The archive.

Can labour explain capital formation without treating saving as its original cause? In this critical essay, Alfred Amonn examines Alexander Kokkalis’s attempt to rebuild economic theory around human productive powers. Kokkalis locates productive advance in invention, organization, and education rather than abstention from consumption; even the maintenance of workers becomes part of production, not merely its endpoint. Amonn takes these connections seriously while testing the distinctions that sustain them: between natural conditions and controllable means, and between directive intellectual labour and executive bodily labour. The essay’s interest lies in this combination of sympathetic reconstruction and conceptual scrutiny. It allows readers to see how redefining labour changes the explanation of capital, income, and wages—and where that explanation depends on contestable premises.

An automated rolling mill can raise output without spreading prosperity. In this 1958 article, Hans Bayer examines that gap through Austria’s uneven adoption of automation, from VÖEST’s industrial installations to the difficulties facing smaller firms short of capital and secure markets. His central distinction is between profitability for an enterprise and welfare for the economy: lower costs need not produce lower prices, and displaced workers need not find new jobs. Bayer treats credit coordination, retraining, shorter working hours, and equal educational opportunities as conditions for sharing technical gains, not incidental remedies. The article offers a concrete encounter with an economist who welcomes industrial modernization while asking how its growing productive power can serve personal development rather than strengthen economic concentration.

What should a social academy offer working adults beyond skills for economic competition? In this 1958 article, Hans Bayer argues that vocational learning must cultivate independent judgment and social responsibility, not merely occupational competence. His distinctive concern is the connection between personal formation and democratic counterpower: unions and cooperatives need educated members, not just capable leaders, if they are to resist concentrated economic power and commercial manipulation. Bayer makes this educational ideal concrete through unequal access to further study, neglected working-class talent, and the possibilities of leisure beyond consumption. The article lets readers examine both the institutional promise of adult education and the demanding ethical conception of Bildung on which Bayer bases it—a conception that refuses to count knowledge or prestigious schooling alone as genuine education.

Beryllium production expanded even as its price fell: this apparent paradox gives Richard Kerschagl’s 1958 survey its economic focus. A metal valued in aircraft, nuclear technology, and copper alloys was acquiring new sources of supply, notably in India and the Belgian Congo. Yet Kerschagl refuses to equate rising reported tonnage with increased extraction alone: better statistical coverage and improved metal recovery complicate the figures. His account distinguishes geographically dispersed mining from concentrated American and British processing, and connects cheaper supplies with a wider range of economically viable uses. Readers can discover both the changing supply geography of a strategic metal and the care required to interpret production statistics whose units, coverage, and relationship to usable metal vary.

The decline of classical liberalism is, in Mises's telling, the one fact that renders modern history intelligible, the return of doctrines that pit class against class, nation against nation, and race against race in place of the market's harmony of rightly understood interests. Originally a reply to a 1957 questionnaire, this compact polemic defines capitalism not as rule by big business but as consumer sovereignty and mass production for the common man, and defends higher output as the moral condition of lower infant mortality and vanishing famine. There is no stable third way, he maintains: each interference with prices, wages, or profits distorts coordination and breeds the next, so reformism slides toward gradual socialization. Sound money, he adds, is the constitutional barrier against escape through inflation.

Interventionism cannot be considered a lasting system of society's economic organization. It is a method of realizing socialism by installment.

A bounded growth curve can be attractive for forecasting yet awkward to estimate from observations taken at regular intervals. In this short 1958 article, Gerhard Tintner offers a precise workaround: taking reciprocals turns the logistic function into a linear relation between successive observations. Unlike an earlier method based on differential equations, his procedure avoids approximating growth rates from potentially noisy data. Swedish population figures from 1850 to 1950 provide the worked example, leading to an estimated population ceiling and a forecast for 1960. The article’s interest lies in this economical change of perspective: readers can see how a nonlinear growth model becomes tractable by matching its mathematical representation to discrete measurements, while distinguishing that computational simplification from evidence of forecast reliability.

'Equilibrium,' in Machlup's hands, is a word doing too many jobs at once: a literal accounting balance, a methodological device for isolating cause, a description of durable historical states, and a smuggled value judgment. The confusion, he argues, comes from sliding among these senses unawares. To label a situation observed in the world an equilibrium commits what he calls the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, since the same facts fit rival models as equilibrium or disequilibrium; to build full employment or price stability into the definition is disguised politics. He carries the critique into international trade theory, praising Joan Robinson's relativism while faulting Nurkse, Ellsworth, and Kindleberger for defining the equilibrium exchange rate through the very policies they happen to favor.

Equilibrium is not a Good Thing, and disequilibrium is not a Bad Thing.

Once policy accepts that no major group's money wages can ever fall, inflation stops being an accident and becomes the standing instrument of adjustment. Hayek's target is a practical conviction he attributes to the Keynesian revolution: because economic development constantly alters the wage relations needed among regions, trades, and skills, and because no nominal cut is permitted, every downward relative adjustment must be engineered by raising other wages instead, so the aggregate level climbs faster than real wages, which is inflation. And inflation stimulates only while it surprises; once expected, costs rise in advance, so the dose must accelerate to keep working. His conclusion reverses the accommodationist premise: the stream of money expenditure must be the fixed datum to which wages adapt, not the passive supply that ratifies whatever unions demand.

A society which accepts this is bound for a continuous process of inflation.

A smaller firm may be able to buy automated machinery yet lack the dependable orders needed to use it profitably. In this 1958 article, Hans Bayer makes that gap central to the question of whether medium-sized enterprises can automate without losing their independence. Flexible production lines, modular equipment, and shared computing facilities offer practical possibilities; dependence on large customers introduces new vulnerabilities. Bayer approaches automation as a problem of economic organization, arguing that coordinated credit, specialization, and public safeguards must accompany technical change. His analysis exposes a difficult bargain: preserving independent firms may require arrangements that limit their freedom of action. Readers encounter a concrete account of why access to machinery alone cannot secure either enterprise autonomy or broadly shared productivity gains.

Joan Robinson's The Accumulation of Capital drew admiration for its rigour, but Lachmann reads its 'Generalisation of the General Theory' as neither Keynesian nor Marxist so much as a Ricardian revival—distribution, accumulation, and technique handled through class categories rather than marginal choice. His critique fastens on what he calls the integrability condition: Robinson must treat the capital stock as the summed total of past net investment, and her 'golden age' is the moving-equilibrium device that keeps that stock measurable under change. But technical progress defeats it. Innovation brings failed experiments, fossilized equipment, and capital gains and losses the model cannot house. Behind the technical objection lies an epistemological one: Robinson's stylized workers, rentiers, and entrepreneurs suppress the divergent judgments and market process through which industrial progress actually occurs.

Homogeneity and progress are at bottom incompatible with each other.

Neither Rome's obedient arm nor a secularizing enemy: the Habsburg monarchy appears in this first volume as a great Catholic power whose dynastic and geopolitical interests repeatedly limited its usefulness to the papacy. Built largely from previously unused diplomatic correspondence out of Vienna and Paris, Engel-Janosi's study runs from the conclave of 1846 through the pontificates of Pius IX and Leo XIII to 1903, tracing the papacy's passage from reformist hope to defensive sovereignty across the revolutions of 1848, the flight to Gaeta, the 1855 Concordat, papal infallibility, and the fall of Rome in 1870. The Italian question sharpens every tension, for temporal power was Rome's own condition of freedom—yet Vienna, defeated and isolated, could not indefinitely subordinate raison d'état to papal restoration. What emerges is a study of mutual dependence in which each side wanted from the other what the other could not give.

William B. Lloyd, Jr. crossed to Switzerland after the Second World War to answer a question historians of great powers seldom pose: how so small and cantankerous a nation, divided in speech and faith, had held itself together and at peace while Europe tore itself apart. Rappard's short preface to Lloyd's book honors the American for mining the arid minutes of the old Diet for an answer of real use. The secret, on Lloyd's telling, lay not in institutions but in temper—conciliation and mediation pursued with patience, a mutual defense accepted only with reluctance, and a neutrality upheld in the wider service of peace. In a few pages Rappard folds another man's inquiry back into the study of Swiss unity that had absorbed his own career.

Here in the heart of the Old World was Switzerland which, throughout the centuries, had succeeded in maintaining within her own narrow borders the peace that her infinitely more powerful neighbors had constantly striven for in vain.