The archive.

What makes a bibliography trustworthy beyond the breadth of its coverage? In this 1936 review of Henry Higgs’s Bibliography of Economics, 1751–1775, Hayek welcomes an undertaking built on Foxwell’s extensive collections, then tests its reliability against particular entries. Harris’s two-part work on money receives misleading records; Raper reappears as “Roper”; a nineteenth-century edition of Prussian archival documents finds its way under 1769. These are not interchangeable complaints: they expose problems of attribution, identification and chronological scope. The brief review offers a concrete encounter with Hayek as a critical reader of scholarly reference tools, showing why admiration for a bibliography’s comprehensiveness need not entail confidence in its details.

A handsome reprint need not be the most useful one for scholars. In this brief 1936 review, Hayek welcomes the republication of W. A. Shaw’s collection of English monetary documents but questions the cost of its sumptuous production. His judgement distinguishes the bimetallic controversy that shaped Shaw’s 1896 selection from the documents’ continuing value—notably Newton’s reports as Master of the Mint, otherwise unavailable in print. The review offers a compact glimpse of Hayek as a reader of historical economic sources, attentive both to the interests governing their selection and to the practical conditions under which scholars can consult them.

A useful biography can still fail its subject as an economist. In this brief review of D. B. Copland’s two lectures on W. E. Hearn, Hayek welcomes new information about Hearn’s Australian career but finds his economic thought poorly served. Hayek values Hearn’s original observations and lucid expression; he wants them examined in relation to the teaching at Trinity College and their influence on later writers. His objection is pointed: Copland makes Hearn a vehicle for contemporary Australian economists’ views. The review offers a compact glimpse of Hayek’s judgement of Hearn—and of the distinction he draws between recovering a thinker’s contribution and recruiting him for present purposes.

For Gerhard Tintner, reliable confirmation can matter more than striking novelty. His 1936 review of Allen and Bowley’s Family Expenditure praises their use of household budgets to connect demand theory with statistical evidence, while questioning one simplifying assumption: a linear preference scale maintained throughout the investigation. Where that assumption appears to fail, he wants statistical tests, not merely a workable approximation. This brief review offers a concrete view of Tintner’s standards for econometric research: close knowledge of the data, explicit testing of theoretical assumptions, and economic interpretation of numerical results. His praise turns on what the calculations establish about household spending—not on mathematical sophistication alone.

Adopting Western civilization to resist Western imperialism: this paradox anchors Wilhelm Röpke’s interpretation of Turkish reform in his 1936 review of Henry Elisha Allen’s The Turkish Transformation. He values Allen’s attention to religious and spiritual change, while questioning the book’s proportions and handling of evidence. His own intervention challenges the tendency to treat Kemalist Turkey as merely another modern dictatorship. Röpke argues that its nationalism serves internal unity and defensive independence rather than expansion, making modernization a requirement of sovereignty. The review offers a compact encounter with this argument and its tensions: cultural adaptation reaches beyond military technique to law, education, and religion, yet the West being adopted is, in Röpke’s account, filtered through a rationalistic, positivist conception partly mediated by Soviet Russia.

A consumer’s satisfaction may depend not only on how much is consumed, but on whether consumption is increasing or declining. In this 1936 article, Gerhard Tintner asks how that dependence changes the allocation of a fixed income across goods and over time. Familiarity with luxuries and a desire for novelty motivate his mathematical departure from static consumer theory. Using the calculus of variations, he replaces ordinary marginal utility with a valuation corrected for the changing influence of consumption flows. Readers can follow how familiar expenditure rules survive in altered form—and why a budget alone cannot determine a consumption path. Tintner’s explicit distinction between necessary and sufficient conditions also marks the limits of what his equations establish.

A bibliography can gather elusive material yet still make it difficult to find. In this brief 1936 review, Helene Lieser assesses the Cologne University retail institute’s bibliography for 1883–1933 from the standpoint of scholars and practitioners trying to locate relevant literature. She welcomes its inclusion of trade and company publications unavailable through the book trade, but questions the absence of cross-references. Her praise remains qualified: spot checks establish usefulness, not completeness. The review offers a compact example of bibliographic judgment, distinguishing breadth of coverage from ease of consultation and identifying the practical gain at stake—less time spent preparing to research, more time for the research itself.

Accepting Keynes’s account of persistent unemployment need not mean accepting his explanation of it. In this 1936 discussion of the General Theory, Emil Lederer asks whether consumption habits and liquidity preference can explain a depression marked by idle factories and investment prospects so poor that even zero interest offers no remedy. He shifts attention from psychological dispositions to investment risk, technical change, disrupted markets, and the interdependence of production and demand. His comparison with Marx sharpens a further objection: reforms that appear economically rational may encounter organized resistance from capitalists defending power as well as income. The article offers an appreciative but exacting encounter with Keynes, distinguishing the diagnosis of unemployment from the historical causes of collapse and the political conditions of recovery.

But in both cases it is not the liquidity that is preferred but the investment that is refused.

Mahr reopens the Austrian puzzle of productive interest by asking precisely what the 'time element' contributes to it. Accepting from Jevons and Böhm-Bawerk that capitalistic production is temporally extended and present factor payments oriented toward future revenues, he defends—against Schumpeter—the persistence of an interest rate in a static economy: statics inherits the rate that development established and finds no force to remove it. His sharpest correction targets Böhm-Bawerk's 'average period of production,' whose inclusion of a capital good's whole past history breeds infinite regress and makes an old mine lengthen a present process merely by age. Distinguishing production period from use period, Mahr rebuilds the concept as the technically necessary time embodied in the portion actually consumed, and denies that more capital must always lengthen production or lower returns.

Die Einbeziehung der Nutzungsperiode der Kapitalgüter in die Berechnung der durchschnittlichen Produktionsperiode scheint mir die hauptsächliche Quelle aller Widersprüche und Ungereimtheiten darzustellen, die diesem Begriff bisher anhafteten.

English translation: “The inclusion of the period of use of capital goods in the calculation of the average period of production seems to me to constitute the principal source of all the contradictions and inconsistencies that have hitherto attached to this concept.”

Mass unemployment can coexist with a shortage of skilled workers. In this 1936 research pamphlet, Richard von Strigl examines that tension in Austria, where interrupted apprenticeships and prolonged inactivity were weakening the workforce needed for recovery. Comparing census counts, insurance records and employment-office registrations, he shows why rising employment need not mean falling recorded unemployment: improved prospects can draw previously unregistered workers into the market. His distinctive concern is not simply how many people lack jobs, but how workers acquire—and lose—the competence that production requires. Recovery, he argues, cannot restore the industrial pattern of 1929 unchanged. The study connects the limits of unemployment statistics with the concrete costs of exclusion: blocked occupational development, lost advancement and diminished prospects for family formation.

Austria's 1934 constitution, and the authoritarian turn behind it, mark for Voegelin not a sudden rupture but a late episode in a state that never quite became one. Total and authoritarian, he argues, are political symbols forged in struggle rather than scientific concepts, and he assembles their elements—Carl Schmitt's total state, economic Vermachtung, mass activation, the monopoly of propaganda, the education of a people by its elite—before turning to the specifically Austrian problem: an empire of many nations that produced no unified Staatsvolk to will the republic into being. Much of the book is a sustained critique of Kelsen's pure theory of law, whose reduction of the state to a system of coercive norms Voegelin reads as an administrative evasion of political substance, and as the very formalism that made the 1933–34 transition so hard to name.

Die Machtquelle bleibt anonym.

English translation: “The source of power remains anonymous.”

Can a theory of stationary equilibrium explain an economy marked by growth, idle factories, and mass unemployment? In this 1936 article, Emil Lederer surveys European economic theory through the tensions exposed by war and depression. His sharpest contrast concerns wages: continental economists often regard high wages as an obstacle to investment, while American economists fear that low wages undermine purchasing power and mass production. For Lederer, these competing diagnoses reveal not only theoretical differences but selective attention to economic facts. He argues that refined equilibrium models cannot substitute for explanations of cumulative disturbance and structural change. The article offers a concrete way to examine how assumptions about scarcity, increasing returns, and unused capacity shape both economic explanation and the case for active recovery policy.