The archive.

To write the history of an idea, Machlup insists, is not the same as writing the history of the word attached to it — and “economic integration” is a young term for an ancient problem. Growing from his 1974 presidential address to the International Economic Association in Budapest, the book defines complete integration not by treaties or common markets but by the actual use of every potential opportunity for efficient division of labour. From that yardstick it ranges across customs-union theory, factor-price equalisation, optimum currency areas, and the Zollverein, deploying Viner’s distinction between trade creation and trade diversion to show that integration is not automatically beneficial. Its third part becomes an annotated genealogy of contributors, from Hamilton and List to Meade and Mundell.

In this interrelatedness and interdependence among all economic activities I see the essence of general economic integration.

Neo-Ricardian critiques advancing, neoclassical theory unsettled, Keynesianism itself in crisis: economics in the mid-1970s struck Lachmann as a discipline in turmoil, and his answer is a deliberate act of dissent. In an age of divergence, he argues, a distinctly Austrian voice must be raised before its insights dissolve into the neoclassical synthesis. Hicks having preempted 'neo-Austrian' with a theory resting on static expectations and a single good, Lachmann simply reclaims the plain word Austrian. He grants the neo-Ricardian exposure of circularity in aggregate capital measurement yet faults its retreat to objective cost, and locates the real quarrel elsewhere: not mathematics but knowledge. Where neoclassical theory treats knowledge as a given datum and presumes universal market awareness, Austrian economics studies the market as a process that diffuses, creates, and renders knowledge obsolete.

When factions are already in existence, who can be blamed for being factious?

What makes a statement representative of business opinion rather than merely a statement by businessmen? In this brief, sharply critical review of Alfred L. Thimm’s book, Murray N. Rothbard questions both the evidence for ideological influence and the economic interests concealed by a favorable account of Morgan-group corporatism. He faults Thimm for neglecting cartelization and for treating concentrated financial ownership as a precursor to control by non-owning managers without explaining the contradiction. The review offers a compact encounter with Rothbard’s standards for business history: scholars need not accept revisionist conclusions, but they must engage the research and distinguish professed ideas from institutional influence.

What does “reflation” promise—and what might the word conceal? In this brief 1977 letter to The Times, republished here in 2022, Friedrich August von Hayek answers Lady Wootton’s request for clarification with a pointed accusation: in the prevailing circumstances, calls for reflation mean calls to accelerate inflation. His target is not merely an ambiguous technical term, but the reluctance he attributes to advocates to name their policy plainly. The letter offers no supporting economic analysis; its interest lies in the compressed confrontation between policy language and public candour, and in Hayek’s insistence that a reassuring label can obscure a consequential choice.

To demand that society be redesigned whole, according to chosen ends, is what Hayek calls constructivism, the modern illusion of Machbarkeit this 1977 lecture sets out to destroy. Social justice, he argues, is an atavism: the moral instincts bred in small hunter-gatherer bands, projected onto the anonymous order of the Großgesellschaft. Prices are not just rewards for what we have done but signals of what we ought to do next, and no one holds a moral claim to a particular market value, since that value emerges from thousands of circumstances no mind can survey. Competition works as a discovery procedure drawing on more knowledge than any planner commands. To enforce a just distribution would demand totalitarian control, cripple productivity, and, he warns with Hölderlin, turn the state made heaven into hell.

Frühere Generationen haben sich noch nicht der Illusion hingegeben, daß sie ihre gesellschaftliche Umwelt völlig nach Wunsch gestalten können.

English translation: “Earlier generations had not yet indulged the illusion that they could shape their social environment entirely according to their wishes.”

Where Hayek would let private banks issue competing paper currencies held to value by reputation alone, Hazlitt draws a firm line. Reviewing Choice in Currency and Denationalization of Money, he embraces the assault on legal-tender monopoly, repeal the tender laws, he agrees, and let citizens contract in gold, Swiss francs, or D-marks so that an inflating state punishes itself as users flee its notes. But American free banking, with its worthless Michigan banknotes and recurrent panics, teaches him to distrust irredeemable private paper and Hayek's vague commodity-basket 'ducat.' Sound private money, he counters, must be gold or silver certificates redeemable on demand, treated like warehouse receipts, with overissue prosecuted as fraud. The result he wants is not denationalized fiat but denationalized custody of a full-reserve metallic standard.

If it continued to inflate, its citizens would forsake its money for other currencies. Inflation would no longer pay.

Ever since serious discussion of the international monetary system began, economists have worried whether the world holds enough reserves, and this exchange pits Haberler against Robert Triffin over whether that worry still makes sense once currencies float. Haberler traces the anxiety through bimetallism, Marshall's symmetallism, commodity-reserve schemes, and Keynes's Clearing Union, arguing that nearly every such proposal presumed fixed or adjustable parities. Under Bretton Woods, defensible but revisable par values made speculation rational and enlarged the appetite for reserves; under generalized floating, the master problem of reserve control simply dissolves. Reserves matter, he insists, only through national choices such as monetary restraint, sterilization, and intervention, so the IMF should practice surveillance rather than act as a world central bank. Triffin's reply presses the opposite case, keeping dollar-centered reserve creation in view.

Under the Bretton Woods system, in contrast, "complete confidence" in the existing rates was no longer possible.

A machine’s productivity may explain its rental income—but why does its purchase price not absorb all its expected future earnings? This distinction anchors Murray N. Rothbard’s 1977 introduction to Frank A. Fetter’s collected essays, Capital, Interest, and Rent. Rothbard presents Fetter as a neglected American contributor to Austrian economics whose account separates payments for productive services from the discounting that determines asset values. His rehabilitation is not unqualified: he defends distinctions between land and produced capital goods that Fetter’s emphasis on capital value tends to obscure. Readers can discover why, in Rothbard’s account, extending rent beyond land and explaining interest through time preference changes the questions distribution theory must answer—and why productivity alone cannot settle them.

Can a party retain the name ‘Liberal’ while keeping a socialist government in power? In this brief letter to The Times of March 31, 1977, republished here in 2022, Hayek answers with an unequivocal no. Responding to the Lib–Lab Pact, he invokes his lifelong study of liberalism to distinguish fidelity to its principles from loyalty to a party label. He does not weigh the policy influence the Liberals gained through the agreement: parliamentary support itself is enough, in his judgement, to disqualify them. The letter offers a sharply compressed example of Hayek turning an ideological distinction into electoral advice—and leaves exposed the tension between political principle and tactical compromise.

Certainly, no liberal can in future vote ‘Liberal’.

Family kinship gave Hayek access to Wittgenstein without making him an intellectual confidant. In this autobiographical essay, first published in 1977 and here reprinted in its 2013 version, railway conversations, Cambridge visits, and practical correspondence reveal the tension between personal warmth and an exacting hostility to pretence. Hayek sees his cousin’s demand for truthfulness as a demand to live truth, not merely to speak it, and places that severity within their Viennese upbringing. Yet he repeatedly acknowledges what he cannot explain or remember. Food parcels and travel arrangements disclose a combination of meticulousness and impracticality; an interrupted final conversation leaves intimacy unresolved. The result is a portrait of integrity’s interpersonal costs, grounded in intermittent acquaintance rather than philosophical discipleship.

It meant much more than truth in speech. One had to 'live' truth and not tolerate any pretence in oneself or others.

Why should proportional changes in prices leave economic choices unchanged—and what happens when investors learn from new evidence? In this conference contribution, Gerhard Tintner tests the assumptions behind the homogeneity of demand and supply and the separation of real from monetary economies. His distinctive move is to distinguish risk, where probability distributions are known, from uncertainty, where their parameters must be inferred. Portfolio models can preserve familiar invariance results when returns, variances, and covariances scale appropriately; Bayesian learning complicates them because observations need not scale with prior beliefs. Tintner also questions the empirical plausibility of the preference restrictions required for monetary and real economies to yield identical outcomes. The article offers a precise way to distinguish mathematical invariance from its behavioral and informational preconditions.

Can a protection agency acquire the authority to suppress its competitors without violating the rights it exists to defend? In this 1977 article, Murray N. Rothbard challenges Robert Nozick’s derivation of the minimal state from voluntary exchanges. His anarcho-capitalist perspective makes the decisive issue not an agency’s size or success, but its claimed right to prohibit independent enforcement. Combining rights theory with subjective-value economics, Rothbard argues that fear of unreliable procedures cannot justify coercive monopoly, and that compulsory protection cannot simply be counted as compensation for lost freedom. The dispute sharpens a distinction easily blurred in debates over government: agreement on legal standards need not imply a single institution entitled to enforce them. Readers encounter a libertarian challenge to state authority conducted on the terrain of individual rights that Nozick himself defends.