The archive.

'Natural right' has hardened, over centuries of scholastic and modern doctrine, into a supposed stock of immutable norms, and undoing that hardening is the essay's whole aim. Reading Aristotle's difficult page on physei dikaion in the Nicomachean Ethics through the frame of the Politics, Voegelin recovers natural right as a symbol of noetic experience rather than a code. Aristotle's 'nature' is equivocal, physical, divine, human, so that the right by nature is at once universally valid in its divine essence and changeable in its human realization, identical not with eternal legal propositions but with the paradigm of the best constitution. The second section turns to phronesis, the existential virtue through which the divine order of the cosmos comes to its truth in concrete action, with the mature spoudaios, not an abstract rule, as the measure.

Die Wahrheit der Existenz erfüllt sich dort, wo sie konkret wird, das ist im Handeln.

English translation: “The truth of existence fulfills itself where it becomes concrete, that is, in action.”

Few economic subjects breed more confusion than money, and here — in the German translation of Rothbard's 1963 What Has Government Done to Our Money? — that confusion is dismantled by returning to the market. Money is no creature of decree but a commodity risen from barter, the most saleable good gradually accepted by all; gold and silver won the role by being durable, divisible, and independently desired. Paper circulates only by inheriting purchasing power already established in metal. From this Rothbard argues that the size of the money stock is irrelevant to real wealth, that inflation is a hidden tax enriching its first receivers, and that fractional-reserve banking issues many claims to the same specie — fraud dressed as credit. State mints, legal-tender laws, and central banks complete money's long descent into fiat disorder.

Weil Gold ein allgemeines Tauschmittel ist, ist es am marktgängigsten, kann es aufbewahrt werden, um morgen genau wie heute verwendet zu werden, und werden alle Preise in seinen Einheiten ausgedrückt.

English translation: “Because gold is a universal medium of exchange, it is the most marketable of goods; it can be stored so as to be used tomorrow just as today, and all prices are expressed in its units.”

Family ownership can preserve a business while undermining its capacity to act: heirs may inherit equal authority without equal ability, and protecting capital may become an excuse to postpone investment. In this 1963 article, Hans Bayer examines how legal arrangements can sustain medium-sized, entrepreneur-led firms without freezing their development. His focus is not the supposedly ideal legal form but the design of agreements governing succession, authority, and cooperation. Contrasting two jute factories, he shows how divided leadership can obstruct adaptation where unified direction enables it. Bayer’s preference for decisive personal responsibility is tempered by his case for outside expertise and advisory boards. The article offers a concrete way to distinguish continuity of ownership from continuity of entrepreneurial capacity—and to see where contracts can help secure both.

Long read as the skeptic who woke Kant from dogmatic slumber, David Hume reappears here as something else entirely: the most coherent theorist of liberty under law. Hayek strips away the myth of a single Enlightenment, setting French constructivist rationalism against a British-Scottish line running through Mandeville, Smith, Ferguson, and Burke, in which durable institutions grow rather than get invented. Justice, property, and promise-keeping, on Hume's account, precede government and arise from convention among partial, ignorant, and scarcity-pressed beings; law must therefore be general and inflexible, never a case-by-case reckoning of merit or utility. The closing pages set Hume against Rousseau, whose democratic enthusiasm displaced this sober Whig liberalism and fed later doctrines of popular sovereignty.

Er wußte, daß die größten politischen Werte, Frieden, Freiheit und Gerechtigkeit, ihrem Wesen nach negativ sind, eher ein Schutz gegen Unrecht als positive Gegebenheiten.

English translation: “He knew that the greatest political values—peace, liberty, and justice—are by their very nature negative, rather a protection against injustice than positive givens.”

A smooth growth curve says little about the uncertainty surrounding it. In this 1963 article, Gerhard Tintner and Jati K. Sengupta construct a generalized birth-and-death process in which expected income follows a logistic path while income itself can rise, fall, or remain unchanged. Their distinctive economic premise is that the scarcest productive factors constrain output, motivating a probability distribution through the statistics of minimum values. Applied to German per-capita national income for 1851–1939, the model links a proposed long-run ceiling to a tractable estimation procedure. Readers can examine how economic assumptions become probability laws—and how historical data calibrate such a construction without independently proving its assumed ceiling or distribution of fluctuations.

To ask why taxes exist, this textbook contends, is really to ask why the state exists — every tax system is at bottom a theory of the state. Kerschagl's teaching text moves from the history of the tax state through Adam Smith's four canons, tax justice, universality, and the interdependence of prices, wages, and shifting that dissolves the tidy line between direct and indirect taxes, to a claim central to the welfare age: even the fully socialized Soviet economy cannot replace taxation with enterprise profit, leaning instead on a turnover tax that works as a consumption tax. A long comparative part then dissects the fiscal constitutions of the United States, the USSR, Italy, France, both Germanys, Benelux, Scandinavia, England, and Austria, exposing how divergent tax systems threaten EEC and EFTA integration.

Der Wohlfahrtsstaat des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts ist eben ein riesiger Ausgleichsmechanismus, durch den etwa die Hälfte aller originären Einkommen einem Prozeß der Neuverteilung unterzogen wird.

English translation: “The welfare state of the twentieth century is nothing other than a gigantic equalization mechanism, through which roughly half of all originary incomes is subjected to a process of redistribution.”

Are there limits to the use of mathematics in economics? The question, this essay answers, is wrongly posed: the obstacle lies not in the subject but in whether economists understand what mathematics is and formulate their problems well. Morgenstern dismisses the usual objections — psychology, non-quantitative data, expectations, unmeasurable utility — by noting that mathematics is not merely quantitative, that no deep gulf separates a simple addition from an integration. Economics erred not by too much formalism but by shallow model-building, borrowing equilibrium from mechanics and casting agents as solitary maximizers under fixed conditions. Game theory marks the conceptual break, supplying a mathematics fitted to strategic interdependence; expected utility, axiomatized, replaces cumbersome indifference curves. Since natural science once remade mathematics, he expects social science to do the same, leaving no fixed boundary that can honestly be drawn.

Nichts ist leichter, als die eigene Beschränktheit für die der Methode oder des untersuchten Gegenstandes zu halten.

English translation: “Nothing is easier than to mistake one's own limitations for those of the method or of the subject under investigation.”

Can an economically successful community lose the political confidence needed to sustain it? Writing after the breakdown of British accession negotiations in 1963, Hans Bayer distinguishes the European Economic Community’s continuing commercial gains from its growing vulnerability to mistrust. His concern is not simply whether the Six can prosper, but whether their integration connects Europe to the wider world or hardens into an exclusive bloc. Agricultural bargaining and disagreements over planning expose the limits of shared prosperity; cross-border investment and the weakening effectiveness of national monetary policy reveal pressures for further cooperation. Bayer’s distinctive caution is that these economic pressures offer possibilities, not guarantees. This article shows why political commitment remains necessary even when businesses and markets are already crossing the boundaries governments struggle to overcome.

Die gefährlichste Auswirkung im Inneren der EWG ist das schwindende Vertrauen.

English translation: “The most dangerous effect within the EEC is dwindling trust.”

A demonic invention that preserves appearances while destroying realities—so Rueff, reaching for Goethe's Faust, casts inflation, the hidden and unjust tax that rewards debtors and quick-adjusting incomes while ruining savers and fixed claims. Ranging from Poincaré's stabilization to West Germany's 1948 monetary reform, the lectures indict the gold-exchange standard born at Genoa in 1922, which let reserve-currency countries run perpetual deficits and, by duplicating credit, organized the boom that broke in 1929 and the Great Depression that followed. Against national accounting and the modern faith in 'conscious organization,' Rueff defends the gold standard as an enlightened monarch that disciplines through incentives rather than commands, insisting that sound money is the precondition of European unity and of liberty itself.

L'Europe se fera par la monnaie, ou ne se fera pas.

English translation: “Europe will be made through money, or it will not be made at all.”

When an economic model fails, has mathematics reached its limit—or has the economist posed the wrong problem? In this 1963 research memorandum, Oskar Morgenstern defends mathematical economics while challenging the substitution of formal elegance for economic understanding. Drawing on his work with von Neumann, he argues that uncertainty and strategic interaction demand more than techniques borrowed from mechanics: they may require new concepts and new mathematics. His examples make the distinction concrete. Counting equations does not prove that an equilibrium exists; treating agents as isolated maximizers can miss their dependence on one another’s choices. Readers encounter a defence of rigorous reasoning that grants no automatic prestige to symbols or axioms, and insists that historical, experimental, and statistical inquiry remain indispensable.

Money is one side of every exchange in an advanced economy, and whoever controls its supply, quality, or use, Rothbard argues, has taken a major step toward controlling the whole system. The essay pairs Austrian monetary theory with revisionist history. Money arises on the market as a demanded commodity—gold or silver—so that income stays tied to production; the state breaks that discipline through inflation, which Rothbard treats as legalized counterfeiting and hidden taxation, with central banking as the institutional form of modern mercantilism. Five American case studies press the point: the Massachusetts Land Bank of 1740, Nicholas Biddle's national bank, Stephen Colwell's protectionism, and Paul Warburg's promotion of bankers' acceptances reveal inflationism driven not by poor debtors but by merchants, bankers, and manufacturers seeking privilege through state-managed money.

Money is the nerve center of any economy above the most primitive level.

An investment allocation can maximize projected income yet leave productive capacity idle, consumption sacrificed, or investment exposed to greater uncertainty. In this article, Jati K. Sengupta and Gerhard Tintner examine that tension through Dutch long-term planning and India’s Mahalanobis model. Their concern is not simply to calculate an optimum, but to ask which assumptions make it feasible and desirable: whether saving keeps pace with investment, whether production techniques can change, and whether planners value output or consumption. A numerical exercise using Indian Third Five-Year Plan constraints makes the stakes concrete, showing how a preference for lower investment risk can alter the income-maximizing allocation. Readers can discover how seemingly technical choices about coefficients and objectives shape the economic priorities embedded in a development plan.