The archive.

Higher farm prices can enrich agricultural producers while leaving the economy poorer. In this 1925 discussion article, Alfred Amonn challenges E. Laur’s inference from agricultural prosperity to national gain by asking what increased domestic production displaces. Labour and capital drawn into farming might otherwise produce industrial goods capable of purchasing more food through international exchange; farmers’ increased purchasing power must also be weighed against consumers’ losses. Amonn’s distinctive insistence is that physical output, sectoral income, and national income require separate judgements. His qualified allowance for temporary protection makes this more than a categorical argument against intervention. The article offers a concrete way to test claims of national benefit: compare alternative uses of resources rather than treating one sector’s gains as gains for everyone.

Can a theory of individual satisfaction explain prices, incomes, and the organization of a social economy? In this two-part critical article, Alfred Amonn tests Friedrich von Wieser’s answer against distinctions that economic abstraction can obscure: between subjective valuation and monetary calculation, individual purposes and relations among persons, explanation and ethical judgment. His objection is concrete: equal prices do not imply equal satisfactions, and accounting in money does not establish that utilities can be added together. Reviewing Wieser’s second edition, Amonn combines appreciation of its sociological insight with scrutiny of explanations that presuppose the prices they seek to derive. The article offers a sustained encounter with the limits of utility-based explanation—and with the question of what disappears when a society is modelled as a single economic subject.

A theory of prices can be logically consistent yet fail to explain why people earn different incomes. In this rejoinder to Franz Oppenheimer, Alfred Amonn withdraws several earlier objections to the reconstructed objective theory of value, then tests the assumptions that remain. Equally capable producers may accept lower earnings to avoid danger or disagreeable work; equal working conditions do not identify a uniquely “normal” worker. These concrete difficulties sharpen Amonn’s distinction between deductive coherence and empirical explanation. His defence of subjective valuation is equally precise: judgments shaped by social circumstances are still judgments made by individuals. The reader encounters an argument for retaining valuing subjects in price theory without treating them as socially isolated—or endorsing marginal utility theory wholesale.

Can support for agriculture justify tariffs that preserve landed rents rather than strengthen farming? In this 1926 review of the first volume of Bernhard Harms’s study of German trade policy, Wilhelm Röpke praises an ally against renewed agricultural protection while probing the concessions that weaken Harms’s case. Economic growth under a tariff regime, he argues, does not prove that protection caused it; emergency and educational duties must not become excuses for permanent shelter. The review’s distinctive tension lies in Röpke’s defense of free trade as a policy for, not against, a vigorous independent peasantry. Readers encounter a precise disagreement over how economic principles should constrain practical compromises—and why protecting established agricultural interests need not mean securing agriculture’s future.

Stabilizing the franc, in Oskar Morgenstern’s 1926 review of George Peel’s The Financial Crisis of France, requires more than a monetary remedy: it demands repair of the fiscal machinery behind the currency. Morgenstern praises Peel’s account of fragmented budgets, outdated taxation, and debt-financed warfare, while questioning the reliability of international comparisons of wealth, income, and tax burdens. His review is especially revealing where endorsement gives way to independent judgement: on the limits of inflation as debt relief, the tension between French objections to international transfers and demands for German reparations, and the merits of a return to gold. Readers can discover how a favorable review becomes a precise argument about the fiscal conditions of monetary stability—and the evidence used to assess them.

A monetary doctrine can guide policy effectively while leaving its causal explanation incomplete. That tension shapes Hayek’s review of the German translation of Gustav Cassel’s Das Geldwesen nach 1914. He praises Cassel’s practical guidance but challenges the direct link drawn between the quantity of money and the general price level: monetary effects, Hayek insists, unfold through successive changes in individual prices. His objection exposes a further assumption—treating price stability as the normal condition can make every departure appear monetary in origin. The review offers a compact encounter with Hayek’s scrutiny of policy remedies: even a credit restriction capable of preventing depreciation and crises must be judged against its possible cost to economic development.

A stable price index need not mean that money has ceased to disturb economic life. This distinction drives Hayek’s 1926 combined review of monetary studies by J. R. Bellerby and G. M. Verrijn Stuart. He challenges Bellerby for assuming that price-level stabilization supplies the proper policy goal, while crediting Verrijn Stuart with attempting to justify that connection—and finding his proof wanting. Hayek’s criticism is discriminating: he values Bellerby’s practical comparisons and Verrijn Stuart’s account of interest and monetary value without accepting their central premise. The review offers a compact encounter with a precise monetary problem: what must be demonstrated before an average of changing prices can serve as evidence that money is leaving price and income formation undisturbed?

What makes a short account of a complex banking system useful? In this brief 1926 review, Oskar Morgenstern commends T. E. Gregory’s forty-page study for combining compression with a clear grasp of what distinguishes American banking from European practice. His selection of examples—branch banking, Federal Reserve discount policy and open market operations, and the connection between deflation and agricultural crisis—shows what he considers essential to that orientation. The review offers a compact statement of Morgenstern’s standards for economic exposition: comparative knowledge, sharply drawn distinctions, and citations that allow readers to pursue questions independently.

What makes an economic yearbook useful beyond its first appearance? In this brief review of the second volume of the Ungarisches Wirtschafts-Jahrbuch, Helene Lieser values both continuity and independence: supplementary data accompany a self-contained account of Hungary’s economic sectors in 1926. Her particular approval goes to the newly added statistical tables, covering subjects from landownership to public debt and railway traffic. The notice offers a compact example of her practical criteria for judging an economic reference work, rather than an interpretation of Hungary’s economy.

How can the value of a single productive good be extracted from a utility that several goods together bring about? This is the imputation problem—Zurechnung, a term Wieser had borrowed from law—and Hayek treats it in 1926 not as a footnote to marginal utility but as the decisive next step in grounding distribution on subjective value. He surveys the Austrian solutions of Menger, Böhm-Bawerk, and Wieser, sets marginal productivity in its place as a supplement rather than an independent answer, and exposes a circularity at the heart of the received theory: product values are derived from factor values through cost, yet factor values are supposedly read off product values. His restatement recasts the whole question as one of allocating given quantities of productive goods among competing lines of production according to the scales of needs—soluble only for the entire economic system at once.

Wieser betrachtet den Wert als die Rechenform des Nutzens.

English translation: “Wieser regards value as the computational form of utility.”

How can a movement promising universal emancipation justify restricting political power to a single party? In this 1926 Encyclopaedia Britannica entry, Emil Lederer examines that tension within modern communism, distinguishing its insistence on revolutionary dictatorship from socialism’s broader range of political means. His attention falls on the passage from workers’ councils to controlled elections and party leadership: institutions justified, in communist theory, as safeguards against capitalist influence. He then sets that reasoning beside the economic concessions of Soviet rule, including private trade and peasants’ freedom to dispose of their produce. The entry offers a compact way to examine how the promised abolition of class domination could authorise immediate coercion—and how governing necessities could force departures from revolutionary doctrine.

How can freedom grow out of institutions founded on coercion? In Das Gesetz der Macht, Friedrich von Wieser approaches this tension through the relationship between directing minorities and the populations that follow them. He argues that law, morality, and public opinion transform power rather than abolish it: even democracy depends on leadership, not simply on the aggregation of equal wills. His account connects conquest and state formation with the less visible authority of creditors, finance, and those who control the press. The distinctive tension lies in Wieser’s treatment of domination as both a constraint on freedom and a historical condition of its development. Readers can examine how this premise shapes his understanding of liberalism—and where it limits his account of collective self-government.