The archive.

Painstaking exposition can still miss what holds a theory together. In this 1939 review of R. J. Saulnier’s comparative study of Hawtrey, Robertson, Hayek, and Keynes, G. L. S. Shackle praises scholarly fairness while identifying that precise failure in the treatment of Keynes. For Shackle, the General Theory turns on decisions made in almost complete ignorance of the future—not merely on its individual concepts and analytical devices. His brief assessment also questions Saulnier’s reliance on an earlier formulation of Hayek’s theory and distinguishes criticism of the multiplier’s presentation from refutation of its substance. The review offers a compact encounter with Shackle’s interpretive priorities: attention to uncertainty, to the development of an economist’s thought, and to the difference between explaining a theory’s parts and grasping its unity.

A federation of formerly sovereign states can secure peace, this German-language essay argues, only as an economic union — yet that union disables much of the nation-state's interventionist repertoire and cannot simply hand it to a federal center. Free movement of goods, labor, and capital turns the federation into a single price area, stripping member states of tariffs, monopolies, and independent monetary policy. But protectionism cannot migrate upward either: the solidarities that sell a tariff as aid to "our" producers dissolve among peoples who share no thick common identity, and the same thinness defeats central planning, which presupposes agreement no diverse union possesses. The federation needs only a negative power — to stop states from rebuilding economic borders, not to plan in their place. Federalism, Hayek concludes, completes liberalism rather than enlarging the state.

Das Bundesgebiet wird ein einziger Markt und die Preise in seinen Teilen werden nur um den Betrag der Transportkosten differieren.

English translation: “The federal territory becomes a single market, and prices in its parts will differ only by the amount of transport costs.”

Germany’s falling unemployment and rapid rearmament posed an uncomfortable question: did military mobilization demonstrate economic efficiency, or merely efficiency at serving a narrowly coercive purpose? In this brief symposium contribution, Gottfried Haberler separates employment, consumption and stability as measures of economic performance. He challenges easy comparisons between dictatorships and democracies by contrasting Germany’s employment record with Italy’s, while qualifying the statistical evidence. He also distinguishes a conceivable economic policy—replacing armaments expenditure with civilian investment—from its doubtful political feasibility. Rather than resolving whether democracies could match Germany’s apparent productive effectiveness, Haberler sharpens the question: what would comparable efficiency mean if consumer choice and political freedom were preserved? The contribution offers a compact exercise in judging economic results without confusing productive capacity with the desirability of its ends.

A country can retain its borders yet lose control over the conditions of its domestic life. In this 1939 essay, Emil Lederer examines how totalitarian regimes exert pressure beyond their territories through propaganda, organizations abroad, and the threat of sudden military attack. His distinctive concern is not simply conquest: defensive preparation itself can force democracies to sacrifice wages, leisure, and civilian priorities. German claims over nationals abroad expose the tension between cultural affiliation and political sovereignty; permanent rearmament carries that tension into everyday economic life. Lederer thus offers a concrete way to understand how foreign regimes can constrain democratic choices without formally abolishing national independence—and why military defense alone cannot answer every form of interference.

Borderlines, it is true, still exist between the states, but in its domestic affairs the world has become one unit.

A fall in demand need not mean a fall in spending: the price itself changes the expenditure calculation. In this 1939 article, Gerhard Tintner extends that distinction to consumption planned across time, asking how income, prices, and interest rates alter spending on particular goods and dates. His elasticities separate changes in quantities chosen from the direct effects of prices and discounting. Although total net saving is zero over the planning horizon, borrowing or saving along the way still matters for expenditure responses. The contrast with Irving Fisher sharpens Tintner’s perspective: preferences concern individual goods at particular dates, not merely aggregate expenditure streams. Readers can discover how aggregation preserves these distinctions—and why quantity-demand elasticities alone cannot explain changes in spending.

A license that shields a small business from competition can also become a debt that makes it harder to survive. This reversal anchors Walter Fröhlich’s 1939 article on Central European experiments in protecting small enterprises, chiefly in Austria. Writing with American fair-trade debates in view, he follows the costs of protection into concrete settings: Vienna taxi licenses, compulsory apprenticeships, and legally fenced-off craft occupations. His argument is that maintained prices invite further entry restrictions, while those restrictions raise fixed costs and obstruct adaptation to changing demand. Readers can discover why higher retail prices need not mean healthier retailers—and how, in Fröhlich’s account, the pursuit of economic security encouraged political expectations that fascist governments’ industrial and military priorities would frustrate.

Why might an entrepreneur postpone an apparently profitable investment—and why might a boom itself create reasons to stop investing? In this 1939 article, G. L. S. Shackle distinguishes the outcomes entrepreneurs envisage from the clearness with which they envisage them. A ship or steel plant commits resources that cannot remain available for a better-informed choice later; waiting can therefore reflect an expectation of improved knowledge rather than simple pessimism. Extending Keynes’s account of equipment valuation, Shackle tentatively argues that rapid investment changes a business enough to make its future less intelligible. Readers can trace how expansion may generate its own pauses, and how subjective uncertainty can affect investment and employment without being reduced to calculable probability.

It is the belief that knowledge, insight, and foresight will improve that causes the so-called apathy.

Remembered by his contemporaries as a banker, abolitionist, and Evangelical of the Clapham circle rather than as an economist, Henry Thornton is here restored by Hayek to the front rank of monetary thought. The introduction to Thornton's Paper Credit of Great Britain reads the 1802 treatise as the point where classical monetary analysis begins, born of the crises of 1793 and 1797 and the Bank Restriction. Hayek credits Thornton with distinguishing internal from external drains, anticipating both liquidity preference and Wicksell's separation of the market and natural rates of interest, and framing the doctrine of forced saving. Against the reduction of everything to over-issue, and against Ricardo's later narrowing, the case is made for a disciplined practical banker who theorized the credit system from within.

“We are all City people and connected with merchants, and nothing but merchants on every side”

Idle factories and available capital pose a puzzle: why does an economy fail to put them back to work? In this 1939 symposium article, Emil Lederer argues that recovery depends not simply on lower wages or prices, but on opportunities for investment that established industries may no longer provide. His distinction between expanding existing production and creating new industries gives technological unemployment a concrete setting: machines can reduce costs without generating enough demand to reemploy displaced workers. Against assurances drawn from nineteenth-century growth, he asks whether the conditions that once made adjustment possible still hold. The economic frontier, he concludes, is not closed—but spontaneous expansion cannot be counted on. Readers can discover why, in his account, deliberate demand creation and a reconsideration of thrift become questions of democratic economic security.

Germany's colonies, stripped away at Versailles and held under mandate, are the immediate provocation of this 1939 study, which recasts their loss as economic strangulation rather than wounded vanity. Yet Thurnwald's ambition is systematic: colonization as a recurring human phenomenon, older than capitalism, whose methods he compares across Portuguese slave-raiding, the Spanish encomienda among the Maya of Yucatán, the Dutch cultivation system in Java, the French Code noir and St. Domingue, and British expansion from Virginia to the Gezira cotton scheme. His own Deutsch-Neu-Guinea supplies the opening case, from Rabaul's plantations to goldfields opened by aircraft. He rejects a purely Marxist reading of empire, frames expansion as a biological and social movement of peoples, and ties its future to National Socialist colonial policy.

Kolonisation gehört zu den großen bewegenden und Geschichte schaffenden Kräften der menschlichen Gemeinschaften aller Völker und Zeiten.

English translation: “Colonization belongs among the great moving and history-making forces of human communities in all peoples and ages.”

A wage cut can lower a firm’s costs while shrinking the market for its products. This tension anchors Emil Lederer’s 1939 article, presented here in French translation, on whether wages cause economic crises and whether reducing them hastens recovery. Lederer challenges both capital-shortage and underconsumption theories by asking when cheaper production actually prompts new investment—and when it merely redistributes purchasing power. His distinctive move is to connect the business cycle with differences among occupations and industries: construction costs, skilled workers’ earnings, and housing affordability matter in ways an average wage index conceals. His case for targeted subsidies rather than general wage cuts offers a concrete way to examine how policy might lower investment costs without reducing workers’ incomes.

Le niveau des salaires est une abstraction, de même que le niveau général des prix.

English translation: “The wage level is an abstraction, just as the general price level is.”

What mathematics should economists learn, and how should it be taught? In this 1939 review of R. G. D. Allen’s Mathematical Analysis for Economists, Gerhard Tintner values economic applications over the physical examples customary in calculus textbooks. Constrained optimization is his telling case: a technique central to economics receives the sustained attention economists need. His praise also draws a useful distinction between teaching mathematical tools through consumer choice, monopoly, and production, and presenting a continuous economic theory. Yet the book’s predominantly static approach leaves dynamic problems underrepresented. This brief review offers a concrete view of Tintner’s standards for graduate training: mathematical instruction should prepare economists to follow current research, while its omissions should guide their supplementary study.