The archive.

Honouring Leonard Read on his seventieth birthday, Hayek turns a tribute into a challenge to defenders of a free society: explain your case better rather than impugn your opponents’ motives. This 1968 speech, republished in 2013, links that obligation to Hayek’s account of civilisation as the unintended outcome of evolving moral and legal rules, whose functions may remain obscure even to those who depend on them. Its personal turn is especially revealing. Hayek admits that he initially regarded Read chiefly as a populariser, then came to recognise an original thinker whose everyday language concealed no lack of depth. The speech offers a compact encounter with Hayek’s defence of inherited institutions—and his recognition that making an argument intelligible can itself advance understanding.

Our chief task therefore must still be to improve the argument on which our case for a free society rests.

A growing population need not supply more work. In this 1968 article, Gerhard Tintner and Yves Aureille examine that tension in France’s postwar demographic revival, separating the number of workers from the hours they contribute. Their accounting method distinguishes employment growth from changes in sectoral composition and working time: movement out of agriculture, with its longer hours, can reduce total labour input even as employment expands. They propose a quality-adjusted measure of labour services, while acknowledging that available French statistics permit only a simpler calculation of hours. Their conditional projection of declining labour input in 1965–70 gives the methodological problem a concrete edge. Readers can discover why schooling, retirement, holidays, and occupational shifts complicate any direct inference from demographic growth to labour supply.

The Rio Agreement on Special Drawing Rights succeeded, on Machlup's reading, precisely because it refused to call a spade a spade: by avoiding contested words — credit, loan, reserve, repayment — it let France read SDRs as a repayable credit facility while Britain and America read them as new reserve assets. Reconstructing the negotiations among the IMF and the Group of Ten, he explains SDRs as a closed giro system among monetary authorities, money created by allocation rather than lending, whose acceptability rests on mutual willingness rather than collateral. He endorses the design while insisting on its limits: added liquidity works only indirectly, easing the pressure that pushes governments toward import restrictions and deflation, and it leaves the dollar overhang, gold speculation, and rigid exchange rates unresolved.

Money needs takers, not backers; the takers accept it, not because of any backing, but only because they count on others accepting it from them.

When Treasury Secretary Henry Fowler laid out his 1968 tax-reform agenda—exempt the poor, tax high incomes shielded by preferences, revisit estate and gift duties, curb tourists' spending abroad—Sennholz read compassion as compulsion. His counter-move is to redefine "the rich" not as idle hoarders but as businessmen and investors whose saving builds the factories and stores that employ the poor; to tax their capital, he argues, is to consume the very fund on which rising wages depend. He defends municipal-bond exemption as a constitutional shield for state borrowing, treats a proposed seventy-seven-percent estate levy as either demagoguery or socialism, and reads the curb on foreign travel as a police measure. Invoking Marshall's warning that the power to tax is the power to destroy, he joins economic, constitutional, and civil-libertarian objections to Great Society redistribution.

Taxing Peter to pay Paul has become a respectable way of life with countless pressure groups and their vociferous spokesmen in Congress.

Political thought stumbles because everyday language fuses what must be kept apart: grown orders with designed organizations, law with command, popular opinion with unlimited collective will. Presented here in translation of Hayek's 1967 essay, the lecture threads seven paired distinctions to clear the confusion, cosmos and taxis, nomos and thesis, articulated and non-articulated rules, opinion and will, nomocracy and teleocracy, catallaxy and economy, demarchy and democracy. A cosmos serves no single purpose and can marshal knowledge dispersed beyond any mind; a taxis is imposed toward chosen ends. Because a spontaneous order allocates nothing, social justice can have meaning only inside an organization. From these terms Hayek rebuilds liberal constitutionalism, proposing demarchy, popular authority over universal rules but not over particular outcomes, as the cure for factional, unlimited majority power.

The insight that not all order that results from the interplay of human actions is the result of design is indeed the beginning of social theory.

Reform is easy to want in rhetoric and costly to endure in fact—and that gap, Sennholz argues, is why electoral hope so reliably disappoints. Saving the dollar from inflation, he insists, cannot be a mere central-bank adjustment; it is a political willingness to let earlier errors be liquidated. Halting credit expansion would expose years of malinvestment, raise interest rates, depress stocks and bonds, and bring recession—the price of a sound currency. Drawing on Gustave Le Bon, he frames monetary reform as a moral problem before a technical one: laws only express popular ideas, and the public that cheers reform balks at its consequences. Because stabilization also strips unions of the inflationary cover for rigid wages, genuine reform would mean abolishing the National Labor Relations Board and restoring a market in labor—something he doubts any administration would endure.

Monetary stabilization means price stabilization, which is a fatal enemy of labor unions.

Scarcity sets the members of a species at odds, yet human beings escape that antagonism through the division of labor and peaceful exchange, so that the market becomes the standard form of interhuman relations. Against both anarchism and socialism, this 1968 essay argues that the market cannot defend itself and therefore needs the state—'a grim apparatus of coercion'—to restrain those who break the peace. But no middle sphere exists: talk of a friendly 'public sector' cannot fuse the two opposed principles of voluntary agreement and command. Planning does not merely administer production differently; it transfers the individual's power of choice to a central authority, demanding obedience from cradle to coffin. Mises ends categorically—the market economy is the only order tending toward the cheapest provisioning of consumers.

There is no conciliation between constraint and spontaneity.

What one person can do against the drift toward socialism is the easy question; the harder one is what defenders of liberty must do together. Hazlitt reframes the problem strategically: interventionism survives not through bad arguments alone but through entrenched institutions—agencies, beneficiaries, pressure groups, and paid experts, some 2,133 federal bureaus by the Hoover Commission's 1954 count—each defending its own program with specialized authority. His remedy is a division of intellectual labor: general principles cannot substitute for detailed mastery of farm policy, labor law, monetary policy, and taxation. He distrusts business as a reliable ally, invokes Bastiat on the state as the fiction by which everyone lives at everyone else's expense, and settles on honest money as the single front where every libertarian can concentrate.

The war must be fought on a thousand fronts, and the true libertarians are grossly outnumbered on practically all these fronts.

Robbins refuses the grand definitions: development, for these expanded 1966 Chichele Lectures, means neither national grandeur nor moral progress but change in real income per head and the productive capacity behind it. He traces how that question passed through economic thought—posed energetically by mercantilist pamphleteers yet rarely theorized, made central by the Physiocrats though wrongly confined to agriculture, given classical structure by Smith's division of labour and capital accumulation. The causal conditions of growth follow: population, saving, the growth of usable knowledge, monetary institutions, and a Smithian natural liberty that is legal order rather than anarchy. The marginal revolution, he argues, narrowed economics toward allocation, while Marshall and Schumpeter kept a developmental imagination alive. A final lecture weighs whether growth should be desired, setting it beside liberty, education, and amenity.

Why do socialist economies, for all their proclaimed internationalism, trade so little and so cautiously? Haberler's answer, offered as candid speculations of a theorist, is that comparative cost identifies gains from trade but never realizes them; someone must go looking. Marginal analysis and shadow pricing can aid socialist calculation, yet they cannot supply the entrepreneurial discovery that foreign markets demand: unfamiliar demand, currency risk, contractual hazard, the real possibility of loss. Private merchants chase profit across borders; plan-bound managers, rewarded for fulfilment and punished for failure, stay inward-looking and nationalistic. The predicted result is trade aversion and undertrading, volumes far below the comparative-cost optimum, together with bilateralism, barter, and imports confined to unavoidable necessities. It is comparative advantage recast from a static doctrine into an institutional argument.

Nationalism has proved to be an extremely hardy plant.

Can an economy sustain balanced growth while maintaining activities that lose money? Oskar Morgenstern and Gerald L. Thompson address this question by opening the generalized von Neumann growth model to trade at externally fixed prices. Their distinctive move is to combine those trading opportunities with domestic bounds on production, allowing profitable industries to finance loss-making services rather than excluding them from equilibrium. Under the model’s assumptions, these controls permit a continuous range of expansion rates where the closed model offered only finitely many. Linear-programming proofs and numerical examples show how trade prices and production requirements shape feasible growth—and how openness can raise it. The article also makes a useful distinction: establishing what specified controls make possible is not the same as deciding which controls an economy should choose.

Postwar West Germany posed a puzzle: aggregate output and employment climbed almost without interruption, yet the economy plainly alternated between vigor and sluggishness. Mintz resolves it by abandoning the classical cycle, which demands absolute declines, for the growth cycle, alternating periods of above- and below-average growth that she neutrally terms speedups and slowdowns. Applying two dating methods to twenty-one indicators, deviation cycles measured against a moving-average trend and step cycles built from growth rates, and consolidating the individual turns through diffusion indexes, she fixes a monthly chronology of three and a half cycles between 1951 and 1967. Classical analysis, she shows, would register no German recession at all before 1966-67. The turning points, she insists, are genuine economic phenomena, not figments of statistical procedure.

Periods regarded as downswings by business and policy makers in Europe and Japan have not usually been characterized by declines in aggregate output, income or employment.