The archive.

Can a philosophy designed to reconcile civilizations preserve the differences that make them worth understanding? In this 1947 review of F. S. C. Northrop’s The Meeting of East and West, Eric Voegelin welcomes the effort to widen Protestant, positivist America’s cultural horizon while challenging its conceptual foundations. Northrop’s pairing of theoretical and aesthetic experience promises reciprocal recognition between cultures; Voegelin asks what disappears when science, theology, art, and spiritual experience are gathered under such broad categories. His objections turn especially on Christianity and on Northrop’s sharp division between Eastern and Western religious life. The review offers a pointed distinction between overcoming cultural provincialism and making unfamiliar traditions intelligible: generosity toward other civilizations does not, for Voegelin, excuse imprecision about their forms of experience.

Exchange stabilization could protect a currency while obstructing economic recovery. In this 1947 review of H. M. H. A. van der Valk’s study of British and Dutch monetary policy, Josef Herbert Fürth examines why similar instruments produced different effects: Dutch banks’ flexible cash ratios made additional sterilization potentially excessive, whereas British intervention accommodated cheap credit. His interest lies in the banking mechanisms behind policy outcomes—and in whether the study’s recommendations follow consistently from its explanations. He questions its contrasting treatment of low interest rates and national versus international priorities, while finding practical lessons for the newly established International Monetary Fund. This compact review offers a concrete comparison of exchange management and domestic credit, sharpened by the unresolved question of who should control monetary policy.

Reliable accounts of national governments do not necessarily add up to an understanding of Europe. In this brief 1947 review of David Fellman’s edited collection, Eric Voegelin praises the individual studies while challenging the perspective that holds them together. His central objection goes beyond missing countries: he argues that postwar politics must confront the problem of European unity, pursuing by democratic means what Hitler had attempted through totalitarian conquest. Without endorsing the collection’s reassuring emphasis on institutional continuity, Voegelin distinguishes its value as a reference from its adequacy as political interpretation. The notice offers a compact encounter with that distinction—and with his insistence that European disorder cannot be understood solely within national borders.

Complementarity and substitution are not, Lachmann argues, symmetrical static relations between factors: complementarity is the coherence of means within a single production plan, while substitution is the response to disruption, error, or revised expectations. A locomotive substitutes for another locomotive yet complements wagons, crews, tracks, and timetables—so which relation holds depends entirely on the plan through which the goods are read. Beginning from the Hicks-Lange-Harrod debate but pulling the question out of demand analysis and into the structure of production, this early essay dissolves the fiction of homogeneous capital without collapsing into mere physical classification. Capital goods are artifacts made for purposes; spare parts, standardization, and reserve capacity are not accidental frictions but devices for preserving a wider pattern of complementarity. Accumulation, working through chain reactions of gain and loss, makes any single rate of profit meaningless.

We have to provide for many minor changes in order to prevent a major one.

Statistical methods can describe economic fluctuations without reliably identifying the mechanism that produces them. In this short review of M. G. Kendall’s 1946 study, Gerhard Tintner makes that distinction concrete: familiar analytical methods perform poorly even on artificial oscillatory series whose generating equations are known. He welcomes Kendall’s results while questioning whether the promising alternative—analysis of runs and sequences—sacrifices too much information. The review offers a compact encounter with a problem at the boundary of statistics and economic policy: how confidently can researchers infer an economy’s underlying structure from its observed movements? Tintner’s measured judgement shows why success with one feature, such as the distance between peaks, need not establish a method’s general adequacy.

Behind the cooperative movement lay a revolutionary dream, to abolish entrepreneurs, capitalists, and the wage system through producers' cooperatives owned in common. That dream, Mises argues in this report commissioned by the Petroleum Industry Research Foundation, failed utterly, and the surviving consumers' and farmers' cooperatives are simply large businesses. Patronage refunds are distributions of profit; undistributed surpluses accumulate capital exactly as any firm's do. What sustains cooperatives, on his account, is not superior efficiency but privilege, the tax exemptions, cheap credit, and legal favors that shelter high-cost operations from a genuine market test. He points to the contradiction between farmers' cooperatives seeking higher prices and consumers' cooperatives claiming to seek lower ones, and concludes that cooperatives can be legitimate in a free society only if they renounce these advantages and win consumers on their own.

Capitalism needs neither propaganda nor apostles. Its achievements speak for themselves. Capitalism delivers the goods.

The social Wunschbild, the anticipatory image of what economy and society ought to become, is treated in this 1947 rectoral address as an active economic factor rather than escapist fantasy. Because all economic processes take shape from the willing of living human beings, Kerschagl argues, economics cannot be a mechanics of things; yesterday's utopia may become today's reality, even as fulfilled ideals cease to press as ideals. He reads mercantilism, physiocracy, classical economics, Marxism, and the Austrian marginalists as mixtures of contradictory wishes, each torn between freedom and binding order—a plurality that turns destructive whenever one doctrine is enforced as total truth. Applied to postwar Austrian policy the thesis is austere: distribution can complement production but never replace it, and social aims must be judged by persuasion and human dignity, not coercion.

Es kann auf die Dauer nur das verteilt werden, was erarbeitet ist, und alle Verteilungssysteme können nur eine wichtige und notwendige Ergänzung der Erzeugung, aber kein Ersatz für diese selbst sein.

English translation: “In the long run only what has been produced by labor can be distributed, and all systems of distribution can only be an important and necessary complement to production, but never a substitute for it.”

Five lectures, delivered to Innsbruck workers in 1946, confront a ruined economy and ask whether Austria can be saved at all. Bayer's answer refuses fatalism: smallness did not doom the First Republic and need not doom the Second—Switzerland shows a small economy can prosper—but recovery must be planned, coordinating production, exports, credit, investment, and income rather than trusting automatic markets or monetary tricks. The lectures range across money and credit, the wage-price-currency tangle, social policy through unions and cooperatives, and socialization, defended here against Hayek's fear that planning must lead to serfdom. Real wages, Bayer insists, depend on the social product and not on nominal claims; money stays a servant, never wealth. Above all, the policy errors of 1918 to 1938 must not be repeated.

Sozialisierung ist mehr als die Summe einzelner Maßnahmen zur Verstaatlichung der Produktionsmittel, sie ist aber auch nicht, wie es manchmal dargestellt wird, gleichbedeutend mit der Durchsetzung einer sozialistischen Planwirtschaft mit völliger Aufhebung der Funktion von Geld und Markt.

English translation: “Socialization is more than the sum of individual measures for the nationalization of the means of production; nor is it, however, as it is sometimes portrayed, equivalent to the imposition of a socialist planned economy with the complete abolition of the functions of money and the market.”

The 'execution' of the 1856 Paris treaty, Engel-Janosi argues, was precisely the process by which the post-Crimean order came apart. Following the Eastern Question from that settlement to the Franco-Sardinian war of 1859, the essay makes Cavour's schemes over Moldavia and Wallachia inseparable from his Italian designs, with Napoleon III—hostile to a merely preserved Ottoman Empire, drawn to Balkan nationality, never wholly clear in plan—as its hinge. The Constantinople chapters read as a prosopography of policy: Stratford de Redcliffe's anti-Russian reformism, Prokesch-Osten's defence of Ottoman individuality, Thouvenel executing a French line he privately distrusted. The manipulated Romanian elections of 1857 and Cuza's double election bind Ottoman decline, Romanian unification, and Italian nationalism into a single crisis of legitimacy—inherited legality hammered by a ruthless new politics.

Wenn dies, wie wir allen Grund haben zu hoffen, das Ende der Welt sein soll, wird alles irgendwie geregelt werden. Wenn dies jedoch nicht das Ende der Welt ist, wird alles noch viel schlechter werden.

English translation: “If this, as we have every reason to hope, is to be the end of the world, then somehow everything will be settled. But if this is not the end of the world, then everything will become much worse.”

A tariff concession means little when a state trading monopoly can exclude foreign goods simply by declining to buy them. This problem of reciprocity gives Richard Schüller’s 1947 article a concrete entry into the tensions of postwar trade policy. He argues that Soviet resistance to American nondiscrimination stems less from bilateral commercial conflict than from the dependence of Soviet neighbors on markets beyond Moscow’s control. His defense of multilateral trade is nevertheless critical of the compromises made in its name: British demands for import quotas and elaborate charter provisions may weaken the system they are intended to secure. The article offers a way to distinguish political ambitions from trading necessities—and to understand why neither a sterling bloc nor a ruble bloc could readily replace wider commercial exchange.

The gap between theoretical competence and usable economic analysis shapes Gottfried Haberler’s brief review of Hans Böhi’s study of postwar equilibrium exchange rates, prepared for the Swiss government. Haberler credits Böhi’s command of international trade theory and his recognition that price-and-cost comparisons cannot provide an unrestricted purchasing-power-parity rule. Yet he questions an exposition that treats quantitative relationships entirely in words, omits references, and gives familiar terms such as elasticity unusual meanings. Written without knowledge of the Keynes and White plans, the study also stands apart from the monetary debates its subject demands. The review offers a compact example of Haberler’s critical standards: sound theory must also make its reasoning accessible and establish its policy bearings.

Higher wage rates need not mean higher earnings for workers as a whole: employment, prices, and bargaining power can pull in different directions. In this 1947 lecture, Alfred Amonn asks what wage policy can accomplish once those differences are taken seriously. He challenges the assumption that competition automatically secures productivity gains for labour, emphasizing workers’ limited ability to wait, move, or obtain information. Yet he also argues that wage increases can cost jobs—a constraint collective bargaining cannot abolish. His distinctive emphasis falls on changing the conditions of wage determination through labour protection, organization, and informed state mediation rather than simply fixing rates. The lecture offers a concrete way to examine whose income a wage measure protects, and whether a nominal gain represents greater purchasing power.