The archive.

A venture may promise substantial gains yet remain unthinkable if failure would end the entrepreneur’s capacity to try again. In this 1941 article, G. L. S. Shackle connects that asymmetry to a concrete proposal: a public Board would guarantee partial recovery of investment costs when equipment is surrendered, financed by a levy on successful ventures. His distinctive concern is not average expected returns but the imagined extremes of success and disaster that command an investor’s attention. The scheme tests how far public protection can encourage private initiative without removing responsibility for loss. Its uncomfortable provision for scrapping surrendered equipment sharpens the tension between preserving productive assets and opening new investment opportunities. Readers encounter an institutional application of Shackle’s thinking about uncertainty, explicitly offered for experiment rather than as a proven remedy.

Would Marshall's message fade like Mill's or Smith's? This semi-centennial appraisal, read here in G. Bombach's German translation, answers with a deliberate doubleness: Marshall's specific tools, methods, and results are no longer ours — obsolete much as older physics was superseded — yet his influence endures because he built research instruments rather than a closed system. Schumpeter reconstructs the originality behind the Principles: partial equilibrium chosen over Walrasian generality, and the apparatus of elasticity, quasi-rent, consumer surplus, internal and external economies, and the representative firm. He argues that Marshall understated his own debt to mathematics, traces his paternity of imperfect-competition theory through Sraffa and Joan Robinson, and credits him with designing an economics open enough to be revised — and measured — by the discipline that followed.

Seine Vorstellung vom Wirtschaftsablauf, seine Methoden und seine Ergebnisse sind nicht mehr die unsrigen.

English translation: “His conception of the economic process, his methods, and his results are no longer ours.”

One God in heaven, one lord on earth: the Mongol letters and edicts of 1245–1255 turned that cosmic analogy into a working juridical doctrine of world conquest. Voegelin collects and classifies the documents carried between the papal and French courts and the khans—two khan letters, two edicts, two commanders' letters—reconstructing their preambles after Pelliot and reading them as formal legal instruments rather than mere barbarian arrogance. The empire they proclaim is an imperium mundi in statu nascendi, a world-empire-in-the-making in which every ruler, upon contact, must submit and enter as vassal or be destroyed as rebel. What lifts the study above orientalist antiquarianism is Voegelin's closing move, comparing the Mongols' sacral literalism—killing and conquest proclaimed as divine judgment—to the peace rhetoric of modern communist regimes.

Das Opfer der Aggression ist der Aggressor.

English translation: “The victim of aggression is the aggressor.”

Written in 1941 and reprinted here in 1997, Hayek’s wartime essay asks how Britain can act intelligently towards Germany without mistaking understanding for forgiveness. He traces a practical weakness in British policy to alternating admiration and hostility, reinforced by travel impressions rather than sustained study of German intellectual life. His distinctive concern is that German ideas already circulate within Britain and among its allies: refusing to study them does not prevent their influence, but makes it harder to judge. The essay connects this problem to concrete institutional remedies—university training for specialists and controlled scholarly access to current German publications. It offers a pointed account of why foreign knowledge requires interpreters able to notice developments beyond a government’s immediate wartime needs.

A machine may remain physically sound long after it ceases to earn its owner anything. In this reply to Professor Pigou, Hayek uses that gap to challenge a definition of capital maintenance based on replacing wear and tear while excluding obsolescence. Three investments with identical physical lifetimes but sharply different commercial prospects show why depreciation allowances must depend on expectations, not merely on durable equipment. The distinction matters for taxation as well as accounting: treating foreseeable replacement costs as disposable income would, Hayek argues, penalise industries undergoing rapid technological change. His concise reply separates provision for anticipated losses from saving after unforeseen losses, and asks when a familiar accounting convention serves—or defeats—its practical purpose of preserving future earning capacity.

Admiration does not erase disagreement in Hayek’s 1941 review of Ludwig von Mises’s Nationalökonomie. He welcomes its integration of economic theory, social cooperation, and liberal policy, yet questions its treatment of interest and the intellectual isolation that limits its engagement with contemporary economics. His strongest allegiance concerns method: Mises’s account of human action, Hayek argues, offers a more persuasive foundation for social inquiry than prevailing attempts to borrow methods from the natural sciences. This short review lets readers locate both the shared ground and the friction between two economists often grouped together. It also shows what Hayek values in a systematic treatise: not merely consistency, but the capacity to connect technical arguments with questions of social cooperation and policy.

Understanding Nazi Germany’s appeal need not mean excusing it. In this 1941 joint review, republished in 1997, Hayek welcomes two contrasting corrections to wartime perceptions: Paul Einzig’s exposure of Germany’s promised European order and C. W. Guillebaud’s account of social policies that helped secure German workers’ support. His sharper objection concerns what the reviewers’ subjects share: an apparent willingness to approve Nazi methods while condemning their purposes. Hayek asks whether comprehensive planning itself demands coercion, imposed hierarchies and leaders ruthless enough to enforce them. This brief review lets readers encounter that question in a concrete dispute over how to describe an enemy accurately—and how to judge seemingly desirable policies by the power required to carry them out.

Austria's long transformation from the Ottomans' frontier antagonist into their guarantor, the price of holding Russia back from Constantinople, frames this account of how Vienna met the birth of the Greek kingdom. Engel-Janosi weighs Metternich's reluctance, who saw in the war of independence only a rebellion, against King Ludwig of Bavaria's dynastic investment in his son Otto, and gives Prokesch-Osten, Austria's envoy in Athens, the central role: a conservative trying to shore up an independent Greek monarchy amid the rivalry of Britain, France, Russia, and Bavaria. Through the Armansperg and Rudhart ministries, the constitutional revolution of 1843, and the duel of Maurokordatos and Kolettis, the project decays. Austrian passivity, great-power intrigue, Greek factionalism, and Otto's weakness, he concludes, made an independent conservative Greece untenable.

Staaten hat noch niemand geschaffen; sie schaffen sich selbst.

English translation: “No one has ever created states; they create themselves.”

Scientific expertise can explain general laws—but can it supply the changing, local knowledge needed to direct an economy? In this 1941 article, republished here in 1997, Friedrich August von Hayek addresses scientists and engineers drawn to centralized planning. He contrasts their ideal of deliberate construction with the coordination achieved through competitive prices, then asks what happens to intellectual freedom when one authority controls the resources needed to pursue competing purposes. His contention is that comprehensive planning concentrates power over ends, not merely economic means. The article offers a compact encounter with the connection between Hayek’s account of dispersed knowledge and his defence of liberty, while distinguishing policies that sustain competition or supplement its results from those that replace it with a single plan.

Whoever controls the means must decide which ends they are to serve.

Benevolent intentions do not settle whether centralized planning can sustain scientific discovery or improve living standards. In this joint review, first published in 1941 and reprinted here in 1997, F. A. Hayek pairs Michael Polanyi’s defence of intellectual and economic freedom with Colin Clark’s reconstruction of Soviet economic performance. Hayek values Polanyi’s challenge to scientists who advocate directing research from above: an overview of a system may lack the specialized knowledge needed to guide its activities. Clark’s figures put enthusiasm for the Russian experiment to a different test, tracing food consumption, housing and output while registering later improvements as well as earlier deterioration. The review offers a compact encounter between Hayek’s institutional objections to planning and his assessment of evidence about what planning delivered.

Admiration need not come with a compulsory reservation: Felix Kaufmann defends Sidney Hook’s enthusiastic portrait of Dewey against the demand that it include criticism. His own objection is more pointed. By painting traditional philosophy too darkly, Hook risks encouraging readers to pursue Dewey while abandoning other philosophers. This brief review draws a useful distinction between wholehearted assent to a thinker and fairness to the intellectual alternatives. Kaufmann’s praise for Hook’s clarity and organization makes his warning sharper: an effective introduction can open one path of inquiry while closing others.

If the author feels like simply saying yes, why should he say "yes, but"?

An economy’s complexity seems to call for comprehensive direction; Hayek argues that it makes such direction impracticable. In this 1941 article, reprinted in 1997, he shifts attention from the planner’s objectives to the changing, local knowledge needed to use scarce resources well. A shortage of tin makes the problem concrete: how can users decide what to conserve, replace or recover without knowing why supplies have tightened? Hayek’s answer is that competitive prices coordinate adjustments without assembling everyone’s knowledge in one place. His argument depends on genuine competition, not simply the existence of markets, and his acceptance of wartime planning qualifies rather than abandons it. The article offers a compact account of why economic coordination involves discovering possibilities, not merely executing a known design.