The archive.

A machine may remain physically sound long after it ceases to earn its owner anything. In this reply to Professor Pigou, Hayek uses that gap to challenge a definition of capital maintenance based on replacing wear and tear while excluding obsolescence. Three investments with identical physical lifetimes but sharply different commercial prospects show why depreciation allowances must depend on expectations, not merely on durable equipment. The distinction matters for taxation as well as accounting: treating foreseeable replacement costs as disposable income would, Hayek argues, penalise industries undergoing rapid technological change. His concise reply separates provision for anticipated losses from saving after unforeseen losses, and asks when a familiar accounting convention serves—or defeats—its practical purpose of preserving future earning capacity.

Admiration does not erase disagreement in Hayek’s 1941 review of Ludwig von Mises’s Nationalökonomie. He welcomes its integration of economic theory, social cooperation, and liberal policy, yet questions its treatment of interest and the intellectual isolation that limits its engagement with contemporary economics. His strongest allegiance concerns method: Mises’s account of human action, Hayek argues, offers a more persuasive foundation for social inquiry than prevailing attempts to borrow methods from the natural sciences. This short review lets readers locate both the shared ground and the friction between two economists often grouped together. It also shows what Hayek values in a systematic treatise: not merely consistency, but the capacity to connect technical arguments with questions of social cooperation and policy.

Understanding Nazi Germany’s appeal need not mean excusing it. In this 1941 joint review, republished in 1997, Hayek welcomes two contrasting corrections to wartime perceptions: Paul Einzig’s exposure of Germany’s promised European order and C. W. Guillebaud’s account of social policies that helped secure German workers’ support. His sharper objection concerns what the reviewers’ subjects share: an apparent willingness to approve Nazi methods while condemning their purposes. Hayek asks whether comprehensive planning itself demands coercion, imposed hierarchies and leaders ruthless enough to enforce them. This brief review lets readers encounter that question in a concrete dispute over how to describe an enemy accurately—and how to judge seemingly desirable policies by the power required to carry them out.

A factory’s book value can fall without its machinery disappearing; its output can rise simply because idle equipment returns to use. These distinctions drive Ludwig Lachmann’s critique of capital measurement in this 1941 article. Examining Colin Clark’s statistics, he argues that asset valuations and capital-output ratios can mistake disappointed expectations or changing utilisation for changes in productive resources. His alternative shifts attention from an aggregate capital stock to the services resources supply within coherent production plans, using adjusted depreciation allowances to measure productive consumption. The article offers a concrete way to investigate a persistent difficulty in quantitative economics: how to make accounting figures answer an economic question without confusing changes in value with changes in productive contribution.

Austria's long transformation from the Ottomans' frontier antagonist into their guarantor, the price of holding Russia back from Constantinople, frames this account of how Vienna met the birth of the Greek kingdom. Engel-Janosi weighs Metternich's reluctance, who saw in the war of independence only a rebellion, against King Ludwig of Bavaria's dynastic investment in his son Otto, and gives Prokesch-Osten, Austria's envoy in Athens, the central role: a conservative trying to shore up an independent Greek monarchy amid the rivalry of Britain, France, Russia, and Bavaria. Through the Armansperg and Rudhart ministries, the constitutional revolution of 1843, and the duel of Maurokordatos and Kolettis, the project decays. Austrian passivity, great-power intrigue, Greek factionalism, and Otto's weakness, he concludes, made an independent conservative Greece untenable.

Staaten hat noch niemand geschaffen; sie schaffen sich selbst.

English translation: “No one has ever created states; they create themselves.”

How did an American constitutional arrangement become acceptable to Swiss cantons determined to preserve their independence? In this conference essay, William Emmanuel Rappard traces the contested reception of American federalism from 1798 to the Swiss Constitution of 1848. Drawing on pamphlets, correspondence and legislative proceedings, he distinguishes informed institutional borrowing from admiration based on imperfect knowledge. His central case is bicameralism: one chamber representing population, another preserving cantonal equality. What emerged was less a shared ideal than a compromise neither side could readily refuse. Rappard also confronts the settlement’s coercive beginnings after civil war and Switzerland’s rejection of an American-style presidency. The essay offers a concrete account of constitutional transfer as selective adaptation, showing how institutions resisted as foreign could become safeguards of local freedom.

Scientific expertise can explain general laws—but can it supply the changing, local knowledge needed to direct an economy? In this 1941 article, republished here in 1997, Friedrich August von Hayek addresses scientists and engineers drawn to centralized planning. He contrasts their ideal of deliberate construction with the coordination achieved through competitive prices, then asks what happens to intellectual freedom when one authority controls the resources needed to pursue competing purposes. His contention is that comprehensive planning concentrates power over ends, not merely economic means. The article offers a compact encounter with the connection between Hayek’s account of dispersed knowledge and his defence of liberty, while distinguishing policies that sustain competition or supplement its results from those that replace it with a single plan.

Whoever controls the means must decide which ends they are to serve.

Counting equations is not the same as proving that an economic equilibrium exists. This distinction anchors Oskar Morgenstern’s review of J. R. Hicks’s Value and Capital, which welcomes the ambition to unite static and dynamic economics while challenging the foundations of that synthesis. Morgenstern demands both mathematical proof and a clear relation between theoretical assumptions and observable behaviour. His criticism becomes especially concrete when he considers individual plans: intentions that appear compatible in isolation may destabilize a system when acted upon together, as in simultaneous bank withdrawals. The review offers a pointed account of why expectations, uncertainty, and knowledge of other people’s plans resist simple aggregation—and why, for Morgenstern, a theory of economic fluctuations must earn its connection to the fluctuations it claims to explain.

Admiration need not come with a compulsory reservation: Felix Kaufmann defends Sidney Hook’s enthusiastic portrait of Dewey against the demand that it include criticism. His own objection is more pointed. By painting traditional philosophy too darkly, Hook risks encouraging readers to pursue Dewey while abandoning other philosophers. This brief review draws a useful distinction between wholehearted assent to a thinker and fairness to the intellectual alternatives. Kaufmann’s praise for Hook’s clarity and organization makes his warning sharper: an effective introduction can open one path of inquiry while closing others.

If the author feels like simply saying yes, why should he say "yes, but"?

How can logic rest on experience when scientific knowledge is itself defined by logical rules? In this review of Husserl’s Erfahrung und Urteil, Felix Kaufmann makes that apparent circle intelligible by distinguishing receptive experience from the judgments formed upon it. His concrete example—a physical thing said to occupy a place—shows how an ordinary assertion carries assumptions about possible perceptions, including those of other people. Kaufmann explains why Husserl seeks to understand objectivity through subjective experience rather than taking the objective world as given. The review offers a compact orientation to this philosophical reversal, alongside a pointed judgment: debates about eidetic intuition should engage Husserl’s later analysis rather than remain fixed on Logische Untersuchungen. Kaufmann’s call for English translations also records his concern over the work’s restricted reception.

Felix Kaufmann’s review of John Dewey’s Theory of Valuation and J. H. Woodger’s The Technique of Theory Construction asks what methodological clarification can achieve—and what it need not discard. He welcomes Dewey’s account of ends and desires as subject to practical appraisal, yet questions whether rationalist ethics must be rejected outright: its supposedly pre-established values might instead be understood as guiding ideals for conduct. His endorsement of Woodger’s symbolic logic is similarly discriminating. A common notation can expose relations between scientific theories and mechanize routine operations without replacing the invention of hypotheses. This brief review offers a concrete encounter with Kaufmann’s critical stance: receptive to pragmatic and formal methods, attentive to their limits, and particularly alert to the difficulties posed by vague concepts in the social sciences.

An economy’s complexity seems to call for comprehensive direction; Hayek argues that it makes such direction impracticable. In this 1941 article, reprinted in 1997, he shifts attention from the planner’s objectives to the changing, local knowledge needed to use scarce resources well. A shortage of tin makes the problem concrete: how can users decide what to conserve, replace or recover without knowing why supplies have tightened? Hayek’s answer is that competitive prices coordinate adjustments without assembling everyone’s knowledge in one place. His argument depends on genuine competition, not simply the existence of markets, and his acceptance of wartime planning qualifies rather than abandons it. The article offers a compact account of why economic coordination involves discovering possibilities, not merely executing a known design.