The archive.

What did an early coin’s stamp certify—weight, metal quality, or the place where it would be accepted? Alfred Amonn makes this concrete dispute a test of how economists and historians explain the origins of money. Defending Kaulla against Herbert A. Cahn’s criticism, he argues that surviving objects cannot establish their institutional meaning without interpretation: a mark on temple property need not mean what a mark on circulating coinage means. Yet practical plausibility is not historical proof, and money need not have emerged everywhere by the same route. The article offers a pointed encounter between documentary evidence and economic reasoning, showing both why conjecture is unavoidable and why an explanation of money’s usefulness cannot substitute for an account of its actual beginnings.

Can civilizations follow recurring patterns without obeying fixed historical laws? Emil Kauder’s 1946 article grounds comparison in the religious and imaginative inheritance he calls “myth”: convictions that connect generations and continue to shape ostensibly secular ideals. Drawing on Vico, he argues that intellectual clarification can exhaust the beliefs that sustain collective action. Yet he refuses to turn analogies into universal sequences: Homer and Dante may perform comparable poetic tasks without their societies repeating the same political history. The article’s central tension lies between this methodological restraint and Kauder’s conviction that civilizations decline as their myths disintegrate. His treatment of freedom and progress lets readers examine what cyclical history can explain—and where claims of historical necessity leave room for creativity, cultural inheritance, and uncertain renewal.

Two rival traditions have worn the name individualism, and Hayek's Twelfth Finlay Lecture, delivered at Dublin in 1945, sets them against each other. The 'true' individualism of Locke, Mandeville, Hume, Ferguson, Smith, and Tocqueville begins from the narrow limits of any single mind's knowledge; the 'false,' Cartesian strain of Rousseau and the Encyclopaedists imagines society as something reason can design whole—and, on Hayek's reading, drifts toward collectivism. Individualism is first a theory of society, not a licence for selfishness, and its cardinal discovery is spontaneous order: the institutions that arise from human action but not human design. Because no authority can know in advance who knows best, coercion must be bounded by general rules that mark out protected spheres rather than steered toward chosen collective ends.

Man in a complex society can have no choice but between adjusting himself to what to him must seem the blind forces of the social process and obeying the orders of a superior.

Orthodox theory said a fall in interest-rates should quicken investment by raising the present value of future returns; businessmen questioned by the Oxford Economists' Research Group flatly denied noticing any such effect. Rather than discard the doctrine, Shackle narrows it. A future receipt must be discounted twice, once for deferment through the pure interest rate and once for doubt, and the two work very differently: interest bites hardest on distant, secure returns, which is why housing and other long-lived, dependable assets remain rate-sensitive. But where invention, fashion, and obsolescence truncate an asset's useful life, a swelling 'marginal rate of risk' absorbs the far future before the pure rate can act, leaving valuations almost unmoved by a one-point change. Entrepreneurs, attending to shifting orders and markets, simply never register interest as the cause of their decisions.

It was until recent years an accepted doctrine that changes of interest-rates powerfully influence the pace at which enterprisers, all taken together, extend or improve their equipment.

Written weeks after Keynes's death, this memoir refuses to separate the theory from the man who made it: a Cambridge and Eton mind, mathematically gifted yet impatient with technique that did not bear on public action. Schumpeter reads the whole career as the slow forging of a single vision, first glimpsed in The Economic Consequences of the Peace, that laissez-faire capitalism had ended in 1914 and that thrift no longer served accumulation. The General Theory supplies that vision its machinery, reducing the economy to three schedules: the consumption function, the marginal efficiency of capital, and liquidity preference. Admiring the elegance yet insisting on the narrowness, Schumpeter accepts Hicks's verdict that this is the economics of depression, and grants Keynes a genuine school rivaling the Physiocrats and Marxists.

It does not make us Keynesians, it makes us better economists.

Empirical critics of the 1940s claimed that interviews and questionnaires had caught firms behaving in ways marginal analysis could not explain; the reply here is that they had misunderstood the theory they meant to refute. Economic theory, Machlup argues, is essentially a theory of adjustment to change, and its variables are the entrepreneur's own expected costs and revenues, not the observer's accounting magnitudes — a driver overtaking a truck responds to speed and distance without computing them. Reports of 'full-cost' pricing dissolve on inspection: average cost may smooth fluctuations over time, discipline a cartel, or hint at rivals' demand elasticity without contradicting marginalism. He is hardest on Richard Lester's wage-employment surveys, whose 'importance' ratings confuse frequency with marginal effect. The theory has not been disproved, he insists, though better empirical work, grounded in theory, is badly needed.

The business man does what he does on the basis of what he thinks, regardless of whether you agree with him or not.

Anti-Prussian sentiment ran high in the monarchy of 1870, yet at the Crown Council of 18 July—Franz Joseph, Andrássy, Beust, Kuhn, and Potocki around the table—Austria-Hungary chose neutrality with only preparatory armament. Engel-Janosi reads that choice not as simple weakness but as the sum of converging constraints. Potocki's federalist ministry, which would have granted the crownlands almost the status of American federal states, had deepened rather than resolved the monarchy's internal paralysis, while the Eastern Question tied any western war to Russia's designs on Constantinople and to unrest in Serbia, Romania, and Egypt. Drawing on ministerial protocols and American diplomatic reports, the essay presents neutrality not as grand design but as the only policy the Dual Monarchy's divided structure could sustain.

Prokesch hatte recht: es war, als seien die Segel eines Schiffes so gesetzt, daß sie gegeneinander wirkten.

English translation: “Prokesch was right: it was as though the sails of a ship had been set so as to work against one another.”

Agreement with a cause need not mean accepting its evidence. In this short review of John R. Baker’s Science and the Planned State, Felix Kaufmann supports scientific independence but challenges Baker’s use of an Oxford-generated list of discoveries to establish the harmful effects of Soviet state control: other factors could explain the comparison. Writing amid debates over atomic research, Kaufmann also shifts the grounds of opposition from scientific productivity to human freedom. His particular concern is the social sciences, where political supervision threatens inquiry into rulers’ own doctrines. The review offers a compact encounter with a critic who separates sympathy from proof—and asks whether the strongest defense of free research rests on the discoveries it produces or the liberty it preserves.

Take a single stretch of history and use it to test what economic analysis can and cannot do: that is Schumpeter's method here, applied to the American 1920s and the collapse that followed. He rejects both the reduction of the decade to monetary quantities and the treatment of it as self-contained, reading its prosperity instead as the American surface of a longer industrial transformation, automobiles, electrical utilities, corporate finance, whose effects were expansive and depressive at once. Prosperity was real but spotty, concealing falling farm and profit tendencies beneath rising output. On the crash he distinguishes why depression was likely from why it turned catastrophic, laying the disaster to speculation in 1927-29, a fragmented banking system prone to epidemics, and a mortgage crisis that turned price declines into panic.

Time series never tell the whole tale and must be supplemented by a detailed historical account of what actually happened in the economic organism.

When civilizations seem to repeat one another’s histories, what makes the resemblance an explanation rather than an analogy? Emil Kauder’s 1946 article tests cyclical interpretations of history against this question, placing Vico—not Spengler—at its conceptual centre. For Kauder, Vico’s distinction between an ideal historical structure and its particular realizations offers a firmer foundation than appeals to civilizational souls or destiny. He values Toynbee’s comparative evidence while questioning whether accumulated parallels can establish historical necessity. Writing in the aftermath of war, he also challenges confidence that human cruelty serves a benevolent providential plan. The article makes visible the philosophical commitments behind accounts of civilizational rise and decline: what acts in history, what recurs, and whether recurrence carries any moral meaning.

Agreement with Hayek’s economics need not entail agreement with his explanation of political change. In this 1946 review of The Road to Serfdom, Joseph A. Schumpeter praises Hayek’s defense of personal liberty while questioning the social foundations of his liberalism. Could an economically workable capitalist reform program win support from voters asked to accept insecurity and delayed rewards? More fundamentally, Schumpeter argues that capitalism itself has empowered constituencies whose demands challenge liberal principles. The departure from individualism is thus not simply a victory of mistaken ideas: it reflects a change in whose preferences carry political weight. This brief review offers a pointed distinction between defending liberty, designing economic policy, and explaining the forces that determine either’s political prospects.

Cheap money has a long pedigree of enemies of interest behind it, Bolshevik, Nazi, and easy-money reformers alike who picture creditors as idle rich and debtors as toiling poor. Mises overturns the picture: in a modern financial society the bondholders, savers, and insurance and social-security claimants harmed by depressed interest and depreciated currency are ordinary people. From the distinction between commodity credit, drawn from real savings, and circulation credit, conjured by banks as fiat money, he builds the familiar sequence, artificially lowered rates, false calculation, malinvestment, boom, and then either runaway inflation toward a 1923-style collapse or panic and mass unemployment. The crisis, he stresses, springs not from ending expansion but from the misdirection cheap money already produced. Interest expresses time preference and cannot be legislated away.

The artificial boom is not prosperity, but the deceptive appearance of good business.