The archive.

Disputes over capital punishment, taxation and political representation often concern not just conclusions but the standards of justice themselves. In this brief review of Ray Lepley’s Verifiability of Value, Felix Kaufmann asks what such disagreement means for the possibility of testing value judgments. He credits Lepley with a strong defense of the view that values can be tested much like facts, yet rejects its central premise: for Kaufmann, value judgments assess the correctness of valuations under presupposed standards rather than assert facts in the strict sense. The review offers a compact encounter between two approaches to verification, showing why a favorable assessment of an argument need not entail agreement about the logical character of what it seeks to establish.

Agreement with democratic ideals is not yet a demonstration of their rational validity. This distinction gives Felix Kaufmann’s review of Arthur E. Murphy’s The Uses of Reason its critical focus. Kaufmann welcomes Murphy’s defense of moral knowledge without theological or metaphysical foundations, but asks whether appeals to justice as a harmony of enlightened interests can withstand the charge that they merely disguise group preferences. His reservation concerns not the ideals themselves but the missing logical analysis of value judgments needed to defend them. The review offers a compact encounter between sympathy for Murphy’s democratic purpose and insistence on argumentative rigor: readers can see precisely where Kaufmann thinks a reasonable moral outlook still owes its skeptical opponents an answer.

Does distinguishing social from physical causation require different ways of testing causal claims, or merely different subjects of inquiry? This question sharpens Felix Kaufmann’s review of R. M. MacIver’s Social Causation. Kaufmann welcomes MacIver’s rejection of explanations that make climate, economic production, or heredity the single decisive cause, and his insistence on comparing situations before identifying what produced a change. Yet he questions whether MacIver’s classification of causal strata establishes a genuine methodological distinction. The review offers a compact encounter between sociological explanation and the philosophy of scientific testing: motives can explain action without being known infallibly, causal attribution cannot by itself establish responsibility, and differences in subject matter do not settle how claims should be verified or falsified.

A plea for peace becomes grounds for suspecting an economist’s financial motives: this episode anchors Ludwig von Mises’s review of S. Leon Levy’s biography of Nassau W. Senior. Mises praises Levy’s portrait of the liberal publicist while rejecting the title’s elevation of Senior into a prophet of capitalism. His sharper concern is the reception of Senior’s proposed arbitration of the Oregon boundary dispute, when even Macaulay questioned his impartiality rather than answering his arguments. Mises finds here a failure of reasoned debate within liberal Britain itself. This brief review reveals his standards for judging an intellectual predecessor: theoretical originality matters, but so does the independence to oppose national passions without being dismissed as cynical.

Richard von Strigl conducted much of his teaching and research in the time left over from his work at Vienna’s Unemployment Insurance Board. In this brief obituary, Hayek places that constrained academic career beside an unusually extensive influence on younger economists. He remembers Strigl as a link to Böhm-Bawerk’s seminar and as a teacher on whom hopes for the Austrian School’s survival in Vienna had rested. Testimony from Strigl’s pupil J. Steindl adds a distinct perspective: liberal, humane teaching offered an alternative to the nationalism of Austrian academic life. The result is a personal account of intellectual continuity sustained through teaching and friendship, with Hayek’s assessments of Strigl’s books set against the limited public recognition their author received.

Economics cannot become exact merely by borrowing the vocabulary of mathematics; it must first clarify what utility, strategy, coalition and stability mean. From that conviction von Neumann and Morgenstern rebuild economic behavior as interdependent choice, where each participant maximizes an outcome he does not control—so games, not single-agent calculation, become the governing model. Read here in the German translation of the 1944 Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, the argument runs from an axiomatic numerical utility through the minimax theorem for two-person zero-sum games, where rational play may demand mixed strategies and probability becomes part of optimal design rather than uncertainty. Extending to n-person games, they replace the single optimal outcome with stable sets of imputations—standards of behavior that resist internal domination—and turn coalitions, bargaining and market organization into formal objects against the Lausanne equilibrium tradition.

Man kann nicht exakte Methoden verwenden, solange keine Klarheit in den Begriffen und Fragen besteht, auf die sie angewendet werden sollen.

English translation: “One cannot employ exact methods so long as there is no clarity concerning the concepts and questions to which they are to be applied.”

Knowing a group’s customs is not the same as knowing how to act among its members. In this essay, republished here in 1964, Alfred Schütz examines the adult newcomer whose inherited expectations no longer provide reliable guidance. The immigrant is his principal example, but his concern is the practical work of entering any unfamiliar social world. Insiders rely on shared recipes for conduct; the stranger must investigate whether those recipes will work from a position they do not necessarily anticipate. Schütz’s distinction between understanding a language and expressing oneself through its social nuances makes this difficulty concrete. His analysis also reframes apparent disloyalty: what members regard as reluctance to accept their ways may be the newcomer’s inability to take those ways for granted.

Three problems—development, individuality, and success—organize this genealogy of how history became the medium in which German thought grasped culture, politics, and human meaning. Tracing a line from Herder's Volksgeist through Humboldt, Goethe, Niebuhr, and the Romantic school to Hegel, Ranke, Marx, and Schopenhauer, Engel-Janosi shows historicism forming by refusing the Enlightenment's universal progress: each epoch, people, and life-form becomes an individual with its own inward justification. The culmination is Jacob Burckhardt, who abandons Hegelian purpose and moral progress for constants, types, and recurring forms, and who holds that political power is in itself evil even as culture depends upon it. Historicism thereby reaches its height as a disciplined art of memory—already shadowed by Nietzsche's counter-demand for an art of forgetting.

Ich aber behaupte, jede Epoche ist unmittelbar zu Gott.

English translation: “But I maintain: every epoch is immediate to God.”

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.

Can policies that sustain spending also preserve the incentives to produce? In this 1945 review of six Oxford studies on full employment, Ludwig M. Lachmann praises the theoretical contributions of Balogh and Kalecki while testing their policy proposals against profitability, international trade, and political bargaining. His sharpest objection concerns plans to hold prices steady while wages rise: redistributing income may strengthen demand, he argues, yet undermine supply if profits disappear. He also examines the tension between independent national employment policies and an integrated world economy. The review offers a compact encounter with Lachmann’s critical method: appreciation of analytical ingenuity coupled with concrete questions about tax exemptions, producers’ incomes, and the political interests concealed by appeals to “social priorities.”

For in the absence of profit no amount of "effective demand" will call forth effective supply.

Criticism of perfect competition is not yet a programme for economic policy. That distinction drives Ludwig Lachmann’s brief 1945 review of the first volume of Walter Adolf Jöhr’s Theoretische Grundlagen der Wirtschaftspolitik. Jöhr identifies monopoly, frictions, weakened profit motivation and power as obstacles to the theoretical market model; Lachmann asks what would protect economic freedom and competition under those conditions. His objection is precise: rejecting laissez faire leaves the constructive task unresolved. Yet his verdict is not simply dismissive. He welcomes Jöhr’s movement from advocacy of a corporative economy towards appreciation of competitive markets. The review offers a compact example of Lachmann separating recognition of a market’s imperfections from an account of how policy should address them.

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.