The archive.

A textbook can be admirably modern and still leave essential questions unanswered. In this review of Part III of Erich Schneider’s economics textbook, Fritz Machlup praises the lucid treatment of credit expansion and multiplier theory while testing the limits of its short-run macroeconomic framework. His objections are concrete: gold remains relevant to money creation, velocity need not be constant to matter, and capital theory cannot simply be excluded from an account of income and employment. The central tension is between explaining what follows if consumption and investment plans are realized and explaining why those plans may fail. Machlup’s combination of technical scrutiny and pedagogical appreciation shows how a textbook’s analytical strengths can coexist with consequential omissions.

Too often do we forget that one of the foremost tasks of economics is to explain and predict circumstances under which consumption and investment plans cannot be realized.

Twentieth-century economics did not merely add topics to an old canon; it replaced the image of a system tending toward stable equilibrium with one shaped by uncertainty, hesitation, and breakdown. Out of that upheaval Shackle draws a map, sorting inherited doctrine by the kind of time and knowledge each theory assumes: perfect adjustment, calculable dynamics, aggregative comparative statics, and the economics of uncertain expectation. The organizing question is temporal—whether a model treats time as timeless adjustment, a dated sequence, or agents' conjectures about futures that cannot be known. Keynes straddles the categories, formally comparative statics yet substantively a theory of imagined futures. The chart doubles as a proposed curriculum and as a warning against teaching incompatible assumptions as though they belonged to one unified doctrine.

Imagined future events still form an entirely distinct category, since they do not constitute a unique series.

Ceremonial rather than argumentative, this brief closing note to a Review of Politics exchange isolates the one disagreement with Hannah Arendt that Voegelin judges decisive. The quarrel is not over the word totalitarianism but over method: how phenomena of the class 'political movements' are to be delimited and defined as theoretical units. Arendt draws her boundaries on the plane of historical fact, ready to accept complexes like totalitarianism as ultimate essential unities; Voegelin objects that the institutional and ideological self-formation of movements is not a theoretical formation. Inquiry starts from the phenomena, but must not take at face value the unities cast up in the stream of history. Once philosophical anthropology supplies the principles of interpretation, apparent enemies may share a hidden structure, and theory must refuse to let history's own groupings become its final ontology.

Es kann dann passieren, dass politische Bewegungen, die auf der Bühne der Geschichte einander bitter bekämpfen, sich auf der Wesensebene als nahe verwandt erweisen.

English translation: “It may then turn out that political movements which bitterly combat one another on the stage of history prove, on the level of essence, to be closely related.”

Higher farm prices can protect rural incomes while eroding workers’ purchasing power—and agriculture itself depends on industrial prosperity. In this 1953 article, Hans Bayer treats that tension as a problem of shared economic security rather than an inevitable conflict between farmers and workers. His distinctive emphasis is on changing productive conditions, not merely guaranteeing prices: fragmented holdings, unsuitable farm sizes and poorly coordinated output can defeat otherwise useful protections. Joint cultivation without changes of ownership offers one concrete alternative. Austrian examples and comparisons with Swiss policy allow readers to examine where cooperation and price regulation reach their limits, and why Bayer argues that agricultural planning must answer to consumers and the wider economy as well as to farmers.

Gemeinschaftliche Produktion (zum Beispiel gemeinsamer Anbau und gemeinsame Ernte ohne Änderung der Eigentumsverhältnisse) ist notwendig.

English translation: “Joint production (for example, joint cultivation and joint harvesting without changing ownership arrangements) is necessary.”

An equation may describe equilibrium without explaining how anyone arrives there. In this 1953 methodological essay, Ludwig von Mises presses that distinction against mathematical economics, asking what numerical precision can establish when people act on uncertain expectations. His examples give the dispute practical substance: observed demand concerns particular markets and periods, while inventory calculations cannot supply an entrepreneur’s judgment about the future. Yet Mises does not reject abstraction itself. He defends an imaginary economy of unchanging, repetitive production as a means of clarifying profit and loss. The resulting tension makes this essay more than a polemic against formal methods: it asks readers to distinguish a model that helps explain action from one that merely represents a state in which adjustment has ceased.

Surveying business-cycle theory at a moment when the field was fragmenting into rival methods, Haberler imposes order with a single 'modest hypothesis': fluctuations in effective demand are the immediate cause of cyclical swings in output and employment. Written in German, the essay insists this is no narrowly monetary claim — Keynesian, Wicksellian, Austrian, and Schumpeterian accounts all fit beneath it — and reformulates the demand-output link through the elasticity of aggregate supply. He treats Hicks's multiplier-accelerator model as the synthesis's high point yet rejects any mechanical accelerator, keeping only the weaker claim that rising income stimulates investment. The essay's sharpest thrust names the Achilles heel of all Keynes-inspired theory: rigid prices and wages, and an aggregation so coarse it hides the structural maladjustments between production and demand.

Es ist den modernen Konstrukteuren mathematischer Modelle vorbehalten geblieben, über alle diese Dinge hinwegzusehen und ein mechanisches Funktionieren des Prinzips anzunehmen.

English translation: “It has been left to the modern constructors of mathematical models to overlook all these matters and to assume a mechanical operation of the principle.”

Sharing language, history, and culture with the Reich did not make Austrian resistance a mere province of German opposition to Hitler—so runs the thesis of this deliberately provisional survey. Prompted by the Moscow Declaration's call for Austria to earn its own liberation, Engel-Janosi roots the movement less in fresh ideology than in the will 'to remain what one had been,' a determination uniting monarchists, Catholics, socialists, communists, and anti-Prussian conservatives against absorption. Against the charge that resistance came only once defeat was obvious, he documents cells forming immediately after March 1938, from Tyrol to Vienna, and redefines resistance as cumulative and practical: aid to prisoners' families, intelligence networks, Wehrmacht cells, ingenious economic sabotage, the '05' organization, and finally the battle for Vienna and the rescue of bridges and art treasures from last-ditch destruction.

Auch in Österreich wurde die Saat der politischen und geistigen Erneuerung mit Blut getränkt; wir hoffen, daß sie in diesem Boden umso kräftiger gedeihen werde.

English translation: “In Austria too the seed of political and spiritual renewal was watered with blood; we hope that in this soil it will flourish all the more vigorously.”

Social scientists study a world that people have already interpreted: a posted letter presupposes expectations about strangers, institutions, and what others will do next. In this article, Alfred Schütz asks how objective explanation can remain faithful to such everyday meanings. Bringing phenomenology to the study of action, he distinguishes the outcomes people seek from the past experiences that shape their projects, and practical understanding from the detached observer’s models. His fictional model actors sharpen the central tension: their perfect rationality belongs to the scientist’s construction, not necessarily to living people. Readers can discover both why abstraction is indispensable and what constrains it—an explanation of human action must remain intelligible in relation to the common-sense world it seeks to explain.

A government can act with full legislative authority and still exercise arbitrary power. This distinction drives Hayek’s two-installment essay, which asks what laws must be like if they are to protect freedom rather than merely authorize officials. His historical perspective connects English resistance to royal monopolies with the demand for general, predictable rules, making economic regulation a constitutional question. Yet his argument is not a blanket rejection of administrative judgment: measures against disease, fire, and unsafe buildings help him distinguish applying a rule from pursuing a government’s changing preferences. Readers can discover both the substance of that distinction and Hayek’s contentious case that economic planning and legal positivism erode it—even when power is democratically granted.

That the law should be an instrument to be used by the individuals for their ends and not an instrument used upon the people by the legislators is the ultimate meaning of the Rule of Law.

Public ownership and cooperative status do not, by themselves, make an enterprise serve the common good. In this report on the first International Congress of the Common-Weal Economy, held in Geneva in 1953, Hans Bayer makes democratic control the decisive test. His account connects social security and workplace participation with a harder question: how can enterprises oriented toward collective welfare counter concentrated private power without fostering either bureaucratic domination or narrow enterprise interests? Drawing on congress debates about cooperatives, nationalized industries, and economic councils, Bayer argues that participation must extend beyond individual workplaces. The report offers a compact view of the institutional choices behind this ambition—and of why Bayer regarded international organization, rather than agreement on principles alone, as the congress’s unfinished task.

Can interest persist in an economy where innovation has ceased—and can it disappear even where capital remains productive? Alfred Amonn’s 1953 article challenges the assumptions behind both questions by distinguishing physical capital goods from present command over them. Against Keynes’s exclusively monetary explanation, he argues that scarce access to goods underlies interest, while money and liquidity preference help determine its rate. His extended example of fishermen acquiring boats and nets makes the distinction concrete: replacement costs, entrepreneurial profit and pure interest need not rise or vanish together. Readers can discover why productivity alone does not explain a positive return, why stationary conditions need not eliminate it, and how monetary and real explanations can be combined without treating either as sufficient.

When the textbooks of Hansen and Schneider reduced the quantity theory of money to the crude claim that prices simply track the money stock, Amonn set out to show they were attacking a straw man no serious theorist had ever held. Tracing the doctrine from Bodin and Hume through Mill and Fisher, he recasts it not as a mechanistic identity but as the application of ordinary supply-and-demand value theory to the special case of money, whose demand and supply enter as simple quantities rather than price-quantity functions. He defends Fisher's equation of exchange against the charge of empty tautology, distinguishes the money actually offered on the market from the total stock, and closes by likening the quantity-theory law to the law of free fall: never perfectly realized, yet valid when other factors are accounted for.

Man wird selbst in der ältesten geldtheoretischen Literatur vergeblich nach einer derart primitiven Fassung der Quantitätstheorie suchen.

English translation: “Even in the oldest monetary-theoretical literature one will search in vain for so primitive a formulation of the quantity theory.”