The archive.

A property right, for Rueff, is a 'container of value' distinct from the thing it holds: its volume equals the value of its contents, and it may be filled true or left false. From this reinterpretation of Article 544 of the Civil Code he builds an entire economics of true and false rights—price controls, deficit finance, and the discounting of unbacked claims all manufacture rights that cannot be exercised, and such false rights are the real engine of inflation and disorder. Conceived as a monetary dynamics extending his 1927 Théorie des phénomènes monétaires into the problem of governing societies, the work defends legal-economic institutions as the 'technique of freedom,' warning that once the State injects false rights the road runs toward rationing, command, and the loss of human dignity.

Le droit, c'est la coque qui enveloppe le fruit.

English translation: “Law is the shell that envelops the fruit.”

Can reduced consumption impoverish society when it finances future production? In this 1945 article, Frank Albert Fetter tests Lauderdale’s oversaving theory against the distinction between present expenditure and accumulated productive wealth. His criticism turns on what Lauderdale’s account leaves out: future yields from investment, the gradual decline in returns to additional capital, and the tax liabilities extinguished by public debt repayment. Fetter also gives the dispute a political edge, interpreting Lauderdale’s attack on saving as an argument against Britain’s sinking fund and as protective of creditors facing lower reinvestment yields. The result is a pointed encounter between economic reasoning and fiscal interests, showing why temporary disruption, reduced consumption, and permanent loss of wealth cannot simply be treated as equivalent.

Where should a student of economics begin—thrown at once into the tangle of modern theory, or led through the history of the science's own errors? This guide answers plainly: the aim of study is the capacity to judge practical policy on a theoretically grounded understanding, and the surest path runs through the original works of Turgot, Smith, Ricardo, Menger, and Walras before any textbook. Amonn maps the terrain to be mastered—general value and price theory, the factor incomes of wage, interest, and rent, money and the quantity theory, comparative costs, business cycles, and Malthusian population theory—always separating theoretical questions from the political goal-setting that lies beyond science. A closing mathematical appendix reduces supply, demand, and equilibrium price to linear functions worked out by hand.

Das Primäre in einer Wissenschaft sind ihre Probleme.

English translation: “What is primary in a science are its problems.”

Gunnar Myrdal's 1933 essay on monetary equilibrium deserves, Shackle argues, a recognition equal to anything in interwar economics, and he reconstructs it to show why. Myrdal's achievement was to reset Wicksell's problem in time: the natural rate cannot be the observable yield on existing capital, since that yield, once the stream of expected net receipts is discounted at the current interest rate, is tautologically tied to it. The live variable is instead the gap between a projected plant's capital value and its construction cost, a valuation formed before building and therefore a matter of expectations. Equilibrium is recast as compatibility among plans, read alongside Hayek: not balanced aggregates but a state in which realized events force no one to remake their anticipations. Even aggregate equality of investment and 'waiting', Shackle shows, can conceal offsetting individual errors.

Monetary equilibrium in this meaning is a means of classifying the set, considered as a whole, of systems of expectations which are entertained, one system by each individual, at some one point of time.

Falling asleep, becoming absorbed in a play, and adopting a scientist’s detached standpoint change not just what we attend to, but what counts as real. In this essay, Schütz recasts William James’s multiple realities as “finite provinces of meaning”: distinct ways of experiencing, rather than separate worlds. His central tension is that everyday life remains paramount even when imagination, dreams, or theory suspend its demands. Bodily action, resistant objects, and communication with others give practical reality its special weight. This perspective sharpens a difficulty for social science: how can detached theoretical models account for people whose actions are lived, purposeful, and shared? Readers can discover both what abstraction makes intelligible and what it leaves behind when it departs from the actor’s standpoint.

"Planning," in the mouths of its advocates, almost always means socialism, Russian socialization or German Zwangswirtschaft, yet Keynes, Beveridge, and Hansen promised a third road that could plan for freedom without embracing either. Delivered to the American Academy of Political and Social Science in 1945, this address answers that the supposed third way is only interventionism, the old Bismarckian doctrine of Schmoller and Wagner in new dress. Mises argues that isolated coercive commands, minimum wages, easy money, restricted profits, disrupt the integrated market and defeat their own authors' purposes; depression follows credit expansion, and enduring joblessness follows wage rates propped above market levels. Profit and loss, not planners, are how consumers govern production. Between totalitarian control and liberty, he concludes, there is no durable middle ground.

The market and its inescapable law are supreme.

A gain in British imports from Belgium need not mean a gain in world trade. That distinction anchors Richard Schüller’s reply to Professor Morgan on postwar British trade policy: exchange controls, he argues, may facilitate individual transactions while restricting trade overall. His alternative rests on a pointed reversal—Britain’s large import surplus is not merely a payments problem but a source of bargaining power. This brief rejoinder clarifies what Schüller means by negotiated trade expansion, including reciprocal free trade without a common external tariff. Its interest lies in the practical boundary he draws between accepting controls during the transition from war and making them permanent, and in his willingness to consider quotas alongside freer trade rather than offer an unqualified laissez-faire prescription.

Nationalism need not seek conquest to obstruct international cooperation. This distinction sharpens Hayek’s 1945 review of E. H. Carr’s Nationalism and After, reprinted here with editorial notes in 1997. Hayek welcomes Carr’s growing recognition of the dangers of centralized authority, but questions whether his proposals for regional agreements and overlapping international organizations justify confidence in nationalism’s decline. Beneath their disagreement lies a question about coordination: must effective cooperation have a directing centre? Hayek finds Carr insufficiently attentive to the possibilities of decentralized economic order. The review offers a compact encounter between two accounts of postwar integration, culminating in Hayek’s warning that established Western European states might frustrate cooperation through an obstructionist nationalism allied with socialism.

Remembered chiefly as a moralist and forerunner of socialism, Simonde de Sismondi had his strictly theoretical economics undervalued for a century—an imbalance this first volume, offered as a belated centenary tribute, sets out to correct. Amonn reconstructs the 1803 De la richesse commerciale, in which capital governs production understood as a process of turnover, and translates key passages with commentary. He follows Sismondi's distinction of necessary from surplus wages, his national economic balance set against the mercantilist trade balance, his treatment of money as sterile wealth and credit as merely immaterial capital, and his consumer-centered case for free trade against tariffs, guilds, apprenticeship laws, and privileged companies. Throughout, he marks where Sismondi's labor-based reduction of land and capital anticipates the socialist value theories their author himself declined to draw.

«Die Regierung kann also» – so schließt Sismondi – «niemals in die Irre gehen, wenn sie in allen Fällen in Sachen der Handelsgesetzgebung nach dem wohlverstandenen Interesse des Konsumenten verfährt.»

English translation: “The government," Sismondi concludes, "can therefore never go astray if in all matters of commercial legislation it acts in accordance with the well-understood interest of the consumer.”

Rising output need not mean rising welfare: displaced workers may lose purchasing power just as mechanization expands productive capacity. In this 1945 essay, Alfred Amonn makes Sismondi’s attention to such disruptions central to a reassessment of his economic thought. He separates theoretical achievement from policy allegiance, challenging both the dismissal of the early liberal work as derivative of Adam Smith and the reduction of the later interventionist work to humanitarian protest. Amonn finds continuity in Sismondi’s analysis of capital, income, and consumption, while acknowledging weaknesses in his deductions. The distinctive issue is not merely whether an economy eventually reaches equilibrium, but what happens to employment and livelihoods along the way—a distinction through which Amonn connects Sismondi’s work to modern theories of crises and employment.

A remedy for one industry may become a different proposition when applied across an economy. This tension gives Hayek’s review of Frank D. Graham’s Social Goals and Economic Institutions its critical edge. Welcoming Graham’s renewed attention to the purposes of economic activity, Hayek asks how proposed institutions would affect freedom over time. State ownership might address an immediate monopoly problem while helping monopoly perpetuate itself; general rules might limit deliberate control while making individual efforts more effective. His sympathy for Graham’s aims thus coexists with resistance to some of his remedies. The review offers a compact example of Hayek’s institutional reasoning—and of his insistence that practical economic judgment needs theoretical discipline, even though technical competence alone cannot supply wisdom.

Social inquiry assumes that people understand one another’s actions—but what makes such understanding possible? In this essay, first published in 1945 and reprinted here in 1967, Alfred Schütz approaches Husserl’s phenomenology with that foundational concern in view. A perceived chair, a blossoming tree, and a learned theorem make technical distinctions concrete: experience includes unseen possibilities, remembered appearances, and knowledge whose original acquisition no longer needs to be repeated. Schütz explains why suspending judgments about the world’s existence is not denying the world, and why investigating essences need not invoke mystical intuition. His account gives social scientists a precise boundary as well as a resource: phenomenology does not replace empirical research, but examines the structures of consciousness and meaning that research takes for granted.