The archive.

Do business cycles interrupt capitalist development, or are they its characteristic form? In this short 1933 contribution to the Spiethoff Festschrift, Schumpeter argues that statistical curves alone cannot decide. Decomposing a series into trends and waves already involves assumptions about economic processes; correlations do not establish which variable drives which. His distinctive concern is the failure of theorists and empirical researchers to coordinate even their questions. Rather than offer a finished theory of cycles, he proposes a shared inquiry drawing on longer historical series and quantitative histories of industries and firms, where aggregate figures may conceal decisive movements. The essay gives readers a concrete way to examine what economic measurements explain—and what theoretical choices remain hidden inside apparently technical procedures.

What does subjective value theory explain that economics could not explain without it? In this discussion contribution, published in 1933, Oskar Morgenstern faces that challenge directly in an exchange with Mackenroth. He argues that attempts to exclude psychological foundations often smuggle them back in, and tests rival approaches against concrete problems of demand, costs, monopoly pricing, and time. Cassel’s price theory is his chief target: for Morgenstern, appending principles about costs is no substitute for integrating them into an explanation. Yet his defence allows that a theoretical instrument may become dispensable after enabling new discoveries. The recorded interruptions preserve the pressure on his position, making this brief intervention a pointed encounter between claims for theoretical foundations and demands for demonstrable explanatory results.

What kind of “understanding” does utility-value theory require? In this brief discussion contribution, Franz Xaver Weiss answers Colm’s charge that he has misunderstood Sombart by distinguishing understanding of subject matter from understanding of psychic life. Weiss gives priority to the latter without excluding the former, linking it to his claim that utility-value theory can explain price in an exchange economy as an expression of social value. The exchange offers a precise methodological clarification rather than a developed theory of price: its interest lies in seeing Weiss defend the connection between understanding individual experience and interpreting prices socially.

Scientific disagreement need not end in agreement to yield knowledge. In this opening address to a discussion of value theory, published in 1933, Ludwig von Mises connects that principle to a concrete economic question: can prices be explained without tracing them back to individual choices? Against Cassel and Spann, he argues that preferences are ranked rather than measured, and that the relevant quantity is the one at stake in a particular decision—not a unit imposed by the theorist. His defense of subjective value theory separates explaining market prices from judging their justice or investigating buyers’ motives. The address offers a compact encounter with Mises’s explanatory starting point and his demanding conception of debate: clarify the disagreement rather than negotiate a doctrine.

Wir werden am Ende unserer Wechselrede nicht abstimmen, wir werden unbekehrt auseinandergehen, wenn auch vielleicht nicht unbelehrt.

English translation: “We shall not vote at the end of our discussion; we shall part unconverted, though perhaps not uninstructed.”

Rejecting the idea that statutory language mechanically determines every judicial decision need not mean abandoning precise legal definitions. This tension frames Felix Kaufmann’s brief review of Albert A. Ehrenzweig jun.’s Irrtum und Rechtswidrigkeit. Kaufmann warns that legislators can use the limits of legal formulation as a reason to leave unlawfulness and culpability insufficiently defined. Against that background, he assesses Ehrenzweig’s challenge to familiar distinctions between justification and excuse, and between mistakes about unlawfulness and mistakes about an offense’s statutory elements. His endorsement remains qualified: conceptual boldness does not guarantee complete logical rigor. The review offers a compact encounter with Kaufmann’s standards of legal analysis and with the stakes of translating a theory of mistake into provisions for the Austrian draft criminal code of 1927.

Can a condemnation of Soviet law rest on legal technique alone? In this brief 1933 review, Felix Kaufmann questions the basis of B. Mirkine-Guetzévitch’s severe verdict without dismissing the research behind it. Constitutional texts and legislative acts matter, but so do Soviet jurists’ commentaries, given the extensive discretion available to those applying the law. Kaufmann finds that the study’s conclusions owe much to its author’s passionate democratic convictions, not merely to technical analysis. His distinction between the grounds of a judgment and the value of its evidence gives this short review its interest: political commitment need not invalidate documentary scholarship, even when it complicates the claim to a specifically legal critique. He also credits Rita Willfort’s German translation for its subject expertise and linguistic skill.

Can a banking law be clearly explained without inspiring confidence in its effectiveness? In this short 1933 review, Helene Lieser separates the two questions. Comparing editions of Czechoslovakia’s 1932 banking law prepared by Ant. Jeřábek and Oswald Doernfest, she treats the substantial revision of earlier legislation as grounds for skepticism, not reassurance. Yet she credits both editors with making a difficult statute intelligible: Jeřábek through cross-references and documentary materials, Doernfest through commentary incorporating parliamentary sources. The review offers a compact example of critical discrimination—approval of the tools for understanding regulation need not imply approval of the regulation itself.

What makes an international banking reference useful during a banking crisis? In this brief 1933 review of the 1932 survey Europäische Banken, Helene Lieser weighs the value of annually updated information against coverage limited to a few representative banks per country. Her praise centres on explanation rather than balance sheets alone: how the world crisis and currency depreciation damage credit institutions, and how rescue efforts differ across countries. From the Austrian Credit-Anstalt’s reorganisation to Swedish banks’ reckoning with the Kreuger crash, her examples identify what she finds instructive in the survey—a comparative account of banking distress and attempted repair, despite its restricted institutional coverage.

Financial translation requires more than formal equivalents: jargon and differences between British and American usage can determine a dictionary’s practical value. These are Helene Lieser’s particular concerns in her brief 1933 review of the English–German first volume of K. Th. Langguth’s Handwörterbuch des Finanzwesens. She grounds her strong recommendation in spot checks made during practical use, praising coverage useful to exporters as well as bankers. The review offers a compact statement of her criteria for a financial reference work: reliability tested in use, attention to regional terminology, and inclusion of expressions that more conventional dictionaries miss.

What keeps a stock-exchange handbook useful when the rules of finance change? In this brief 1933 review of the twenty-first edition of Salings Börsen-Papiere, Helene Lieser values legal currency as much as a clear account of securities and trading. She singles out the reproduction of statutory provisions in full and the inclusion of recent measures on interest-rate reductions, banking supervision, and the Reich flight tax. Her assessment offers a compact view of the practical demands placed on financial reference works: explaining market institutions while making their changing legal framework readily consultable, including for readers outside Germany.

What if rising productivity no longer supplied the investment opportunities needed to restore employment? In this untitled 1933 contribution to the Spiethoff Festschrift, Emil Lederer asks whether rationalization in the production of machinery and other capital goods could weaken capitalism’s familiar recovery mechanisms. Greater productive capacity might require less new investment, devalue existing equipment, and leave displaced workers without new jobs. Rather than offer technology as an all-purpose explanation of the depression, Lederer proposes a specific structural hypothesis for business-cycle research to test. His distinction between expanding physical output, increasing capital value, and creating lasting employment gives the essay its bite: readers can see why processes commonly treated as mutually reinforcing might instead come apart—and why wage cuts need not bring recovery.

A wage cut cannot create the machinery needed to employ more workers: this concrete difficulty captures Oskar Morgenstern’s challenge to business-cycle theory in his untitled 1933 contribution to the Spiethoff Festschrift. Explanations of crisis, he argues, remain limited by unfinished economic theory and by the changing institutions to which it is applied. His distinctive concern is the economy’s capacity to rearrange actual goods and productive resources over time—a conception of liquidity extending well beyond banks. The essay connects this problem to a pointed warning: neither intervention nor nonintervention can derive reliable prescriptions simply by repeating propositions framed for free competition and unrestricted mobility. Readers encounter a research programme that makes theoretical ambition inseparable from scrutiny of material constraints and empirical conditions.