The archive.

A useful biography can still fail its subject as an economist. In this brief review of D. B. Copland’s two lectures on W. E. Hearn, Hayek welcomes new information about Hearn’s Australian career but finds his economic thought poorly served. Hayek values Hearn’s original observations and lucid expression; he wants them examined in relation to the teaching at Trinity College and their influence on later writers. His objection is pointed: Copland makes Hearn a vehicle for contemporary Australian economists’ views. The review offers a compact glimpse of Hayek’s judgement of Hearn—and of the distinction he draws between recovering a thinker’s contribution and recruiting him for present purposes.

For Gerhard Tintner, reliable confirmation can matter more than striking novelty. His 1936 review of Allen and Bowley’s Family Expenditure praises their use of household budgets to connect demand theory with statistical evidence, while questioning one simplifying assumption: a linear preference scale maintained throughout the investigation. Where that assumption appears to fail, he wants statistical tests, not merely a workable approximation. This brief review offers a concrete view of Tintner’s standards for econometric research: close knowledge of the data, explicit testing of theoretical assumptions, and economic interpretation of numerical results. His praise turns on what the calculations establish about household spending—not on mathematical sophistication alone.

Adopting Western civilization to resist Western imperialism: this paradox anchors Wilhelm Röpke’s interpretation of Turkish reform in his 1936 review of Henry Elisha Allen’s The Turkish Transformation. He values Allen’s attention to religious and spiritual change, while questioning the book’s proportions and handling of evidence. His own intervention challenges the tendency to treat Kemalist Turkey as merely another modern dictatorship. Röpke argues that its nationalism serves internal unity and defensive independence rather than expansion, making modernization a requirement of sovereignty. The review offers a compact encounter with this argument and its tensions: cultural adaptation reaches beyond military technique to law, education, and religion, yet the West being adopted is, in Röpke’s account, filtered through a rationalistic, positivist conception partly mediated by Soviet Russia.

A bibliography can gather elusive material yet still make it difficult to find. In this brief 1936 review, Helene Lieser assesses the Cologne University retail institute’s bibliography for 1883–1933 from the standpoint of scholars and practitioners trying to locate relevant literature. She welcomes its inclusion of trade and company publications unavailable through the book trade, but questions the absence of cross-references. Her praise remains qualified: spot checks establish usefulness, not completeness. The review offers a compact example of bibliographic judgment, distinguishing breadth of coverage from ease of consultation and identifying the practical gain at stake—less time spent preparing to research, more time for the research itself.

Accepting Keynes’s account of persistent unemployment need not mean accepting his explanation of it. In this 1936 discussion of the General Theory, Emil Lederer asks whether consumption habits and liquidity preference can explain a depression marked by idle factories and investment prospects so poor that even zero interest offers no remedy. He shifts attention from psychological dispositions to investment risk, technical change, disrupted markets, and the interdependence of production and demand. His comparison with Marx sharpens a further objection: reforms that appear economically rational may encounter organized resistance from capitalists defending power as well as income. The article offers an appreciative but exacting encounter with Keynes, distinguishing the diagnosis of unemployment from the historical causes of collapse and the political conditions of recovery.

But in both cases it is not the liquidity that is preferred but the investment that is refused.

Mahr reopens the Austrian puzzle of productive interest by asking precisely what the 'time element' contributes to it. Accepting from Jevons and Böhm-Bawerk that capitalistic production is temporally extended and present factor payments oriented toward future revenues, he defends—against Schumpeter—the persistence of an interest rate in a static economy: statics inherits the rate that development established and finds no force to remove it. His sharpest correction targets Böhm-Bawerk's 'average period of production,' whose inclusion of a capital good's whole past history breeds infinite regress and makes an old mine lengthen a present process merely by age. Distinguishing production period from use period, Mahr rebuilds the concept as the technically necessary time embodied in the portion actually consumed, and denies that more capital must always lengthen production or lower returns.

Die Einbeziehung der Nutzungsperiode der Kapitalgüter in die Berechnung der durchschnittlichen Produktionsperiode scheint mir die hauptsächliche Quelle aller Widersprüche und Ungereimtheiten darzustellen, die diesem Begriff bisher anhafteten.

English translation: “The inclusion of the period of use of capital goods in the calculation of the average period of production seems to me to constitute the principal source of all the contradictions and inconsistencies that have hitherto attached to this concept.”

Austria's 1934 constitution, and the authoritarian turn behind it, mark for Voegelin not a sudden rupture but a late episode in a state that never quite became one. Total and authoritarian, he argues, are political symbols forged in struggle rather than scientific concepts, and he assembles their elements—Carl Schmitt's total state, economic Vermachtung, mass activation, the monopoly of propaganda, the education of a people by its elite—before turning to the specifically Austrian problem: an empire of many nations that produced no unified Staatsvolk to will the republic into being. Much of the book is a sustained critique of Kelsen's pure theory of law, whose reduction of the state to a system of coercive norms Voegelin reads as an administrative evasion of political substance, and as the very formalism that made the 1933–34 transition so hard to name.

Die Machtquelle bleibt anonym.

English translation: “The source of power remains anonymous.”

Similar borrowing techniques can serve very different state purposes. That distinction gives Helene Lieser’s brief 1936 review of Heinrich Stuebel’s study of Prussian state borrowing its historical edge: many loans financed the nationalization of private railways rather than budget deficits. Lieser values the book’s archival substance, particularly its reproduced syndicate agreements, without equating documentary abundance with successful history. Her praise rests equally on its integration of economic and political context and foreign comparisons. The review offers a concise appraisal of what specialists and nonspecialists can gain from Stuebel’s work, while drawing attention to the difference between how a state borrows and what it borrows for.

What makes a mathematical model economically persuasive rather than merely tractable? In this review of Charles Frederick Roos’s Dynamic Economics, Gerhard Tintner welcomes new ways of analysing time lags and demand while questioning the assumptions that make their calculation possible. Linear demand curves and quadratic costs may be useful approximations, he argues, but conclusions drawn from them need explicit qualification. His sympathy for Roos’s methods sharpens rather than softens his criticism: analyses of particular markets cannot by themselves explain economy-wide employment, expectations, or cyclical fluctuations. The review offers a concrete encounter with the tension between mathematical innovation and economic justification, showing why Tintner values dynamic methods yet asks for stronger theoretical constraints and closer attention to systemic interdependence.

What makes a statistical handbook useful for tracking economic fluctuations? In this brief review of Ernst Wagemann’s Konjunkturstatistisches Handbuch 1936, Helene Lieser looks beyond the accumulation of figures to their selection, comparability and accessibility. Her approval is expressly limited to a first inspection, but her criteria are concrete: series should illuminate conditions across the economy and within individual industries, while a clear arrangement and subject index should make the evidence retrievable. The review offers a compact example of judging an economic reference work by what its users can actually do with it.

A gift given, a service rendered, a wrong avenged: beneath these Thurnwald finds one impulse toward counter-performance, and here he raises reciprocity into the organizing principle of social life. Association begins in the bio-psychical complementarity of the sexes and ages—marriage as durable mutual care, parent and child bound by deferred return, the living tied to ancestors through offerings. He rejects any primitive communism of products, reads barter, kula, and potlatch as personal repayment rather than impersonal purchase, and interprets Buin shell money as a memory-sign of obligation. Stratification bends reciprocity into clientage, feudalism, serfdom, and slavery—equilibria that turn unjust once valuations shift—while law, morality, and revenge appear as its formalized demands. Cultures decline, he warns, when this balance is lost.

Jede Leistung aus der „Spezialität“ des einen Partners soll zur Erwiderung beim anderen anregen.

English translation: “Every service arising from the "specialty" of one partner is meant to prompt a reciprocal response from the other.”

What makes a statutory handbook usable beyond its domestic readership? In this brief 1936 review, Helene Lieser singles out the practical aids in the eighth edition of the German Commercial Code, revised by Heinrich Höninger with an introduction by Max Hachenburg. Her endorsement rests on concrete features: amendments incorporated through January 1935, a compilation of amending laws, a clear introduction, and a detailed subject index. Rather than interpreting commercial law, the notice records Lieser’s criteria for a dependable reference work—and her attention to the foreign reader’s need to navigate it.