The archive.

From a single household's valuations through exchange, money, capital, prices and interest to population, currency, credit and the cartelized modern economy, this systematic handbook follows the whole arc of provision for life. Here in the German rendering of Engliš's 1925 Czech lectures, the Brno economist and Czechoslovak finance minister grounds every category in purpose and means, deliberately omitting statistics so the doctrine will not date. He parts sharply from the Austrians: marginal utility, he argues, measures the value of a loss and cannot explain why a particular good is bought. Malthus, Gresham's law, bimetallism and the wartime paper inflations of central Europe all find their place within a framework that treats price above all as a regulator holding production and consumption in balance.

Ohne Zweck gibt es keine Nützlichkeit.

English translation: “Without a purpose there is no utility.”

A monopolist can restrict supply, but cannot independently dictate both price and sales. This distinction anchors Hans Mayer’s 1925 encyclopedia contribution, “II. Der Monopolpreis,” which asks when monopoly pricing admits a definite economic explanation—and when it does not. Mayer shows why maximizing profit need not mean charging the highest price or always withholding goods: demand, purchasing power, production costs, and substitutes constrain the seller’s choices. His account becomes especially revealing at the boundaries of monopoly, where potential competitors can restrain a sole supplier, public-service obligations displace profit maximization, and two monopolists must bargain over their shared surplus. Readers can discover a carefully differentiated account of market power that separates control over supply from freedom to set prices, and calculable outcomes from those dependent on institutions and negotiation.

Viewed from neutral, republican Geneva — a city shaped by religious refuge and small-state vulnerability — the League of Nations appears to Rappard not as one institution but as three uneasily combined: a League to execute the peace treaties, a League to promote cooperation, and a League to outlaw war. Across these lectures he weighs each function with an insider's candor, praising the Permanent Mandates Commission and the financial reconstruction of Austria while exposing the weakness of Articles 10 and 16, whose sanctions collapsed at Vilna and Corfu once Germany, Russia, and above all the United States stood outside. War cannot be outlawed, he insists, until an impartial legal alternative exists for every dispute; the Permanent Court, not coercive force, is the League's most durable achievement. He closes with an appeal for American participation.

As municipal law is the sole protection of widows and orphans, so is international law, in the last resort, the sole protection of small nations.

Restoring a currency’s gold value is not the same as restoring economic stability. This distinction drives Martha Stephanie Braun’s 1925 assessment of international monetary conferences and their unfinished work. She supports ending inflation, balancing budgets, and freeing foreign-exchange markets, yet accepts warnings against the unemployment and disruption caused by forcing depreciated currencies back to prewar parity. Her defense of gold is therefore also an argument for shared management: central banks must coordinate policy and distribute the costs of maintaining reserves rather than leave responsibility chiefly to Britain and the United States. The article offers a concrete way to examine the tension between a common monetary anchor and national policy discretion—and to understand why, for Braun, currency stabilization cannot by itself moderate economic fluctuations.

Historical usefulness and theoretical failure coexist in Mises’s brief review of the sixth revised edition of Karl Helfferich’s Das Geld. He credits Helfferich with defending Germany’s gold currency and systematizing Ludwig Bamberger’s monetary teaching, but finds that the former disciple later attempted an untenable reconciliation with Georg Friedrich Knapp’s state theory of money. Mises locates this reversal between the first and second editions—not in the latest revision—and adds a pointed charge of neglecting monetary-theoretical literature, German as well as foreign. The review offers a compact example of his critical discrimination: monetary history and statistics can retain their value even when, in his judgement, the theory supporting them fails.

From the Bank of England's slow evolution, from privileged private bank to bankers' bank to guardian of the currency, Schumpeter draws a lesson against the reformers: central-bank rules grew organically from the needs of capitalist money, not from theory, and discount policy can correct small disturbances but not panic or structural impoverishment. Across four sections this 1925 article defends the return to gold as second-best rather than ideal, warns that Britain's restoration at prewar parity ignored the gap with purchasing-power parity, and rejects the Keynes-Hawtrey claim that the trade cycle is a monetary disease curable by price stabilization. Credit creation, banks making means of payment that did not previously exist, is capitalism's mechanism for financing innovation. Managed credit, he concludes, would turn money into economic governance and quietly prepare the way for socialism.

Und von diesem Standpunkt versteht man dann diese ganze Gedankenrichtung und besonders den Keynesplan als sehr ernstzunehmende Vorarbeit für einen ernstzunehmenden Sozialismus.

English translation: “And from this standpoint one then understands this entire line of thought, and especially the Keynes plan, as very serious preparatory work for a serious socialism.”

Written for the Berliner Börsen-Courier at the close of 1925, this short essay takes up the anti-inflation orthodoxy of post-stabilization Germany, raise taxes and tighten credit, and turns it against itself. Both tools, Schumpeter grants, were necessary to defend the currency, yet excessive taxation and monetary tightening can paralyze production and deepen unemployment; necessity is not success, and the patient's condition is what matters. His conceptual move is to detach credit policy from the narrow role of servant to the exchange rate. Because the value of money and the tempo of development depend on bank-created means of payment rather than on gold stocks and savings alone, credit becomes an instrument of therapy. The program is selective, not loose: channel credit to firms with real futures, expand capacity, and cut unemployment without endangering the currency.

Man kann damit Konjunkturen schaffen und verhindern, Produktionszweige fördern und drosseln, Richtung und Temperatur der wirtschaftlichen Entwicklung diktieren.

English translation: “By this means one can create and prevent booms, promote and throttle branches of production, dictate the direction and temperature of economic development.”

An equation can balance without explaining why prices change. In this 1925 article, Gottfried Haberler makes that distinction the basis of a critical engagement with Schumpeter’s monetary theory. Counting only purchases that deliver goods to final consumers gives monetary velocity a special meaning: hoarded money and funds circulating solely in capital markets contribute nothing to the relevant expenditure total. Haberler shows why such definitions preserve an accounting identity without establishing causal dependence. He extends the challenge to money’s “objective” exchange value, arguing that a general price level depends on how and for what purpose prices are combined. The article offers a concrete way to distinguish useful monetary shorthand from an aggregate mistakenly treated as an independent economic force.

Switzerland championed international law while resisting some of the obligations that might give it force. In this 1925 assessment of its first five years in the League of Nations, William Emmanuel Rappard examines that tension as both a Geneva professor and a member of the Mandates Commission. Broadly sympathetic to Swiss policy, he nevertheless tests its claims against uncomfortable particulars: support for Austrian reconstruction without collective guarantees, advocacy of compulsory jurisdiction alongside resistance to sanctions, and delayed narcotics controls amid powerful export interests. His distinction between official diplomacy and independent Swiss service reveals how a neutral country could contribute without committing its government. The result offers a concrete inquiry into the distance between impartiality, national advantage, and effective international solidarity—and into citizens’ responsibility for scrutinizing that distance.

If a preference is inferred from an exchange, can that same preference explain why the exchange occurred? Felix Kaufmann’s 1925 article makes such circularities central to its examination of economic theory. He distinguishes the concepts that define economic activity from the evidence needed to explain it, bringing an analysis of intentional action to bear on Austrian marginal utility theory. For Kaufmann, rankings of intended uses can guide inquiry, but cannot become necessary truths merely because they make choices intelligible. His scrutiny of economic measurement likewise locates substantive knowledge in the assumptions behind equations, not simply in their solution. The result offers a concrete way to distinguish what an economic model defines, what it assumes, and what it actually explains—without asking logic to replace empirical research.

A decade of stagnation, the young Hayek observes, had settled over general economic theory since Wieser's great synthesis seemed to leave nothing further to do—until Leo Schönfeld's Grenznutzen und Wirtschaftsrechnung. This 1925 review, here in English translation, greets that book as a genuine reopening of the field. What draws Hayek is Schönfeld's attempt to ground marginal utility not in a fixed, independent system of needs but in the process of economic calculation itself, distinguishing a logically complete theoretical reckoning from the abbreviated procedures of practice and building outward through combinations of decisions, isolated individual utilities, and a principle of economic quid pro quo. Hayek doubts whether maximum total utility can really be found by comparing isolated utilities, yet judges the work unusually mature and exact—regretting only that its promised later volumes never appeared.

It was also to remain the last noteworthy achievement in this field for a long time.

A crowd in panic is not an organization, and collective life is not always a crowd in panic. In this encyclopedia entry, Friedrich von Wieser challenges mass psychology’s fixation on excitement and revolution by examining ordinary cooperation: producers learning from successful rivals, speakers adopting an expression, and users accepting money. His distinctive emphasis falls on leadership and following—not merely imitation—as the relationship through which individual initiatives acquire collective force. A tension runs through the account: organization requires subordination, yet law, morality, and popular freedom depend on active participation rather than obedience alone. Wieser’s argument offers a concrete way to examine how collective acceptance sustains authority and turns innovations into durable practices, while exposing his preference for leadership and the conservative functions of the mass.