a price at all, one must already know how prices form—and confusing value with price, this essay warns, wrecks the attempt from the start. Contributed to the 1946 Bern anthology Konkurrenz und Planwirtschaft, Amonn's piece first pries apart two words ordinary usage runs together: price, the money ratio of a good, and value, its regular exchange ratio against other goods. He distinguishes indirect influence such as tariffs from direct price policy, showing how ceilings breed shortages and rationing while floors breed surpluses and quotas, and grounds the whole in modern functional supply-and-demand theory and elasticity. Economics can test whether measures suit a chosen aim, he concludes, but the aims themselves belong to politics—so direct policy should ordinarily aim at durable competitive equilibrium, best secured by curbing monopoly.

Die Wert- und Preistheorie ist eine unumgängliche Voraussetzung einer rationellen Preispolitik, wie einer rationellen Wirtschaftspolitik überhaupt.

English translation: “The theory of value and price is an indispensable prerequisite of a rational price policy, and indeed of a rational economic policy generally.”

Can satire sharpen a history of political ideas without compromising its fairness? In this 1947 review of Alexander Gray’s The Socialist Tradition. Moses to Lenin, Hayek argues that irreverence toward socialism’s founders need not undermine serious scholarship. He praises Gray’s accessible exposition while testing its historical boundaries and noting gaps in its use of recent research. His endorsement becomes most pointed over Marx: Hayek approves Gray’s irony about the difficulty sympathetic interpreters have in agreeing on what Marx meant, particularly concerning value. The review offers a compact encounter with Hayek as a critical reader—attentive to historical evidence, openly unsympathetic to intellectual reverence, and unwilling to assume that Lenin supplies a settled endpoint to socialism’s development.

A concise introduction can teach statistical reasoning well yet leave students poorly equipped to continue their studies. In this brief review of S. T. Bok’s textbook for medical students, Gerhard Tintner praises its Fisherian perspective, medical and biological examples, and emphasis on methodology rather than mathematical proofs. His reservations are concrete: nomographs seem less accurate than tables, replacing χ² with G² needlessly obstructs access to English-language literature, and the absence of references leaves no route to further reading. The review offers a compact account of Tintner’s standards for statistical teaching: clarity and brevity matter, but so do computational accuracy, shared notation, and guidance beyond the introductory text.

Democratic consent cannot simply be assumed—but can discussion establish the values on which a free society depends? In this 1947 review of Frank H. Knight’s Freedom and Reform, Ludwig M. Lachmann admires Knight’s resistance to easy answers while probing the gap between cooperative truth-seeking and political debate. His sharpest disagreement concerns methodological individualism: against Knight’s demand that it account for society’s formation of individuals, Lachmann argues that scientific analysis isolates conceptual elements rather than explaining concrete social life in its entirety. The review offers a compact encounter between two defenders of freedom who disagree about its philosophical and analytical foundations. Readers can discover why securing agreement, validating values, and explaining purposeful action are distinct problems—and why conflating them weakens the case for a free society.

A statistical method can succeed on artificial data without earning authority over economic observations. That distinction drives Oskar Morgenstern’s review of M. G. Kendall’s study of oscillatory time-series. Kendall’s experiments favour correlogram analysis, but Morgenstern asks whether the result follows from building the test series around the very mechanism that method assumes. His objection is concrete: the empirical Beveridge series have not been shown to share that mechanism, and economic processes may change over the span of a long record. Appreciative of Kendall’s computational labour, yet alert to emerging high-speed machines, Morgenstern argues for larger experiments with varied assumptions rather than a premature ranking of methods. This compact review shows how a seemingly technical comparison turns on what counts as evidence about the process producing the data.

Can a philosophy designed to reconcile civilizations preserve the differences that make them worth understanding? In this 1947 review of F. S. C. Northrop’s The Meeting of East and West, Eric Voegelin welcomes the effort to widen Protestant, positivist America’s cultural horizon while challenging its conceptual foundations. Northrop’s pairing of theoretical and aesthetic experience promises reciprocal recognition between cultures; Voegelin asks what disappears when science, theology, art, and spiritual experience are gathered under such broad categories. His objections turn especially on Christianity and on Northrop’s sharp division between Eastern and Western religious life. The review offers a pointed distinction between overcoming cultural provincialism and making unfamiliar traditions intelligible: generosity toward other civilizations does not, for Voegelin, excuse imprecision about their forms of experience.

Exchange stabilization could protect a currency while obstructing economic recovery. In this 1947 review of H. M. H. A. van der Valk’s study of British and Dutch monetary policy, Josef Herbert Fürth examines why similar instruments produced different effects: Dutch banks’ flexible cash ratios made additional sterilization potentially excessive, whereas British intervention accommodated cheap credit. His interest lies in the banking mechanisms behind policy outcomes—and in whether the study’s recommendations follow consistently from its explanations. He questions its contrasting treatment of low interest rates and national versus international priorities, while finding practical lessons for the newly established International Monetary Fund. This compact review offers a concrete comparison of exchange management and domestic credit, sharpened by the unresolved question of who should control monetary policy.

Reliable accounts of national governments do not necessarily add up to an understanding of Europe. In this brief 1947 review of David Fellman’s edited collection, Eric Voegelin praises the individual studies while challenging the perspective that holds them together. His central objection goes beyond missing countries: he argues that postwar politics must confront the problem of European unity, pursuing by democratic means what Hitler had attempted through totalitarian conquest. Without endorsing the collection’s reassuring emphasis on institutional continuity, Voegelin distinguishes its value as a reference from its adequacy as political interpretation. The notice offers a compact encounter with that distinction—and with his insistence that European disorder cannot be understood solely within national borders.

Complementarity and substitution are not, Lachmann argues, symmetrical static relations between factors: complementarity is the coherence of means within a single production plan, while substitution is the response to disruption, error, or revised expectations. A locomotive substitutes for another locomotive yet complements wagons, crews, tracks, and timetables—so which relation holds depends entirely on the plan through which the goods are read. Beginning from the Hicks-Lange-Harrod debate but pulling the question out of demand analysis and into the structure of production, this early essay dissolves the fiction of homogeneous capital without collapsing into mere physical classification. Capital goods are artifacts made for purposes; spare parts, standardization, and reserve capacity are not accidental frictions but devices for preserving a wider pattern of complementarity. Accumulation, working through chain reactions of gain and loss, makes any single rate of profit meaningless.

We have to provide for many minor changes in order to prevent a major one.

Behind the cooperative movement lay a revolutionary dream, to abolish entrepreneurs, capitalists, and the wage system through producers' cooperatives owned in common. That dream, Mises argues in this report commissioned by the Petroleum Industry Research Foundation, failed utterly, and the surviving consumers' and farmers' cooperatives are simply large businesses. Patronage refunds are distributions of profit; undistributed surpluses accumulate capital exactly as any firm's do. What sustains cooperatives, on his account, is not superior efficiency but privilege, the tax exemptions, cheap credit, and legal favors that shelter high-cost operations from a genuine market test. He points to the contradiction between farmers' cooperatives seeking higher prices and consumers' cooperatives claiming to seek lower ones, and concludes that cooperatives can be legitimate in a free society only if they renounce these advantages and win consumers on their own.

Capitalism needs neither propaganda nor apostles. Its achievements speak for themselves. Capitalism delivers the goods.