The archive.

Newton’s absolute space was intended partly to secure God’s presence in a mechanical universe. How did it instead help authorize a worldview that could dispense with God? In this article, Eric Voegelin follows that reversal through the dispute between Newton’s defenders and Leibniz, distinguishing the success of physical science from the authority claimed for its philosophical assumptions. His central tension is between conceptual criticism and social prestige: an argument can fail philosophically yet prevail culturally. Linking this history to technological power and schemes of social engineering, Voegelin argues that methods suited to physical phenomena become destructive when treated as instruments for remaking human existence. The article offers a pointed account of how scientific expertise acquires authority beyond its domain—and why correcting physics need not undo that authority.

The theoretical dilettantism of the great scientist is socially effective; the argument of the great philosopher is socially ineffective.

Lower reported profits need not mean less investment. In this 1948 article, Walter Fröhlich examines how accounting rules divide business funds between disposable income and the resources needed to maintain capital. His distinctive premise—that businesses are generally more willing to reinvest than to make new investments out of income—makes depreciation and inventory valuation consequential for aggregate demand. Excluding inventory appreciation from profits may weaken an apparent incentive to invest while retaining more funds for replacement. Fröhlich traces this tension into taxation: an income measure useful for business decisions may make a poor tax base for countercyclical policy. The article offers a concrete way to distinguish accurate measurement, investment incentives, and economic stabilization—objectives that seemingly technical accounting conventions do not necessarily reconcile.

Popular sovereignty can authorize government without restraining it: this distinction anchors Hayek’s review of Bertrand de Jouvenel’s Power, first published in 1948 and reprinted here in 2013. Hayek admires de Jouvenel’s account of how ordinary motives and rationalist schemes can concentrate authority, especially when a simplified political design displaces the many institutions and loyalties that sustain social order. Yet admiration does not mean agreement with the book’s pessimism. Hayek argues that de Jouvenel gives too little weight to opinion and belief as forces capable of checking power. This short review offers a sharp encounter between two defenders of liberty who differ over how inevitable political domination must be—and an unexpected endorsement of Rousseau’s understanding of the rule of law.

The mechanics of inflation are not obscure; what defeats every cure is the refusal of the groups who count politically to pay the price of stopping it. Reading the American inflation of 1948 through the post-1918 collapses of Austria, Germany, Italy, and France, Schumpeter defines inflation as means of payment rising faster than output and divides the disease into three stages: incipient, advanced, and wild. America, he judges, has reached the advanced phase, where full employment turns new money into general price increases and bank lending breeds secondary credit inflation, the national payroll serving as its chief conductor. His program rejects price rollbacks and direct controls in favor of credit restriction, budget surpluses, and taxes that reward saving, warning with a nod to Lenin that a debauched currency corrodes the very classes on which the social order rests.

So inflation runs on by common consent.

Scientific inquiry depends on results it must remain willing to withdraw. What, then, does it mean to call those results true? In Three Meanings of “Truth,” Felix Kaufmann argues that timeless truth cannot provide the methodological foundation for revisable empirical knowledge. His distinctive move is to separate a proposition’s meaning from the rules governing its acceptance: changing evidence can overturn an assertion without changing deductive logic. Disputes with Russell and Carnap sharpen the difference between technical obstacles to verification and the absence of applicable standards. The article offers a precise way to distinguish logical relations, warranted acceptance, and coherence as an ideal for revising methods—without assuming that successive scientific conclusions necessarily converge on a predetermined final truth.

Scarcity is the premise from which everything else unfolds, economic life understood as the disposition of limited goods toward the fullest possible satisfaction of needs. This comprehensive Viennese treatise, here in its substantially expanded second edition, moves from needs, goods, and marginal utility through a full theory of prices, competition, monopoly, oligopoly, bilateral monopoly, and the imputation of factor values from consumer demand, into money, credit, national income, and the business cycle. Mahr rejects the static claim that investment merely follows prior saving; in a growing economy, he argues, investment must exceed saving, the excess financed by monetary expansion. Against Hayek's neutral money he defends stabilizing a wholesale-price index; on foreign trade he is liberal but strategic, weighing reciprocity and defensive tariffs. Throughout, causal explanation takes priority over moral verdict, though moral judgment is never dismissed.

Keinesfalls erspart die ethische Bewertung eines wirtschaftlichen Vorganges die Mühe seiner kausalen Erklärung.

English translation: “Under no circumstances does the ethical evaluation of an economic process spare us the effort of its causal explanation.”

Economic planning need not mean an economy administered entirely by the state. In this 1948 article, Hans Bayer separates the existence of a plan from the institutions that carry it out, judging both by their capacity to secure the material conditions for personal development. His criticism cuts two ways: competition alone cannot reliably restrain economic power, yet nationalization and bureaucratic control are not ends in themselves. Individuals, private enterprises and cooperatives should retain scope wherever they can serve the plan’s purposes as well as—or better than—state agencies. The article offers a concrete way to examine the tension between collective provision and personal agency: economic institutions must create opportunities for people to cultivate their abilities, without pretending that institutions can do that cultivating for them.

A move in chess reshapes the whole board; so, Shackle insists, does a genuinely crucial economic decision, one that cannot be repeated because it alters the very conditions under which any later choice would occur. Replying here to critics of Expectation in Economics, he defends the distinction between unique, isolated, and crucial trials against those who would treat rival imagined futures as additive terms in a single statistical expectation. Mutually exclusive outcomes, he argues, cannot be summed like fractions drawn from an urn; the chooser confronts an act, a moment, and a set of hypotheses. Against Baumol and Graaff he deploys his focus-value method, the φ-function, and potential surprise, rejecting 'degree of belief' as any general rescue of probabilistic ordering.

Now when an experiment, a question about the future, is unique, isolated, or crucial, it does not make sense to add together its rival hypothetical outcomes or answers.

More productive farms do not necessarily mean more secure farmers—or better-fed consumers. In this 1949 article, Hans Bayer draws on a study visit to the United States to examine that tension: machinery saves labour and enlarges operating units, yet abundant harvests can depress farm income while nutritional needs remain unmet. His observations of farmers comparing their accounts with state averages give modernization a practical texture; his Austrian comparisons ask which improvements might travel across very different landholding systems. Bayer argues that technical efficiency cannot substitute for economic coordination. By weighing price supports and production controls against employment and purchasing power, he shows why agricultural prosperity depends on what happens beyond the farm gate, including whether industry can absorb the workers that mechanization releases.

Distinguishing two concepts of probability need not mean separating them. In this brief oral reply to Professor Bartlett, Gerhard Tintner argues that discussions of probability often founder on conceptual confusion rather than genuine disagreement. He connects degree of confirmation with relative frequency: as evidence accumulates, the former must approach the latter. Yet convergence does not settle how to assign measures when evidence is scarce. This two-paragraph contribution isolates the point at which Tintner sees Carnap’s theory as useful—the small sample, where initial assignments still matter—and clarifies why a distinction between concepts can support, rather than obstruct, an account of their relationship.

An accounting identity can be correct and still mislead a student about what causes economic change. This is the tension Fritz Machlup pursues in his 1949 review of the first volume of Erich Schneider’s Introduction to Economic Theory. He welcomes Schneider’s effort to build national-income accounts from the bookkeeping of individual firms, but questions formulations that make taxes and budget deficits appear to determine entrepreneurial income merely by definition. His criticism turns on a precise distinction: quantities recorded after the event do not, by themselves, explain how policy changes affect behaviour. The review offers a compact lesson in reading macroeconomic equations critically, while preserving Schneider’s case for aggregation as a practical necessity rather than a substitute for understanding individual decisions.

British merchants imagined China as a vast market worth opening by force; the Foreign Office doubted that trade could pay for the responsibilities conquest would bring. In this review of Nathan A. Pelcovits’s study, Eric Voegelin accepts that explanation of British restraint but questions what an archival demonstration leaves unevaluated. He asks how competition between Chinese textiles and Western machine goods changed, and distinguishes prudent short-term calculation from the longer reach of industrial ambition. His distinctive suggestion is that the merchants’ program of railways, reform, and industrialization survived under Chinese nationalist leadership, while Britain lacked the strength to carry it out. The review lets readers follow the point at which approval of a documented policy history becomes an argument about the limits of imperial power.