The archive.

Bureaucracy is a symptom, not the underlying evil: this distinction anchors Frank Albert Fetter’s 1945 review of Ludwig von Mises’s book. Fetter locates its real target in the transfer of decisions about prices and production from private enterprise to government. His distinctive contribution is to connect that argument to an older dispute over price theory, presenting Austrian subjective valuation as a basis for consumer sovereignty and political liberalism. Yet his endorsement has limits: he questions whether Mises sufficiently distinguishes bureaucratic administration from the system it serves, and whether capitalism deserves so much credit for scientific and cultural progress. This brief review shows where a sympathetic defender of free enterprise qualifies Mises’s claims—and why Fetter does not read the book as a demand for unrestricted laissez-faire.

India in 1940, England in 1830–48, and Germany in 1865–70 form one of the historical “equations” Gerhard Tintner examines in this brief review of Benoy Kumar Sarkar’s book. Tintner clarifies that the title promises no mathematical economics: Sarkar instead compares countries at supposedly equivalent stages of economic development. The review’s interest lies in Tintner’s discriminating judgement of that approach. He credits Sarkar with perceptive observations and wide multilingual reading, while qualifying the depth of his scholarship and finding his treatment of post-war problems unilluminating and journalistic. This compact assessment separates the appeal of comparative economic history from the book’s less convincing promise of guidance for reconstruction.

Calling the economy a machine does not, for Gerhard Tintner, make economics an exact science. In this brief, sharply dismissive review of Jerome Levy’s book, he questions the unconventional terminology and assumed linear relationships behind Levy’s model. He also asks what social philosophy supports its prescriptions for “just” wages and profits, finding little explicit justification. The interest lies in the grounds of Tintner’s rejection: mathematical form and appeals to justice are not substitutes for defensible economic concepts and stated policy principles. His closing astonishment that the book found a publisher during a paper shortage gives the methodological objections a distinctly caustic edge.

When observed variables contain measurement error, strong correlations alone cannot establish how many independent relationships underlie them. Gerhard Tintner’s 1945 note links that question to a second: how should those relationships be estimated once their number is determined? His distinctive move is to make one generalized eigenvalue problem serve both purposes, using an independently estimated disturbance covariance matrix to separate systematic dependence from noise. The emphasis is structural estimation rather than prediction: the aim is to recover coefficients of underlying relations, not simply improve a forecast. Readers can follow how error-weighted least squares leads back to the roots used in rank testing—and see why the resulting unity depends on assumptions about disturbance estimation and large samples.

Why does one price movement leave expectations unchanged while another forces people to rethink the future? In this article, Ludwig Lachmann distinguishes measuring the responsiveness of expectations from explaining it. Against accounts based on fixed psychological sensitivity or a single expected price, he examines the range of outcomes people consider plausible. A movement near its boundary may encourage expectations of reversal; a movement beyond it may undermine the very assumptions on which a forecast rests. His distinctive claim is that expectations arise through interpretation: people diagnose the forces at work before predicting their effects. The article shows why identical numerical changes can carry different economic meanings—and why a narrow range of expectations can both stabilise a market and make its eventual disruption more abrupt.

The formation of expectations is always incidental to the diagnosis of the situation in which we find ourselves; no prognosis without diagnosis.

How could the Allies prevent renewed German aggression without making foreign domination the rallying point for another nationalism? In this 1945 essay, reprinted in 2013, Hayek proposes progressively autonomous German states, compulsory free trade, and intellectual reconstruction led by independent scholars rather than Allied propagandists. His distinctive concern is that a settlement must survive after the victors cease enforcing it. Yet his proposals expose a tension between liberal ends and coercive means: he endorses severe retribution and externally imposed economic rules while rejecting an imposed political creed. Linking regional independence and commercial interdependence to the recovery of truthful historical inquiry, the essay lets readers examine both the practical architecture and the uneasy limits of Hayek’s postwar liberalism.

An Allied decision could separate Austria from Germany—but what would make that independence last? In this April 1945 article, reprinted here as an addendum, Friedrich August von Hayek argues that sovereignty needs an economic foundation. He interprets the earlier appeal of Anschluss chiefly as a calculation by a poor country seeking its neighbour’s prosperity, rather than as nationalist sentiment. His striking alternative is an autonomous, internationally protected Vienna: a free-trade district whose commercial revival need not restore its former political dominance. Read alongside his warning that punitive reparations could drive Austria back towards Germany, this proposal exposes a concrete tension in postwar reconstruction: how to secure political separation without imposing economic isolation.

A small revision in expectations can provoke a large shift from money into speculative assets. In this 1945 article, G. L. S. Shackle asks how that disproportion arises when investors confront imagined possibilities rather than a certain forecast. His distinctive vocabulary—“potential surprise,” “focus gain,” and “focus loss”—connects the outcomes that capture an investor’s attention with the gains and losses that investor is willing to contemplate. Geometrical models show how purchases can raise prices and seemingly confirm the optimism that prompted them. Development land provides a revealing test: each owner may plausibly anticipate a profitable sale even when all those hopes cannot be fulfilled together. The article offers a precise way to examine how individually credible possibilities can sustain collectively incompatible valuations, while exposing the assumptions behind its own account of portfolio choice.

Six and a half centuries of Swiss survival amount, in Rappard's reading, to one sustained experiment in mutual defense—and thus to a rehearsal of the problem the League of Nations and the United Nations inherited: how sovereign units, unequal in wealth and divided by creed, can shield one another without a common command. Prepared in English at Lionel Curtis's urging as an abridgment of his French Cinq siècles de sécurité collective, the book separates the law of the Swiss alliances—from the 1291 pact of Uri, Schwyz, and Unterwalden through the Covenant of Stans and the Defensional of Wyl—from the messier facts of Morat, the Musso War, and the Catholic secession of 1680. Federalism, he concludes, reconciles unity with diversity, and stands as the alternative to anarchy.

It might delight the patriot to believe, but it would discredit the historian to assert, that the present Swiss federal state was born of the love of the Swiss cantons for each other.

Older social philosophies held human interests to be naturally antagonistic, and so justified coercion, moral self-denial, and submission to inequality as the price of order. Against them Mises reconstructs the utilitarian and classical case that peaceful cooperation, not sacrifice, is what the division of labor makes possible. Delivered as a 1945 conference paper, the essay moves from Ricardo's law of association—proof that specialization benefits even the unequal—to what he names the Montaigne fallacy, the zero-sum belief that one man's gain must be another's loss. He traces that error through protectionism, exploitation theory, and just-price doctrine, and reframes profit as reward for foresight and the market as a consumers' democracy. Economics is called inhuman, he argues, only because it names the real cost of shielding inefficient producers.

Under capitalism, competition is the peaceful method to assign to every individual that place in society in which he renders the most valuable services to his fellow men.

An economist may explain how a profits tax affects employment without possessing scientific authority to choose society’s ultimate ends. In this 1945 review of E. Ronald Walker’s From Economic Theory to Policy, Joseph A. Schumpeter makes that boundary a defence of economic expertise rather than a concession of its futility. He praises Walker’s combination of theoretical knowledge and governmental experience, but questions his tentative claim to a wider policy authority. Equally pointed is Schumpeter’s distinction between logical schemata and statistical generalizations: a proposition clarifying an implication cannot be tested against reality in the same way as an observed association between prices and interest rates. This compact review offers a precise account of why different kinds of theory require different standards of judgement—and why useful policy advice need not dictate political purposes.

What if the pursuit of national unity, rather than a fixed national character, helps explain Germany’s political catastrophe? In this 1945 review of Edmond Vermeil’s Germany’s Three Reichs, reprinted in 2013, Hayek praises a history that holds German humanism and Nazi aggression in the same frame without explaining either away. He develops Vermeil’s doubts about Germany’s national cohesion into his own argument: strong regional identities coexist with a longing for common characteristics that can make unity attractive regardless of its political content. His proposed response is neither permanent partition nor restored centralisation, but regional autonomy linked to a wider Western European community. This short review exposes the connection Hayek draws between imagined national belonging and the institutions through which it might find a less destructive expression.