The archive.

Economic statistics can guide governments and businesses without giving researchers a mandate to make policy. That distinction anchors Gerhard Tintner’s 1936 article on international business-cycle research, written in connection with a congress of research institutes in Vienna. Tintner treats these institutes as necessary responses to economies too complex to understand through personal experience alone, while insisting that their figures remain probabilistic and require economic interpretation. His account brings statistical methods into contact with the Austrian institute’s theoretical commitments, showing why neither data collection nor theory can suffice independently. Readers can discover a concrete conception of research cooperation: shared methods and comparable reports should improve the evidence available for international policy, while independence from state influence and private interests protects the institutes’ capacity to report objectively.

For Helene Lieser, the test of a legal reference work is practical: can banking professionals use it without mastering every intricacy of German tax law? Her brief 1936 review of Burghard Kessler’s annotated edition of the Capital Transactions Tax Act of 16 October 1934 singles out its clear commentary and time-saving index. Covering company, securities and stock-exchange turnover taxes, the edition serves foreign as well as domestic users. The review offers a compact example of Lieser’s attention to the accessibility of specialist legal knowledge, rather than an assessment of the taxes themselves.

For Helene Lieser, the value of Korek-Stark’s bibliography lies in the searching it saves—not only for librarians, but for anyone studying Central Europe. Her brief 1936 review identifies the practical merits of arranging literature from 1919–1934 by country and recurring subject categories. She also marks the first part’s limits: agriculture, trade policy, and efforts toward regional integration. This compact assessment offers a researcher’s view of a reference tool, welcoming its clarity while calling for a second part to cover the questions left outside its scope.

Three movements organize a century and a half of Swiss constitutional history in Rappard's telling: the emancipation of the individual, the triumph of democracy, and the rise of the state. He begins with the great paradox — that the Helvetic Constitution imposed by French bayonets in 1798, with its liberty, equality, and unitary citizenship, came to shape modern Switzerland more than the old Confederation ever did — and traces the sequence through the Act of Mediation, the reactionary Pact of 1815, the liberal cantonal revolutions of 1830, the federal Constitution of 1848, and the centralizing revisions after 1874. The individual who freed himself from the aristocratic state, and then mastered it through referendum and initiative, ends by surrendering to a federal statism of tariffs, railways, insurance, and subsidies whose swelling debt Rappard reads as the measure of lost independence.

Pour triompher définitivement en Suisse, le libéralisme avait donc dû faire appel au moins libéral des arguments.

English translation: “To triumph definitively in Switzerland, liberalism had thus been obliged to resort to the least liberal of arguments.”

The Methodenstreit had hardened into a war of slogans, naturalism against Verstehen, nomothetic against idiographic, value-free against normative, and this 1936 German treatise sets out to disarm every one of them. Kaufmann offers not a doctrine but a critique of principles: methods earn their place by problem-type and research aim, never by metaphysical prestige. Physical objectivity itself rests on schemas and measurement; social science differs because its objects include alter egos, projects, and socially available meanings, so understanding is indispensable yet never sovereign. Drawing on Weber and Schütz for controlled interpretation, he recasts marginal utility theory as an analysis of purpose-rational choice within a ranked goal-order, treats ideal types as instruments of causal control, and credits Kelsen with purifying legal dogmatics while rejecting the Sein/Sollen dualism. Plurality is preserved; its inflation into pseudo-conflict is what must go.

Demgemäß ist alle Kritik in diesem Buche Prinzipienkritik.

English translation: “Accordingly, all criticism in this book is criticism of principles.”

Keynes defines the multiplier as the reciprocal of one minus the marginal propensity to consume — and in that definition, this methodological critique argues, the celebrated result is already smuggled in. To infer a large multiplier from a high propensity to consume explains nothing, Haberler contends, unless that propensity has been established independently; otherwise the argument merely renames the unknown magnitude it claims to illuminate. He separates the formal aggregate propensity, which is just the algebra of the multiplier, from the psychological propensity describing how people actually spend, and shows that leakages, time lags, monetary velocity and displaced investment stand between them. The same defect, he adds, runs through Keynes's Treatise, where saving and investment are defined into equality and then made to explain one another. Identities can clarify accounts while misleading theory when mistaken for mechanisms.

By assuming something about the marginal propensity to consume he assumes something about the multiplier, but this is no more an explanation of the multiplier that pauvreté is an explanation of poverty.

Beneath the visible quarrels of schools, systems, and policy creeds runs more logical continuity than economists usually grant, and this essay reads the history of theory as sedimentary rather than revolutionary: Ricardo clarifies Smith, while Jevons, Walras, and Menger carry classical work forward rather than discarding it, like geological layers conditioning the ones above them. The occasion is Taussig's Wages and Capital, which Schumpeter credits with finally disposing of the wages-fund doctrine and, alongside Böhm-Bawerk, supplying a theory of capital as a time-structured process that marginal utility and marginal productivity alone could never reach. Along the way he names the Ricardian Vice — presenting simplified models to the public as policy certainties — as the standing temptation the theorist must resist.

There is more logic in the history of those tools of analysis which we have come to call economic theory than either its friends or its foes admit.

Understanding an action is not the same as establishing that one’s interpretation is correct. In this article, Felix Kaufmann makes that distinction central to a social science that neither imitates physics wholesale nor claims exemption from empirical testing. His example of a naval distress signal shows how deciphering words, recognizing a request, explaining an emergency, and inferring the sender’s knowledge require different evidence. Drawing on Weber and Schütz, he replaces sweeping disputes over scientific method with precise questions about what investigators assume and how their claims can be checked. Readers can discover why uncertainty need not mean vagueness, and why practical interests may shape the choice of a research problem without deciding what counts as an adequate answer.

An unfavorable but respectful tribute is how this 1936 review casts its verdict on Keynes's General Theory, granting the book's public impact while charging it with reviving the Ricardian habit of smuggling situated policy into theory disguised as universal law — on every page, Schumpeter writes, the ghost of that policy looks over the analyst's shoulder. His technical objections are sharp: the aggregate demand and supply schedules illegitimately stretch the Marshallian cross to social aggregates; treating employment as an index of output assumes invariant production functions and so assumes away the continuous revolution in production methods that defines capitalism; the propensity to consume enters as a deus ex machina, and liquidity preference names rather than explains. The whole closes with a satirical bow to the spending of Louis XV.

Economics will never have nor merit any authority until that unholy alliance is dissolved.

An exhaustive account of Soviet institutions can still leave the decisive economic question unanswered: how does a plan establish which uses of scarce resources are most worthwhile? In this 1936 review, reprinted with editorial notes in 1997, Hayek praises Sidney and Beatrice Webb’s investigative achievement while challenging their confidence in a deliberately constructed, “scientific” civilization. His objection is not that Soviet workers lack incentives; he credits competitive wages and piecework with real successes. Rather, he asks what replaces the coordinating function of profits and prices. Bookkeeping, he argues, cannot test efficiency when its figures fail to reflect relative scarcity. This compact review makes visible the distinction between mobilizing resources and allocating them effectively—and the limits Hayek finds in treating social organization as an engineering problem.

Social insurance may protect against individual misfortune, but what happens when economic contraction makes unemployment a mass condition? In this contribution to the 1936 National Conference of Social Work proceedings, Karl Pribram challenges the stability assumed by social legislation without dismissing its protective purpose. He locates recurrent crises in monetary and credit imbalances, distinguishing these from the trade barriers and international debt difficulties that, he argues, deepened the Depression. His practical concern is how protection should change with economic conditions: shorter hours, public works, and wage adjustments cannot be judged independently of industry and timing. The essay offers a pointed encounter between business-cycle analysis and social policy, showing why preventing economic breakdown and relieving its uneven consequences require distinct but coordinated measures.

Orderly tables do not necessarily make national economies comparable. In this short 1936 review of the Statistisches Reichsamt’s handbook, Helene Lieser weighs the usefulness of statistics for 80 countries against differences in definitions and collection methods. She highlights the handbook’s own warning against mechanical comparisons: common layouts and metric units help, but cannot remove those differences. Her endorsement rests less on new findings than on access—bringing scattered, sometimes hard-to-obtain sources within reach of practitioners and non-statisticians. The review offers a compact distinction between making economic information usable and making it genuinely comparable.