The archive.

Shared vulnerability to aggression does not necessarily make nations willing partners in peace. In this 1943 review of Egon Ranshofen-Wertheimer’s Victory Is Not Enough!, Ludwig von Mises tests proposals for European confederation against the persistence of tariffs, migration barriers and exchange controls. His imagined Ruritanian worker gives the objection a concrete edge: why support a federation that preserves other countries’ wage advantages while blocking access to their markets? Mises argues that political institutions cannot secure lasting peace while their members practise economic exclusion. Yet he warmly values the reviewed author’s realism, informed by experience in the League of Nations secretariat. This short review offers a pointed distinction between recognising a common security interest and accepting the economic changes that cooperation demands.

No sophisticated union-project and no diplomatic makeshifts can make peace durable in an environment of economic warfare.

Public responsibility need not mean public ownership—and private ownership need not mean private control. This distinction anchors Fritz Machlup’s 1943 examination of how government and enterprise should share economic tasks. He accepts grounds for social insurance, monopoly control, and compensatory public spending, while asking when these remedies weaken incentives or accumulate powers that endanger political liberty. His distinctive concern is not to draw an immutable boundary but to identify what each intervention displaces: alternative uses of resources, private investment, or managerial discretion. Readers can discover why social-security expenditure is not simply a social cost, why a commitment to competition might paradoxically encourage nationalization, and why public investment must fill an economic gap without enlarging it. The result is a conditional framework for judging intervention rather than a blanket case for or against it.

Why might an investor postpone an attractive project—and resume it after an election without judging its prospects any better? In this 1943 article, Shackle locates investment decisions in the individual’s changing imagination of possible futures. His concept of “potential surprise” distinguishes what a person can envisage without disbelief from what they regard as improbable, without assigning probabilities to every outcome. Attention centres on a compelling gain and loss, rather than an average return. Crucially, investors also anticipate changes in their own expectations: waiting preserves opportunities and postpones possible disappointment. This perspective gives liquidity a psychological as well as a financial rationale. Readers can trace how the timing of news, the pleasure of anticipation, and the effort of absorbing surprises may influence investment even when current project valuations offer no obvious reason for change.

A charm may shape conduct even when the observer denies it has any power, for what matters is not the physical object but the purpose someone imputes to it. On this footing Hayek defends the interpretive social sciences against the scientism he knew from within, having trained in Mach and logical positivism. The facts of economics, law, and linguistics are teleological concepts: we grasp an action by analogy with our own mind, fitting movement into patterns of purpose rather than reducing it to behavior. Social theory, he argues, is 'compositive,' assembling models of wholes like markets and states from intelligible individual conduct—and it stands logically prior to history, since no historian can bound a fact like a battle or a legal order by space and time alone.

In short, in the social sciences the things are what people think they are. Money is money, a word is a word, a cosmetic is a cosmetic, if and because somebody thinks they are.

Written in 1943 with postwar reconstruction already in view, this chapter poses a constitutional rather than merely tariff question: whether international cooperation should be built through universal institutions or through larger regional and continental federations. Haberler answers cautiously. Larger markets do permit mass production and a wider division of labour, but that gain belongs to nondiscriminatory liberalization, not to protected spheres, so he separates the complete customs union, which genuinely enlarges a market, from the incomplete preference, which merely diverts imports from cheaper outsiders to favoured insiders and hands them a windfall. Dismantling Pan-Europe, Pan-America, and Danubian schemes as geographically incoherent or coercive, he anticipates the later vocabulary of trade creation and diversion, and warns that partial blocs turn cooperation into exclusion.

To put the question the other way around: suppose that some machinery for international co-operation on a worldwide scale, like the League of Nations, is set up; should it be based on regional blocs or on independent states?

Knowing how to get across a city is not the same as knowing how to map it. In this essay, first published in 1943 and republished here in 1964, Alfred Schütz uses the native, stranger, and cartographer to distinguish practical understanding from scientific explanation. His central question is what happens when social scientists judge everyday action by standards of knowledge and consistency developed for theory. Ordinary actors rely on workable recipes; theoretical actors possess motives and information stipulated by their creators. Schütz defends such models without confusing them with living people. Readers can discover both why routine conduct need not be irrational and why a logically coherent explanation must still answer to the meanings an action has for those involved.

How can expectations enter a science of action when the future is uncertain and every observable fact admits rival readings? The answer here refuses two easy paths: against Keynes, Morgenstern, and Myrdal, Lachmann denies that expectations are ultimate data like tastes and resources; against Lundberg and Schumpeter, he denies they can be deduced from objective business situations. A price rise may signal reversion or inflation, so meaning arrives only through the actor's interpretation, and economics needs ideal types and historical understanding rather than deterministic law. From this he builds a theory of plan-guided action and tests it on Hicks's elasticity of expectations and on interest-rate formation, concluding that an Austro-Wicksellian crisis requires a particular expectational climate. The essay makes intelligibility, not determinateness, the proper aim of social science.

The Social World consists not of facts but of our interpretations of the facts.

Can competitive price theory be taught convincingly before students encounter monopoly and imperfect competition? In this 1943 review of the preliminary edition of George J. Stigler’s The Theory of Competitive Price, Fritz Machlup weighs that pedagogical choice while testing the precision of definitions, diagrams, and explanations. His detailed corrections coexist with admiration for Stigler’s concise exposition: a demanding textbook can clarify theory without making it easy. The review offers a concrete view of what Machlup expects from economic instruction—analytical distinctions that hold up under scrutiny, assumptions whose purpose students understand, and technical tools connected to actual problems. His closing disagreement with Schumpeter over the book’s level turns on students’ mathematical preparation, leading to an insistence that advanced theory belongs in the undergraduate curriculum.

What should a textbook in the new field of econometrics teach—and which difficulties should it refuse to evade? In this 1943 review of Harold T. Davis’s The Theory of Econometrics, Gerhard Tintner weighs classroom usefulness against original research. He praises the exposition of economic statics but locates Davis’s strongest contributions in dynamics, particularly the treatment of serial correlation and forecasting, problems he considers too often avoided in economic statistics. His judgement draws on teaching experience: students with some calculus can, he argues, work through the book’s problems and acquire a substantial grounding in the subject. This compact review offers a concrete view of Tintner’s standards for econometric education, joining mathematical theory to the complications of observed economic data.

Openness to new economic ideas need not mean surrender to intellectual fashion. In this brief 1944 review of Oscar R. Hobson’s Can We Afford It?, Hayek praises a financial journalist who states an argument fairly before explaining why it leaves him unconvinced. Hayek’s almost complete agreement with Hobson is explicit, but his judgement also rests on the craft of making difficult questions intelligible in a few paragraphs. The review offers a compact statement of what he values in public economic discussion: attention to immediate policy problems, sensitivity to the ideas behind them, and resistance to treating either yesterday’s paradoxes or today’s commonplaces as final wisdom.

Can a decentralized competitive order modeled on Switzerland answer the problems of a Europe transformed by war? In this 1944 review, Karl Pribram tests Wilhelm Röpke’s proposed “third way” against the historical conditions it must confront. He appreciates Röpke’s scholarship and his effort to reconcile competition, social cohesion, and political liberty, but questions a diagnosis that traces modern upheaval to earlier revolutions while giving insufficient attention to National Socialism. Pribram’s distinctive contribution is to separate the appeal of an institutional ideal from its practical reach: independent farmers, skilled artisans, and decentralized industry may offer an attractive model without providing a transferable remedy. This brief review sharpens the question of what economic reconstruction requires when war has altered the society a reform program presupposes.

The question may be raised whether Röpke's analysis will still be applicable to the conditions of post-war Europe.

Policies suited to a general depression may fail when unemployment is concentrated in particular places. This distinction anchors Gottfried Haberler’s 1944 review of Robert R. Nathan’s Mobilizing for Abundance, a popular exposition of the Keynes–Hansen theory of oversaving. Haberler accepts that preventing a deflationary spiral helps governments address local economic troubles; he objects to treating aggregate demand as a sufficient diagnosis of postwar difficulties. His criticism turns on what Nathan leaves out: resource maldistribution, wage and price rigidity, labor mobility, and inflation. The review offers a pointed account of the difference between making economic policy accessible and making it deceptively simple—and of how prescribing demand stimulus under unsuitable conditions could discredit that policy when it is genuinely needed.