The archive.

We plan by imagining what we will have accomplished—but carrying out a plan changes what we know and what its accomplishment means to us. This tension anchors Alfred Schütz’s inquiry into knowledge of the future. Beginning with Tiresias, whose certain foreknowledge offers no power to intervene, Schütz turns to the less certain but practically useful expectations of ordinary life. His phenomenological perspective locates foresight in socially acquired knowledge, familiar patterns, and the interests that make some possibilities matter more than others. The essay’s distinctive insight is that projects anticipate completed acts rather than merely picturing actions ahead. It gives readers a precise way to understand why expectations can guide conduct reliably without ever capturing an event exactly as it will occur.

Does the merchandise trade balance rise or fall when a nation's economy expands? The empirical record, Mintz found, had scarcely been examined, though contradictory assumptions abounded. Working with quarterly American and British data from 1880 to 1938 and the Burns-Mitchell cycle method, she establishes that both balances swing in long cycles closely tied to domestic business, yet in opposite ways. The American balance moved inversely, sinking in late expansions and recovering sharply in early contractions; the British balance conformed positively before 1914 and then reversed to become perfectly inverse after the war. Refining the picture with a world-cycle chronology of co-phases and counter-phases, she overturns the belief that all creditor or industrial countries share a single cyclical pattern, and traces the British reversal to altered terms of trade rather than to industrialization.

General expansion depressed, contraction improved the trade balance.

Can freely imagining variations of an object disclose its essence—or does the familiar type already determine what we can imagine? In this essay, Alfred Schütz presses that question against Husserl’s accounts of everyday experience and eidetic intuition. Recognizing a dog involves expectations acquired through previous encounters; discovering an essence is supposed to reach beyond such contingent familiarity. Schütz asks what warrants the passage between them. His attention to interest and selective attention makes the difficulty concrete: resemblance alone cannot explain which features count when we recognize something as a kind of thing. Readers can discover how an apparently technical distinction between type and essence bears on the limits of phenomenological method, without mistaking Schütz’s conditional challenge for a dismissal of Husserl’s project.

When Walter Reuther pressed his 1958 wage demands on behalf of the United Automobile Workers, Hayek seized on them as a test case for a broader warning about legally privileged group power. Modern unions, he argues, owe their strength not to freedom of association but to the tolerated coercion of workers willing to accept other terms, and their wage pressure turns inflationary only once monetary authorities feel bound to supply whatever credit full employment demands at any wage. Distinguishing average output from the marginal productivity of labour, he brands the claim on productivity gains generated by capital an attempted expropriation, and reads Reuther's profit-sharing scheme as a step toward syndicalism—not public ownership, but the seizure of enterprise returns by closed groups of incumbent workers who supply none of the capital.

Inflation-born prosperity has never been and never will be lasting prosperity.

Because dependent earners form the majority of the population, Bayer treats their place in economic policy not as a workplace detail but as the pivot on which democracy either becomes real or lapses into empty form. He defines the workforce broadly, as all dependent earners for whom being ruled outweighs ruling, and maps three routes of participation: the occupational, running from firm-level codetermination up through branch committees; the common-economy route of cooperatives, municipal enterprise, and the nationalized sector; and the political route of elections and referenda. Firm-level co-ownership and profit-sharing in monopoly firms he rejects as blind alleys. Grounding the whole case in the economy's purpose, the securing of material foundations for personality development, he warns of a negative accelerator in which absent institutions dampen interest, and absent interest blocks the institutions.

Es geht darum, die Gefahren einer bloß formalen Demokratie zu vermeiden und lebendige Demokratie sicherzustellen.

English translation: “The task is to avoid the dangers of a merely formal democracy and to ensure a living democracy.”

Switzerland, Amonn argues, has accumulated so many collectivist interventions that it can no longer honestly be called a market economy, whatever its constitution's guarantees of commercial freedom. Dedicated to Fritz Marbach, this critical survey turns a sharp eye on Swiss cartels, on the milk regime whose guaranteed prices breed gluts, on cost-covering agricultural prices that capitalize into ever-rising land values, and above all on wartime rent control, which he indicts at length for freezing the housing market, privileging sitting tenants over young families, and letting the building stock decay. He leans on the Federal Price Formation Commission's report and its standard of "possible competition," traces recent price rises to imported inflation, and warns that permanent rent control amounts, in Otto Bauer's own terms, to socialization by other means.

When does a promise of human emancipation become a prohibition on asking questions? In Wissenschaft, Politik und Gnosis, Eric Voegelin examines systems that, in his reading, protect their claims to liberating knowledge by excluding inquiry into their premises. Marx’s account of human self-production and Hegel’s promise of completed knowledge become tests of the boundary between philosophical inquiry and intellectual domination. Voegelin’s distinctive argument is theological as well as political: he contends that projects of human self-salvation require the speculative abolition of an order humanity did not create. His comparison of medieval Golem legends with modern self-creation sharpens the stakes—whether makers can acknowledge limits and undo their work. Readers encounter both a diagnosis of ideological closure and the demanding conception of transcendence on which that diagnosis rests.

Foreign-exchange controls can undermine the balance they are meant to protect: cheap official foreign currency encourages imports while penalizing exporters. In this 1959 article, Richard Kerschagl traces that contradiction through compulsory surrender, rationed allocations, clearing arrangements, and blocked capital transfers. His attention to administrative detail shows how traders adapt to controls through invoice prices and third-country transactions, shifting monetary distortions into trade. Yet his case for realistic exchange rates is not a promise that markets alone will secure stability. Liberalization, he argues, requires credible restraint on inflation and effective coordination of economic policy, with a substantial role for the central bank. The article offers a concrete account of why removing restrictions and establishing durable convertibility are different tasks.

Claims that economic theory scarcely influences policy may depend on what has been excluded from the category of theory. In this contribution to a 1960 discussion, Fritz Machlup tests the boundaries behind Stigler’s and Wilcox’s conclusions: do applied economists, dissenting doctrines, and ideas inherited from earlier generations count? He resists both an academic definition so narrow that it conceals influence and one so broad that every policy choice proves it. His sharper political observation is that disputes over theory’s “unrealism” may concern whose welfare matters—identifiable constituents now or dispersed consumers later—rather than analytical competence. The contribution offers a compact way to distinguish disagreements about economic reasoning from disagreements about its scope, its historical transmission, and the people whose interests it serves.

What makes a theory of capital realistic: attention to tools, or an account of how different resources work together? In this 1960 review of B. S. Keirstead’s Capital, Interest and Profits, Ludwig Lachmann welcomes the challenge to established theories but disputes the proposed alternative. Defining capital as tools, he argues, obscures the complementary relationships that make investment productive. His criticism asks how failed plans reshape investment and how share prices reflect the capital combinations being valued. A closing example—ships making the ocean usable for transport and trade—clarifies his alternative: progress depends not simply on adding equipment, but on discovering better uses for existing resources. This compact review shows what Lachmann demands of an explanation connecting entrepreneurial judgment, capital structure, and economic change.

For Gerhard Tintner, mathematical economics proves its worth through contact with data and the risks of practical advice. His 1960 review of Jan Tinbergen’s Selected Papers praises precisely this combination, pointing to Tinbergen’s willingness to leave concrete policy recommendations open to later scrutiny. Yet Tintner also highlights results that unsettle easy policy assumptions: economic integration can, under specified conditions, lower real income, and increased productivity need not produce desirable outcomes. His strongest interest lies in Tinbergen’s analysis of the optimum economic regime, where formal welfare reasoning encounters ethical choices between capitalism and collectivism. This short review offers a focused account of what Tintner values in economic analysis—and where he sees its mathematical tools clarifying, rather than settling, questions of policy and institutions.

Gerhard Tintner’s brief 1960 review of Harry M. Markowitz’s Portfolio Selection focuses on a concrete trade-off: greater average return cannot be obtained from an efficient portfolio without accepting greater dispersion of returns. Tintner reads this criterion as an application of newer mathematical economics, contrasting its tools with the calculus and mechanical models of the classical tradition. His interest lies in the connection between formal reasoning and practical use: quadratic programming, computational methods, and utility theory promise an analysis that financial analysts can use. The review offers a concise account of why Tintner welcomed Markowitz’s approach, especially its combination of mathematical innovation with exposition accessible to readers lacking extensive mathematical preparation.