The archive.

Counting equations is not the same as proving that an economic equilibrium exists. This distinction anchors Oskar Morgenstern’s review of J. R. Hicks’s Value and Capital, which welcomes the ambition to unite static and dynamic economics while challenging the foundations of that synthesis. Morgenstern demands both mathematical proof and a clear relation between theoretical assumptions and observable behaviour. His criticism becomes especially concrete when he considers individual plans: intentions that appear compatible in isolation may destabilize a system when acted upon together, as in simultaneous bank withdrawals. The review offers a pointed account of why expectations, uncertainty, and knowledge of other people’s plans resist simple aggregation—and why, for Morgenstern, a theory of economic fluctuations must earn its connection to the fluctuations it claims to explain.

Admiration need not come with a compulsory reservation: Felix Kaufmann defends Sidney Hook’s enthusiastic portrait of Dewey against the demand that it include criticism. His own objection is more pointed. By painting traditional philosophy too darkly, Hook risks encouraging readers to pursue Dewey while abandoning other philosophers. This brief review draws a useful distinction between wholehearted assent to a thinker and fairness to the intellectual alternatives. Kaufmann’s praise for Hook’s clarity and organization makes his warning sharper: an effective introduction can open one path of inquiry while closing others.

If the author feels like simply saying yes, why should he say "yes, but"?

How can logic rest on experience when scientific knowledge is itself defined by logical rules? In this review of Husserl’s Erfahrung und Urteil, Felix Kaufmann makes that apparent circle intelligible by distinguishing receptive experience from the judgments formed upon it. His concrete example—a physical thing said to occupy a place—shows how an ordinary assertion carries assumptions about possible perceptions, including those of other people. Kaufmann explains why Husserl seeks to understand objectivity through subjective experience rather than taking the objective world as given. The review offers a compact orientation to this philosophical reversal, alongside a pointed judgment: debates about eidetic intuition should engage Husserl’s later analysis rather than remain fixed on Logische Untersuchungen. Kaufmann’s call for English translations also records his concern over the work’s restricted reception.

Felix Kaufmann’s review of John Dewey’s Theory of Valuation and J. H. Woodger’s The Technique of Theory Construction asks what methodological clarification can achieve—and what it need not discard. He welcomes Dewey’s account of ends and desires as subject to practical appraisal, yet questions whether rationalist ethics must be rejected outright: its supposedly pre-established values might instead be understood as guiding ideals for conduct. His endorsement of Woodger’s symbolic logic is similarly discriminating. A common notation can expose relations between scientific theories and mechanize routine operations without replacing the invention of hypotheses. This brief review offers a concrete encounter with Kaufmann’s critical stance: receptive to pragmatic and formal methods, attentive to their limits, and particularly alert to the difficulties posed by vague concepts in the social sciences.

An economy’s complexity seems to call for comprehensive direction; Hayek argues that it makes such direction impracticable. In this 1941 article, reprinted in 1997, he shifts attention from the planner’s objectives to the changing, local knowledge needed to use scarce resources well. A shortage of tin makes the problem concrete: how can users decide what to conserve, replace or recover without knowing why supplies have tightened? Hayek’s answer is that competitive prices coordinate adjustments without assembling everyone’s knowledge in one place. His argument depends on genuine competition, not simply the existence of markets, and his acceptance of wartime planning qualifies rather than abandons it. The article offers a compact account of why economic coordination involves discovering possibilities, not merely executing a known design.

'I am not running a drug store,' Schumpeter told the Economic Club of Detroit in the spring of 1941 — no pills to hand out, only a diagnosis. Wartime defense spending, he warned, could be the catalyst that turned America's excess reserves and government-monopolized gold stock into inflation, no greenbacks required. The deeper argument is constitutional: gold was never essential to money, but like Supreme Courts and constitutions it restrained the freedom of action of government, telling the truth, like a naughty child, about a nation's finances. Planned economies resent exactly that discipline, so gold's old function is gone — though he allows it a narrower postwar life within an Anglo-American convention or bullion standard, if governments will accept limits on their own sovereignty.

Gold has no function, for planned economy has come to stay.

Why did Swiss officers who proposed a stronger federal government in 1830 later fall silent about their initiative? William Emmanuel Rappard follows scattered testimony, newly located correspondence, and a petition reprinted in the Journal de Genève to recover two distinct reform proposals. Their American inspiration lay chiefly in central authority and military coordination, not the representative institutions later favoured by radicals. Rappard suggests that the officers retreated when their programme attracted political opponents while alienating conservative allies; suspicions of French influence further weakened its credibility. This historical investigation offers a concrete distinction between competing uses of the American constitutional example—and shows how letters and hostile newspaper commentary can recover an abandoned project without resolving every uncertainty about its design or disappearance.

An armaments boom can raise employment while leaving the long-term unemployed behind and reducing the goods available for civilian life. This tension gives Oskar Morgenstern’s 1941 article its sharpest test of conventional unemployment analysis. He treats idle workers, machinery, and materials not as interchangeable reserves but as resources whose particular skills and uses constrain economic adjustment. His skepticism extends to forecasts built on business-cycle regularities and statistics that may assume the patterns they claim to discover. Yet methodological caution does not prevent him from advocating controversial wage reductions, paired with monetary support for the total wage bill. The article lets readers examine both that policy judgment and a concrete problem it cannot settle: how wartime production can expand employment while preparing a difficult transition when military demand ends.

How does a thought retain its meaning while its content continually changes? In this essay, supplied in its 1970 republication, Alfred Schütz brings William James’s stream of thought into conversation with Husserl’s phenomenological psychology. His focus is the often-overlooked fringe of experience: the felt relations, expectations, and receding impressions that make a present thought more than an isolated mental event. Schütz shows how James’s descriptions can illuminate Husserl’s accounts of horizons and temporal continuity without making James a phenomenologist or claiming historical influence. The comparison gives readers a concrete approach to a difficult problem: how an object remains identifiable across changing experiences, and how the conclusion of a train of thought can remain available after its intermediate steps have faded.

A convincing account of a crisis need not rest on a convincing theory of economic change. In this review of Thomas Wilson’s Fluctuations in Income and Employment, Ludwig Lachmann praises much of the analysis of American fluctuations while challenging the theoretical synthesis behind it. His objections are concrete: raw-material shortages can interrupt expansion, industrial equipment differs in age and productivity, and expectations cannot simply be treated as given. These concerns sharpen his defence of Austrian cycle theory against what he regards as Wilson’s static assumptions. The review culminates in a question that reaches beyond their disagreement: if investment opportunities are exhausted, what explains the human effort through which new ones arise? Readers encounter a compact example of Lachmann testing economic explanation against changing resources and purposeful action.

A useful statistical textbook need not settle the theoretical problems behind its procedures. In this brief review of the second edition of Mordecai Ezekiel’s Methods of Correlation Analysis, Gerhard Tintner distinguishes genuine practical improvements from questions the discipline itself has yet to resolve. His qualified praise turns especially on the reliability of time-series forecasts: a sketchy treatment of error formulas disappoints him, but he refuses to blame Ezekiel for the absence of generally accepted solutions. Tintner also notes the edition’s reliance on Fisher’s fiducial approach rather than newer theories of estimation and hypothesis testing. The review offers a concise appraisal of what improved statistical instruction can provide—and what remains beyond its reach.

What can economic analysis establish about monopoly, and where must political judgment begin? In this 1942 review of E. A. G. Robinson’s Monopoly, Fritz Machlup admires the handbook’s integration of institutional detail and theory while testing the precision of its claims. He questions the basis for comparing one person’s satisfaction with another’s burden and identifies the constant-marginal-cost assumption needed for Robinson’s claim about demand elasticity and monopoly output. His appreciation is equally discriminating: breaking a monopoly into a few firms need not restore competition, and opportunities for firms to combine complicate equilibrium. The review offers a compact example of sympathetic criticism, showing how accessible applied economics can remain answerable to explicit assumptions and clearly acknowledged value judgments.