The archive.

Can the desire to put science and industry at the service of human welfare justify directing them from a centre? In this 1941 paired review, Hayek welcomes Michael Polanyi’s challenge to scientific and economic planning, emphasizing the gap between benevolent intentions and the specialized knowledge on which discovery and practical judgment depend. Colin Clark’s reconstruction of Soviet economic statistics gives that institutional criticism a concrete test. Hayek draws attention to depressed food consumption and deteriorating housing, but also acknowledges later improvements and industrial gains. Read together, his assessments show why increased production cannot alone settle questions about freedom or material welfare—and how a critic of planning weighs evidence that complicates his own position.

A venture may promise substantial gains yet remain unthinkable if failure would end the entrepreneur’s capacity to try again. In this 1941 article, G. L. S. Shackle connects that asymmetry to a concrete proposal: a public Board would guarantee partial recovery of investment costs when equipment is surrendered, financed by a levy on successful ventures. His distinctive concern is not average expected returns but the imagined extremes of success and disaster that command an investor’s attention. The scheme tests how far public protection can encourage private initiative without removing responsibility for loss. Its uncomfortable provision for scrapping surrendered equipment sharpens the tension between preserving productive assets and opening new investment opportunities. Readers encounter an institutional application of Shackle’s thinking about uncertainty, explicitly offered for experiment rather than as a proven remedy.

Protecting small shopkeepers can preserve their businesses while making them increasingly dependent on political privilege. In this 1941 reply to Reisner, Walter Froehlich examines that tension through Central European retail restrictions: scarce licences acquire prices of their own, while price controls redirect competition toward costly services and additional outlets. His distinctive concern is how protection generates demands for further controls over business size, location, turnover and wages. Froehlich does not claim that retail regulation alone produces Fascism; he argues that it can foster an outlook in which political power replaces economic adaptation. The note offers a concrete way to examine the distance between defending independent proprietors and preserving their independence—and why, in Froehlich’s account, nominal private ownership need not safeguard democratic compromise.

How can an economic theory become obsolete while its author remains a productive guide? In this 1941 appraisal of Alfred Marshall’s Principles, Joseph A. Schumpeter separates the survival of doctrines from the continuing usefulness of a way of investigating economic life. He finds Marshall’s strength in the conjunction of mathematical reasoning, close observation of English business, and tools capable of supporting statistical measurement. His admiration is exacting: partial equilibrium can mislead when extended beyond its proper setting, and Marshall concealed the mathematics essential to his achievement. Readers can discover why theoretical compromises that look defective in a general system may nevertheless enable concrete inquiry—and why Schumpeter locates Marshall’s lasting influence in research possibilities rather than authoritative conclusions.

One God in heaven, one lord on earth: the Mongol letters and edicts of 1245–1255 turned that cosmic analogy into a working juridical doctrine of world conquest. Voegelin collects and classifies the documents carried between the papal and French courts and the khans—two khan letters, two edicts, two commanders' letters—reconstructing their preambles after Pelliot and reading them as formal legal instruments rather than mere barbarian arrogance. The empire they proclaim is an imperium mundi in statu nascendi, a world-empire-in-the-making in which every ruler, upon contact, must submit and enter as vassal or be destroyed as rebel. What lifts the study above orientalist antiquarianism is Voegelin's closing move, comparing the Mongols' sacral literalism—killing and conquest proclaimed as divine judgment—to the peace rhetoric of modern communist regimes.

Das Opfer der Aggression ist der Aggressor.

English translation: “The victim of aggression is the aggressor.”

How could America’s gold accumulation support employment yet leave it with a largely useless stock of metal? In this conference discussion paper, Fritz Machlup reviews arguments advanced by Neisser and Hardy, separating the effects of acquiring gold from the benefits of possessing it. His answer turns on idle resources: exports exchanged for gold could raise income without displacing much other production, though wartime bottlenecks would change that calculation. Equally pointed is his refusal to equate correcting policy with reversing it. He condemns the 1933–34 dollar devaluation but argues that lowering the gold price during war would weaken Britain’s purchasing power. The paper offers a concrete way to distinguish financial expenditure from real economic sacrifice—and to assess monetary decisions by their present consequences rather than their apparent consistency.

If it is found that a certain move was a mistake, it is not always possible to repair it by moving back; moving back may often be just another mistake.

Written in 1941 and reprinted here in 1997, Hayek’s wartime essay asks how Britain can act intelligently towards Germany without mistaking understanding for forgiveness. He traces a practical weakness in British policy to alternating admiration and hostility, reinforced by travel impressions rather than sustained study of German intellectual life. His distinctive concern is that German ideas already circulate within Britain and among its allies: refusing to study them does not prevent their influence, but makes it harder to judge. The essay connects this problem to concrete institutional remedies—university training for specialists and controlled scholarly access to current German publications. It offers a pointed account of why foreign knowledge requires interpreters able to notice developments beyond a government’s immediate wartime needs.

A machine may remain physically sound long after it ceases to earn its owner anything. In this reply to Professor Pigou, Hayek uses that gap to challenge a definition of capital maintenance based on replacing wear and tear while excluding obsolescence. Three investments with identical physical lifetimes but sharply different commercial prospects show why depreciation allowances must depend on expectations, not merely on durable equipment. The distinction matters for taxation as well as accounting: treating foreseeable replacement costs as disposable income would, Hayek argues, penalise industries undergoing rapid technological change. His concise reply separates provision for anticipated losses from saving after unforeseen losses, and asks when a familiar accounting convention serves—or defeats—its practical purpose of preserving future earning capacity.

Admiration does not erase disagreement in Hayek’s 1941 review of Ludwig von Mises’s Nationalökonomie. He welcomes its integration of economic theory, social cooperation, and liberal policy, yet questions its treatment of interest and the intellectual isolation that limits its engagement with contemporary economics. His strongest allegiance concerns method: Mises’s account of human action, Hayek argues, offers a more persuasive foundation for social inquiry than prevailing attempts to borrow methods from the natural sciences. This short review lets readers locate both the shared ground and the friction between two economists often grouped together. It also shows what Hayek values in a systematic treatise: not merely consistency, but the capacity to connect technical arguments with questions of social cooperation and policy.

Understanding Nazi Germany’s appeal need not mean excusing it. In this 1941 joint review, republished in 1997, Hayek welcomes two contrasting corrections to wartime perceptions: Paul Einzig’s exposure of Germany’s promised European order and C. W. Guillebaud’s account of social policies that helped secure German workers’ support. His sharper objection concerns what the reviewers’ subjects share: an apparent willingness to approve Nazi methods while condemning their purposes. Hayek asks whether comprehensive planning itself demands coercion, imposed hierarchies and leaders ruthless enough to enforce them. This brief review lets readers encounter that question in a concrete dispute over how to describe an enemy accurately—and how to judge seemingly desirable policies by the power required to carry them out.

Austria's long transformation from the Ottomans' frontier antagonist into their guarantor, the price of holding Russia back from Constantinople, frames this account of how Vienna met the birth of the Greek kingdom. Engel-Janosi weighs Metternich's reluctance, who saw in the war of independence only a rebellion, against King Ludwig of Bavaria's dynastic investment in his son Otto, and gives Prokesch-Osten, Austria's envoy in Athens, the central role: a conservative trying to shore up an independent Greek monarchy amid the rivalry of Britain, France, Russia, and Bavaria. Through the Armansperg and Rudhart ministries, the constitutional revolution of 1843, and the duel of Maurokordatos and Kolettis, the project decays. Austrian passivity, great-power intrigue, Greek factionalism, and Otto's weakness, he concludes, made an independent conservative Greece untenable.

Staaten hat noch niemand geschaffen; sie schaffen sich selbst.

English translation: “No one has ever created states; they create themselves.”

Scientific expertise can explain general laws—but can it supply the changing, local knowledge needed to direct an economy? In this 1941 article, republished here in 1997, Friedrich August von Hayek addresses scientists and engineers drawn to centralized planning. He contrasts their ideal of deliberate construction with the coordination achieved through competitive prices, then asks what happens to intellectual freedom when one authority controls the resources needed to pursue competing purposes. His contention is that comprehensive planning concentrates power over ends, not merely economic means. The article offers a compact encounter with the connection between Hayek’s account of dispersed knowledge and his defence of liberty, while distinguishing policies that sustain competition or supplement its results from those that replace it with a single plan.

Whoever controls the means must decide which ends they are to serve.