The archive.

The road from chaos to catastrophe is not one the Vatican itself traveled, but the path of Europe seen from the Holy See. That distinction governs this monograph, which reconstructs the interwar Vatican's political mentality through the Austrian diplomatic reporting of Ludwig von Pastor and Rudolf Kohlruss. Engel-Janosi is frank that he pursues judgments and assumptions rather than a chronicle of events: the Paris peace treaties register as a disorder that multiplied grievances while weakening every transnational restraint. From that diagnosis the book descends through the Lateran reconciliation, the condemnation of Action française, the doomed Reichskonkordat and Mit brennender Sorge, to Pius XI's mounting horror of Nazi Germany and the Anschluss he grieved as Europe's ruin. Throughout, moral authority proves unable, by itself, to arrest the slide toward war.

Diese Einstellung entsprach seiner Natur, aber der unmittelbaren, der zündenden Wirkung seiner Worte war sie abträglich.

English translation: “This disposition corresponded to his nature, but it was detrimental to the immediate, kindling effect of his words.”

When does a growth model describe a genuinely open economy, rather than a closed economy with trade variables attached? In this corrective note, Oskar Morgenstern and Gerald L. Thompson sharpen the answer by replacing import prices with export prices in a key positivity assumption. They acknowledge criticism of their earlier formulation and explain why the revised condition repairs an existence proof without changing the theorem statements. The economic distinction is concrete: trade must involve goods of positive value, not merely exchanges of free goods. Readers can follow how a small mathematical correction changes the interpretation of production constraints, while seeing the authors distinguish properties of basic solutions from conditions that would require additional assumptions.

A petrol station can have fuel to sell and still fail to serve motorists who never notice it. This gap between availability and awareness anchors Israel M. Kirzner’s defence of advertising as part of entrepreneurial production, rather than an expense added to a finished good. In this essay, republished in the supplied 2016 edition, he asks why even honest advertising must do more than state facts: it must compete for attention. Against accounts that treat selling costs as waste or product differentiation as monopoly, Kirzner understands competition as discovering and communicating opportunities. His argument gives readers a precise distinction with which to assess advertising’s noisy presence: making information accessible is not the same as making an opportunity noticed. That distinction establishes a legitimate economic function without vindicating deceptive advertisements.

Where the archive falls silent, historians have long reconstructed missing origins by other means — analogy, probability, and assumptions about a constant human nature. Engel-Janosi anatomizes this Enlightenment procedure, which Dugald Stewart christened conjectural history, tracing it from Schiller's teleological selection of a usable past through Rousseau's state of nature and Hobbes's social contract, both treated as legitimating fictions rather than documented events. Vico supplies the sharpest counterpoint: against those who project modern motives backward, he makes the strangeness of early consciousness the very principle of understanding. The essay admires conjecture as indispensable while warning that it hardens gaps in knowledge into necessity, purpose, or myth — turning plurality into sequence and, in Ferguson and Kant, ignorance into apparent law.

So und nicht anders ist und mußte die „Universalgeschichte“ verlaufen.

English translation: “Thus and not otherwise "universal history" runs — and had to run.”

An economy can keep expanding and still undergo a consequential slowdown. Ilse Mintz’s empirical chapter asks how such episodes should be dated—and what recession-only chronologies leave unseen. Working across American indicators of production, employment, income and other activities, she compares departures from trend with alternating phases of higher and lower growth. Her aim is to supplement, not displace, classical business-cycle dating. The payoff is concrete: leading-indicator warnings that look false against recession dates may correspond to genuine growth slowdowns. Readers can discover how choices about measurement change assessments of postwar stability, while following Mintz’s careful distinction between identifying a low-growth phase and recommending expansionary policy. Computerized procedures make the chronology more reproducible without removing judgment from its construction.

Economic theories address people who can learn those theories and change their behavior accordingly. This feedback is central to Oskar Morgenstern’s examination of what economics can describe, predict, and prescribe. In this article, reprinted in 1976 from its 1972 publication, he brings the perspective of game theory and axiomatic utility to bear on the limits of both aggregate measurement and predictive success. Stock-market regularities that disappear when exploited and mixed strategies that remain effective when understood sharpen the question: which economic propositions survive their own application? Morgenstern’s commitment to formal rigor accompanies a concern for expectations, institutions, and historical change. Readers can discover why a successful forecast need not validate a theory—and how theory can guide action without choosing the ends that action should serve.

How did a promoter of government-business cooperation acquire a reputation as the defender of laissez-faire? Murray N. Rothbard’s essay locates the answer in Hoover’s uneasy position between voluntary industrial coordination and compulsory economic planning. Reading Commerce Department activism alongside Depression-era wage agreements, farm price supports, and business lending, Rothbard argues that Hoover helped build the apparatus Roosevelt would expand. His distinctive target is not intervention alone but the use of federal authority to organize producers and restrain competition. The revealing tension comes when Hoover rejects the Swope plan for compulsory industrial organization after years of encouraging cooperation under government auspices. Readers can examine both Rothbard’s case for continuity between Hoover and the New Deal and his explanation of how resistance to further planning could obscure an interventionist record.

When Nixon suspended the dollar's convertibility into gold in August 1971, most observers saw a diplomatic problem to be solved by renegotiated parities. Sennholz reads the collapse of Bretton Woods as something deeper: evidence that money managed by governments is inherently unstable. Writing from an Austrian, market-centered standpoint, he derives exchange rates not from national aggregates but from individual cash balances, expectations, and purchasing power, and contrasts the classical gold-coin standard—an international order requiring no treaties, since coins were valued by weight—with a managed system that concentrated discretion in central banks. Balance-of-payments crises, he argues, are simply people fleeing depreciating money; the dollar's fall traced to domestic deficits and credit expansion, not foreign malice. His remedy is a return to gold, beyond the reach of political manufacture.

Market forces tend to establish the parity between the purchasing powers and thus their exchange ratios.

What could children's liberation actually mean—perhaps, Rothbard suspects, little more than a right to kick adults in the shins on a guaranteed income from long-suffering parents? Beneath the joke, his 1972 essay puts a genuine puzzle to libertarian theory: the infant is neither a full self-owner nor an owned object. His move is to shift from vague "freedom" to jurisdiction over property. Parents may set household rules as conditions of residence on their own property, but may never own the child's body; every child must therefore hold an absolute right to run away, forced return amounting to kidnapping. The parent is trustee-owner and guardian, morally bound to rear and educate yet not legally compelled to do so. Rothbard extends the logic to a market in guardianship and against compulsory schooling and child-labor law, liberating child and parent alike from the State.

Therefore, the child must always be free to run away; he then becomes a self-owner whenever he chooses to exercise his right to run-away freedom.

Envy, in Hazlitt's diagnosis, is not the mere desire for what one lacks but resentment of another's advantage—and because its object is comparative status rather than need, no concession can satisfy it. This 1972 essay argues that redistributive politics is often driven either by envy or by the fear of it, and that forced equalization can only level downward, destroying the abundance from which wages and relief flow. Steep progressive and confiscatory inheritance taxes, he contends, punish the rich symbolically while injuring the poor by starving capital accumulation. His objective test asks not whether a policy favors equality but whether it pursues equality at the expense of abundance. Reaching for Tocqueville on pre-revolutionary France, he warns that appeasing resentment provokes more of it, and that a government paying social blackmail invites the collapse it fears.

Envy is implacable. Concessions merely whet its appetite for more concessions.

The arithmetic is deflating: confiscating every after-tax income above fifty thousand dollars in 1968, Hazlitt calculates, would have yielded barely a hundred and twenty dollars a head, and could never be repeated once those incomes ceased to be earned. That figure frames his survey of redistribution's schemes, from equal division, guaranteed income and the negative income tax he once favored to land reform, progressive taxation and one-time leveling. Each, he argues, mistakes wealth for a fixed surplus rather than a flow produced by work, saving, investment and secure property. Near-confiscatory marginal rates raise little revenue while draining the capital that becomes machines, productivity and higher wages, so they injure the poor more than the rich. Following Irving Fisher, he predicts any equal division would dissolve at once through differences in ability, luck and thrift.

Any attempt to equalize wealth and income by forced redistribution must destroy wealth and income.

"Optimum" sounds like a clear concept and is nothing of the sort. Responding as a discussant to Abram Bergson and Jan Tinbergen, Morgenstern presses two objections that unsettle the confident vocabulary of welfare planning. First, productivity, so intelligible for physical output, becomes one of the weakest ideas in economics once services dominate national income, leaving comparisons across systems on shakier ground than they claim. Second, an optimum invoked rhetorically is not an optimum proven to exist, and recent theory had produced cases where none does. From there he argues that society cannot in principle be fully formalized, that imposed equality raises the unanswered question of what keeps equal incomes equal, and that identical physical circumstances can sustain rival stable orders. Choosing among them, he concludes, is an ethical and political act, not a scientific result.

There is no scientific reason why one system should be preferred over the other.