The archive.

In May 1895 Kálnoky could describe Austria-Hungary's foreign relations as orderly while an American envoy judged the monarchy's future exceptionally bleak—and Engel-Janosi shows the two verdicts need not contradict each other. Reconstructing the foreign minister's resignation as a constitutional rather than merely personal crisis, he traces its trigger to the Agliardi affair, in which the papal nuncio's politically charged Hungarian visitation let Premier Bánffy turn a conditional diplomatic protest into a public fait accompli. Behind the rupture lay a structural defect of the 1867 Ausgleich: a common foreign ministry obliged to act for the Dual Monarchy without any command able to restrain Vienna and Budapest at once. Agliardi's later recall partly vindicated Kálnoky, but his fall came as European politics dissolved into a wider world crisis, Russia's gaze turning eastward after Japan's defeat of China.

Zwei Leistungen bestimmen die geschichtliche Rolle des Grafen Kálnoky: seine Politik des Abschlusses und der zweimaligen Erneuerung des Dreibundvertrages und seine Politik gegenüber Rußland, in der die Balkanfrage das Zentralproblem darstellte.

English translation: “Two achievements determine the historical role of Count Kálnoky: his policy of concluding and twice renewing the Triple Alliance treaty, and his policy toward Russia, in which the Balkan question was the central problem.”

Rename a cause as its effect, and blame for it dissolves: this, Mises charges, is the semantic trick by which governments escape responsibility for inflation. Properly understood, inflation is not the rise in prices but the state's expansion of money and bank credit—here to finance rearmament—which adds government demand to undiminished civilian demand and drives prices upward. Officials then claim to fight inflation while sustaining its cause, attacking only the visible symptom through price control. But ceilings cannot repeal scarcity: fixed below market-clearing levels, they force high-cost producers out and empty the shelves, as American experience under the Office of Price Administration showed. The one remedy, he insists, is to stop creating money for the Treasury; the cost of spending must fall somewhere, and inflation merely hides who pays.

This is a classical case of the thief crying “catch the thief.”

Reprinted from a 1951 newspaper column, this brief polemic reads the postwar boom as an artificial episode conjured by paper money, bank credit, cheap interest, and deficit finance rather than as genuine prosperity. Mises presses the Austrian distinction between real capital accumulation and its monetary substitutes: rising prices prove not new wealth but falsified entrepreneurial calculation, so every credit-driven boom carries its own reversal. His deeper warning is ideological. When the inevitable slump arrives, a public that blames capitalism instead of inflationary public finance—the New Deal, the Fair Deal—will convert the failure of intervention into an argument for central planning. Avoiding depressions therefore means refusing artificial booms beforehand, though Mises doubts that politicians, who reap present popularity and leave the crash to their successors, will ever exercise such restraint.

Worse than the crisis itself could prove the psychological and ideological consequences of an erroneous interpretation of its causes.

The era of financing government by taxing wealthy minorities has ended, Mises told a 1951 conference on the economics of mobilization; henceforth the masses must foot the bill. His target is the comforting belief that inflation offers a painless alternative to taxation. It works, he shows, only on public ignorance: while people expect prices to fall they hold cash, but once they grasp that depreciation is deliberate they rush to buy—the flight into real values that wrecks the currency. War means diverting real goods from civilian to military use, a cost no printing press can conjure away; the honest methods are taxation and genuine borrowing from savings. Inflation, by hiding costs and shifting popular anger onto merchants and 'profiteers,' is at bottom an antidemocratic evasion, not democratic generosity.

At the breakfast table of every citizen in wartime sits an invisible guest, as it were, a GI who shares his meal.

Does democratic control of money protect freedom—or remove a restraint on government power? In this 1951 article, Wilhelm Röpke defends monetary independence as part of the same constitutional order as federalism and the separation of powers. His argument turns on an asymmetry: inflation offers immediate political rewards while postponing its costs, whereas deflation makes its pain felt at once. Against demands to subordinate central banks to elected governments, he presents the gold standard and bank autonomy as safeguards against this temptation. His critique also distinguishes inflation from its repression through administrative controls, which he argues extends coercion without removing monetary pressure. Readers encounter a pointed case for treating stable money not merely as an economic objective, but as a limit on concentrated power.

Inflation is an ever-present temptation. Under all circumstances it is the line of least resistance. There is no organized lobby opposed to it.

For a century, Mill's exalted tributes to Harriet Taylor were dismissed as the delusion of a besotted logician. Assembling letters, family testimony, and a scrupulous chronology, Hayek sets out to replace legend with evidence, tracing the friendship from Harriet's radical circle around W. J. Fox through scandal, chronic illness, concealed journeys to Italy, the 1851 marriage, and her death at Avignon in 1858. The documents present the bond as moral and intellectual discipline rather than romance: Harriet emerges as collaborator on the Principles of Political Economy and on the essays toward On Liberty, a judgment that reshaped Mill's rationalism. Hayek's method is his argument, letting dates and manuscripts do the work where gossip once ruled. What begins as archival restraint ends in bereavement, the edition closing on the widower's grief.

The spring of my life is broken.

How do musicians understand one another when what they share cannot be restated in words? In this essay, reprinted in 1964, Alfred Schütz uses musical performance to question whether common signs and conventions are enough to explain communication. A score cannot specify everything players must do: they anticipate one another’s phrasing, respond to bodily movements, and adjust their freedom to that of their partners. Schütz’s phenomenological perspective brings these ordinary acts of coordination into focus as a sharing of lived time, distinct from agreement on clock time. His account lets readers reconsider both ensemble playing and attentive listening as relationships constituted through unfolding experience. Music becomes a concrete test of his claim that communication presupposes a “mutual tuning-in,” rather than producing it through a shared code alone.

Music is a meaningful context which is not bound to a conceptual scheme.

A military supply operation can succeed without showing whether it could have used fewer resources or responded faster. In this 1955 article, revised and extended from a RAND memorandum, Oskar Morgenstern asks what must be understood before logistical performance can be judged or optimized. His economic and organizational perspective makes a shipment more than a quantity moved: personnel and machinery create continuing demands, complementary goods must arrive together, and requests may conceal inflated expectations. These dependencies make uniform cuts and rigid supply packages unreliable. Readers can discover why sources must exercise judgment rather than merely fill orders, and why military command needs broadly circulating information as well as directed instructions. Morgenstern’s proposed groundwork for theory exposes the practical choices hidden inside apparently straightforward calculations of requirements.

Schumpeter inspired lasting intellectual loyalty without founding a distinct school of economics. In this 1951 obituary, Oskar Morgenstern explores that contrast as both a former student and a critical fellow economist. He recalls the revelatory force of Schumpeter’s early theory while questioning the empirical conclusions of Business Cycles and the kind of capitalism whose demise Schumpeter predicted. Admiration sharpens rather than suspends his judgment: an economist receptive to new scientific methods remained attached to a vanished social world. The result is a compact portrait that helps readers distinguish Schumpeter’s theoretical achievements from his historical expectations—and understand how his generosity toward younger scholars fostered independent work rather than doctrinal allegiance.

What can an economic law establish if it cannot predict the size of a price change or settle the causes of a revolution? In this 1951 reply to Schuller, Murray N. Rothbard defends the certainty he attributes to praxeological deduction while sharply limiting its authority over particular events. His monetary examples make the distinction concrete: a law connecting money supply and purchasing power does not tell the historian whether its conditions held, or the forecaster whether they will persist. Readers can examine why Rothbard treats observed dollar shortages as illustrations rather than tests—and where that position places the burden of explanation. The reply offers a compact account of his methodological commitments without equating theoretical certainty with infallible historical or political judgment.

Praxeology is indispensable, but it does not provide omniscience. It furnishes laws in the form of: If X, and if Y remains unchanged, then Z.

Strip profit and loss from the market, Mises argues, and production loses its only compass - the point this 1951 pamphlet drives home. Profit, he explains, is no arbitrary surcharge but the reward for anticipating future prices better than one's rivals and correcting the market's maladjustments, while loss is the penalty for judging wrong; under perfect foresight neither could exist. He then meets the moral condemnation of profit head on, rebutting the slogan of production for use and not for profit, the schemes to abolish or cap entrepreneurial gains, and the demand for equality, which he treats as envy in the guise of justice. The alternative to consumer-directed enterprise, he warns, is not a gentler middle way but socialism - and with it the erosion of representative government and civil liberty.

The consumers by their buying and abstention from buying elect the entrepreneurs in a daily repeated plebiscite as it were.

A firm, an army, a university, a logistics system: none can be understood as a mere sum of its inputs, because their capacities depend on arrangements of authority, information, timing, and control. Morgenstern's unfinished RAND memorandum clears the ground for a future quantitative theory of organization, arguing that economics has treated the firm as a black box and lacked even a descriptive language for what happens inside it. He builds one, distinguishing inner from outer activity, defining operations as chosen sequences of acts, and replacing organic metaphors with "competences," units delegated authority to set variables within domains. Signals activate them, memory sustains them, control counters the drift toward disorder. Written in 1951, the memorandum anticipates cybernetics, information theory, operations research, and bounded rationality, insisting that careful phenomenological description must precede any premature axiomatization.

Organization in itself, wherever it occurs, whether in social or natural life, is something exceptional and extraordinary.