The archive.

Henry Dunning Macleod’s ambition to rebuild economics threatened to obscure the banking insights he actually achieved. In this compact biographical encyclopedia entry, republished in 1937, Hayek separates those insights from the larger system he judges inadequately worked out. He credits Macleod’s account of Bank of England policy, early grasp of discount policy, and detailed explanation of bank credit creation, while questioning his treatment of credit and capital. The distinction is pointed: theoretical vagueness did not, in Hayek’s judgement, lead Macleod to unsound monetary prescriptions. Alongside the failed bank, fraud conviction, and frustrated academic ambitions, readers encounter a discriminating assessment of what deserves preservation in an economist’s work even when his claims to have refounded the discipline do not.

Demand and supply explain prices—but what explains their effects on individual valuations? In this compact encyclopedia entry, Franz Xaver Weiss places that question at the centre of Carl Menger’s contribution to economics. His portrait connects marginal utility with an effort to understand individual conduct, while presenting Menger’s defence of theory as compatible with, rather than a substitute for, historical research. Weiss also identifies a practical obstacle to Menger’s reception: his principal books went out of print, leaving successors to transmit much of his thought. Republished here in its 1937 version, the entry offers a concise account of what Weiss regarded as Menger’s distinctive explanatory approach and why readers often encounter it through other economists.

Written in 1933 as the United States' experiment in credit-controlled stabilization was collapsing, this pamphlet—introduced by Harry Gideonse—makes monetary law the guardian of production and employment rather than of abstract justice between creditor and debtor. Its rule is the stabilization of purchasing power through a wholesale-price index, chosen over broader cost-of-living standards that merely register productivity or contracts. Its sharpest theoretical stroke is the contrast between stable money and the Hayekian ideal of neutral money, which Mahr judges administratively unusable because velocity and money substitutes cannot be measured. Reconsidering the 1920s, he concedes that stable prices did not prevent the boom, yet blames the catastrophe on deflationary collapse—and licenses credit-financed public works, disciplined by a legally fixed price target, while demoting gold from principle to mere reassuring camouflage.

If currency policy, however, is legally directed toward the stabilization of purchasing power, the limit of credit expansion would coincide with the attainment of the intended level of prices.

Giving employers, workers and other economic interests seats at a common table does not tell them how to settle their differences. In this signed encyclopedia entry, originally published in 1933 and republished in 1937, Emil Lederer examines that difficulty through national economic councils, with particular attention to Germany’s Weimar experiment. Occupational representation promised an alternative to territorial politics, yet class divisions repeatedly outweighed occupational affiliations, and councils largely settled into advisory roles. Lederer distinguishes the useful collection of technical knowledge from the authority to make binding decisions. His comparative perspective makes the entry valuable for understanding why better representation of interests need not produce agreement—and why, in his account, economic coordination remains a matter of political judgment rather than institutional design alone.

Organizing an industry is not the same as organizing production for society’s needs. This distinction drives Emil Lederer’s encyclopedia article, which asks why monopoly and piecemeal regulation can leave workers and machinery idle even as economic coordination increases. Lederer defends the possibility of socialist calculation without reducing production to an engineering problem: prices, consumer choice, and comparisons of efficiency still matter. His concrete proposals for credit allocation and control of basic industries expose a further tension—planning within capitalism may stabilize investment while continuing to serve existing purchasing power rather than unmet needs. Readers can discover here an argument for planning that refuses to equate administrative coordination with social benefit: its purposes and possibilities depend on who holds economic and political power.

A League that condemns aggression but leaves it unpunished offers little security to its members. In this 1933 published lecture, William Emmanuel Rappard defends international cooperation by confronting the gap between the League’s Covenant and governments’ conduct. Japan’s aggression against China makes that gap concrete: for Rappard, the decisive failure is not Japan’s defiance but other states’ refusal to enforce their commitments. He connects this failure to a troubling disarmament dilemma—equalizing weapons may strengthen aggressors—and to economic policies pursuing self-sufficiency in an interdependent world. His proposed remedy demands limits on national sovereignty and mechanisms for peaceful treaty revision. Readers encounter both the force and the tensions of his internationalism, including his defense of China alongside hierarchical assumptions about Japan’s claims to expansion.

No, internationalism has not failed. What has failed is contemporary international statesmanship.

Written in the spring of 1933, as Hitler consolidated power, this short essay confronts a comforting misreading head-on: that National Socialism was a conservative or capitalist reaction. Hayek argues the opposite, that it was a genuinely socialist and collectivist movement, the ripened fruit of an anti-liberal current running through German thought since the Bismarckian era. Its hostility to the Marxist parties, he contends, was national and cultural rather than economic, while its intellectual debts ran to Marxian relativism and anti-rationalism. Tracing how collectivist planning tends toward coercion, the suppression of intellectual freedom, and finally dictatorship, he warns that other Western nations expanding state control over economic life court the same descent. A compact statement of the themes Hayek would enlarge a decade later in The Road to Serfdom.

The inherent logic of collectivism makes it impossible to confine it to a limited sphere.

Mobility need not mean aimless wandering: in Richard Thurnwald’s encyclopedia article “Nomads,” camps and grazing circuits follow food supplies, technical capacities, and customary territorial rights. This 1937 republication of the 1933 entry asks how different mobile livelihoods shape property and authority. Its sharpest contrast is between hunters’ difficulty in storing surplus and herders’ possession of wealth that can move with them. Thurnwald then traces how encounters between pastoralists and cultivators may turn differences in subsistence into political domination and social rank. Readers can discover both an account of movement as organized social life and the assumptions of a comparative ethnology that links livelihood, gender relations, and state formation through broad, sometimes contestable generalizations.

George Warde Norman’s place in the English currency school can obscure the range of his economic commitments. In this compact biographical encyclopedia entry, supplied in its 1937 republication, Hayek connects Norman’s monetary writings with his work as a Bank of England director and witness before parliamentary committees. He cautiously identifies Norman’s privately circulated 1833 pamphlet as probably the earliest statement of the school’s aims by one of its members. Yet the portrait also distinguishes Norman from his allies: he disputed protection with Colonel Torrens and advocated a single tax on all property. Readers gain a concise account of how one economist combined argument with institutional responsibility, alongside bibliographical leads extending beyond the monetary controversy for which he is chiefly remembered.

When does an economic theory explain conduct, and when does it merely redescribe the assumptions built into it? Felix Kaufmann’s 1933 essay makes this distinction the test of methodological claims. His central case is subjective value theory: ordering a consumer’s preferences is not yet explaining how those preferences arose. He treats marginal utility as a guide to investigating economic plans, whose usefulness must be demonstrated rather than secured by deduction alone. At the same time, he distinguishes economics’ subject—social exchange—from its explanatory instrument, the individual plan. Readers can discover why accepting preference analysis need not mean defining all purposive action as economic, and how conceptual precision exposes claims of empirical certainty that definitions and formal reasoning cannot support.

Swiss parties cooperate nationally without ceasing to be rooted in their cantons. In this signed encyclopedia contribution, republished in 1937, William Emmanuel Rappard explains that tension through concrete institutional arrangements: canton-bound constituencies, an indirectly elected federal executive, and referendums that cut across party loyalties. His revealing exception is the Socialist party, whose internationally oriented policies coexist with unusually unified national organization. Rather than treating parliamentary strength as a simple measure of nationwide allegiance, Rappard distinguishes parties’ local constituencies from their federal functions. His compact account shows how religious, constitutional, and economic divisions overlap—and how Radical Democratic predominance gave way to coalition government without dissolving the cantonal foundations of Swiss politics.

How can logic depend on consciousness without becoming a branch of psychology? In this 1933 review of Edmund Husserl’s Formale und transzendentale Logik, Alfred Schütz makes that tension the key to the book’s philosophical project. He reads Husserl’s turn toward transcendental subjectivity as a continuation, not a retreat from, his rejection of psychologism: an act of thinking occurs in time, while the judgment it produces can retain its identity beyond that act. Schütz’s exposition also sharpens the difference between a consistent judgment and knowledge of its object. Readers can discover why, on this interpretation, investigating logic’s foundations leads beneath explicit reasoning to experience, passive association, and temporality—and where Schütz acknowledges that Husserl’s ambitious account remains programmatic.