The archive.

A sugar magnate and a banker occupy an unusual place in Gerhard Tintner’s account of early Austrian economics: mathematical innovators whose work found a stronger following outside their own school. This concise encyclopedia entry reassesses Rudolf Auspitz and Richard Lieben through their 1889 study of price theory. Tintner highlights their independent development of indifference curves and their treatment of markets between free competition and monopoly, while contrasting Menger’s hostility with their influence on Pareto, Edgeworth, and Fisher. Their exchange with Walras brings a precise methodological question into view: what can partial-equilibrium analysis explain, and where do its limits lie? The entry offers a compact route into the distinction between belonging to an economic school and contributing to its analytical development.

Why should present goods command a premium over otherwise identical future goods? In this encyclopedia article, Emil Kauder places Böhm-Bawerk’s answer within his larger attempt to connect consumer valuation, time-consuming production, wages, and interest. Capital emerges not as a permanent productive substance but as goods that must continually be replaced while workers are sustained through unfinished production. Kauder offers a qualified reassessment: he finds Böhm-Bawerk overrated in his lifetime yet insufficiently appreciated afterward, and distinguishes his analytical contributions from their disputed assumptions. His attention to Austrian Aristotelianism and administrative paternalism also complicates a simple identification of Austrian economics with unrestricted competition. Readers can discover both the appeal of Böhm-Bawerk’s economic synthesis and the precise points at which its explanations of production and interest remain contested.

A law can be precisely written yet offer little lasting certainty if legislators can readily replace it. In this memorial address for Bruno Leoni, reprinted in 2013, Hayek explains why his friend’s account of law challenged his own thinking. He reads Leoni’s Freedom and the Law not as a simple demand to abolish legislation, but as an inquiry into qualities that judge-made and jurist-developed rules may preserve better: long-term stability and restraints that protect individual domains. Personal recollections and an explicitly limited knowledge of Leoni’s writings give the tribute its particular perspective. Readers encounter both an intellectual friendship and an unfinished question: how can law prevent injustice without becoming an instrument for directing people towards prescribed ends?

As to many other profound thinkers the task of the law was to him not so much to create justice as to prevent injustice.

Textbook models of perfect competition assume away the very thing real markets accomplish: because they presuppose that all relevant facts are already known, they make rivalry look wasteful and pointless. Hayek turns the objection around, arguing that competition earns its keep precisely as a discovery procedure, a way of eliciting information about scarcities, uses, and capacities that no participant or planner holds in advance. He reframes the market not as an economy governed by a single ranking of ends but as a catallaxy, a self-correcting order steered by negative feedback and price signals, whose value can be judged only by comparing societies rather than by predicting particular outcomes. Along the way he defends pattern prediction, rejects the language of equilibrium, and warns that incomes policy freezes adjustment exactly when circumstances demand movement.

But which goods are scarce goods, or which things are goods, and how scarce or valuable they are – these are precisely the things which competition has to discover.

Scholarly prestige, curial trust, and diplomatic office fused in a single man when the impoverished Austrian republic sent Ludwig von Pastor, the famous historian of the popes, as its envoy to the Holy See. Engel-Janosi's study of that 1920–28 mission argues that Pastor's fame gave a weakened state a Roman voice out of all proportion to its power: Cardinal Gasparri spoke to him with a freedom rarely extended to other heads of mission, making his dispatches a privileged source for Vatican thinking. Through them the interwar Curia appears anti-Versailles, conservative, intensely political, and suspicious of the postwar order, tempted by "providential" strongmen yet unwilling to surrender ecclesial independence. The narrative runs through the Roman Question, Fascism, South Tyrol, the Anima dispute, and the still-unsettled question of Anschluss.

Der Österreicher betont die Vorsicht und die Selbständigkeit dieses Papstes, auf den niemand, selbst kaum sein Staatssekretär Einfluß auszuüben scheint.

English translation: “The Austrian emphasizes the caution and the independence of this Pope, upon whom no one, scarcely even his Secretary of State, appears to exert influence.”

Inherited words—order, law, economy, democracy—make spontaneous social orders look like purposive organizations, and this 1968 essay in political semantics sets out to break their spell through a series of paired corrections: Kosmos against Taxis, spontaneous order against made arrangement; Nomos against Thesis, the universal rule of just conduct against the organizational command; Katallaxie against Wirtschaft, the market as a discovery procedure against the household writ large; and finally Demarchie against Demokratie. Only a Kosmos, Hayek insists, can sustain an open society among strangers who share no concrete ends, so 'social' or distributive justice—the justice of an organization—loses all meaning where no one distributes the results. The tract anticipates Law, Legislation and Liberty, turning the reform of language into a servant of liberal constitutionalism.

Wir wünschen die Meinung der Mehrheit als letzte Autorität, aber wir wollen nicht dulden, daß die nackte Gewalt der Mehrheit den einzelnen regellos Gewalt antut.

English translation: “We desire the opinion of the majority as the ultimate authority, but we do not want to tolerate that the naked power of the majority does violence to the individual in a rule-less manner.”

How can strangers who share no common purpose live together in peace? Not, this short lecture answers, by organizing them around shared aims, but only when they obey the same abstract rules while pursuing different ends. Hayek traces the passage from tribal closure, bound by common purposes, to the open Great Society, whose achievement is to generate order spontaneously and merely to furnish each individual with opportunities rather than prescribe his goals; Roman law and Christianity figure as forces that turned tribal rules into universal ones. The rules such a society needs are mainly negative, delimiting coercion rather than commanding ends—and the same principle, extended outward, is for Hayek the only real foundation of international peace, which no multiplication of international bodies can supply.

Die große Errungenschaft der offenen Großgesellschaft besteht darin, daß sie spontan Ordnung hervorbringen kann, dadurch daß die Individuen abstrakten Regeln gehorchen, das heißt, daß sie eine sich selbst bildende Ordnung ist.

English translation: “The great achievement of the open Great Society consists in its being able to bring forth order spontaneously through the fact that individuals obey abstract rules—that is, that it is a self-forming order.”

No participant in a strategic encounter controls all the conditions of success. In this 1968 encyclopedia article, Oskar Morgenstern explains why that fact requires something different from ordinary individual maximization. His perspective as a cofounder of game theory gives particular weight to cooperation: coalitions can create gains, but cannot by themselves determine how those gains should be divided. Moving between mathematical concepts and questions of social organization, he shows why voting weights need not measure effective power and why the same resources may sustain different stable distributions. Readers encounter both the precision of minimax reasoning and the less determinate world of bargaining, where multiple solutions can express alternative institutional arrangements rather than a failure of analysis.

Historical circumstances can explain an economist’s changing views—but can they establish whether those views were sound? This distinction animates Murray N. Rothbard’s review of Melvin M. Leiman’s study of the Charleston editor Jacob N. Cardozo. Rothbard welcomes Leiman’s attention to both economic analysis and policy, while resisting his tendency to treat Cardozo’s shifts in banking theory as appropriate responses to institutional change. The disagreement becomes concrete over specie redemption: Rothbard challenges the description of banks’ exemption from contractual obligations as “laissez faire.” His brief review offers a pointed encounter between historical explanation and theoretical judgment, alongside glimpses of Cardozo’s distinction between monetary and real returns and Rothbard’s questions about the publicly borne costs omitted from calculations of slavery’s profitability.

Honouring Leonard Read on his seventieth birthday, Hayek turns a tribute into a challenge to defenders of a free society: explain your case better rather than impugn your opponents’ motives. This 1968 speech, republished in 2013, links that obligation to Hayek’s account of civilisation as the unintended outcome of evolving moral and legal rules, whose functions may remain obscure even to those who depend on them. Its personal turn is especially revealing. Hayek admits that he initially regarded Read chiefly as a populariser, then came to recognise an original thinker whose everyday language concealed no lack of depth. The speech offers a compact encounter with Hayek’s defence of inherited institutions—and his recognition that making an argument intelligible can itself advance understanding.

Our chief task therefore must still be to improve the argument on which our case for a free society rests.

A growing population need not supply more work. In this 1968 article, Gerhard Tintner and Yves Aureille examine that tension in France’s postwar demographic revival, separating the number of workers from the hours they contribute. Their accounting method distinguishes employment growth from changes in sectoral composition and working time: movement out of agriculture, with its longer hours, can reduce total labour input even as employment expands. They propose a quality-adjusted measure of labour services, while acknowledging that available French statistics permit only a simpler calculation of hours. Their conditional projection of declining labour input in 1965–70 gives the methodological problem a concrete edge. Readers can discover why schooling, retirement, holidays, and occupational shifts complicate any direct inference from demographic growth to labour supply.

Weapons can take years to develop, yet the political conditions governing their use may change before they enter service. In this March 1968 research report, Klaus Knorr and Oskar Morgenstern confront military planning’s dependence on forecasts that cannot reliably predict wars, revolutions, or shifts in alliances. Their answer is not greater predictive confidence but disciplined conjecture: explicit, criticizable reasoning from incomplete evidence. Declining access to overseas bases provides a concrete test, linking political pressures to choices about range, transport, and infrastructure without predicting the fate of any single installation. Equally important is their institutional argument: political expertise must help shape military requirements, not merely comment on technical decisions already made. The report shows how acknowledging uncertainty can change both what planners prepare for and whose judgment counts.

Conjecture is reasoned inference from admittedly defective evidence.