The archive.

From his editorial desk in Zehlendorf on 15 June 1931, Thurnwald answers Dr. Ernst Harms with the courteous firmness of a journal editor holding a line. Writing for the Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie und Soziologie, he reports that the contributions to the symposium, already excessively swollen, have been definitively closed, and that Harms's submitted review of Halfdan Bryn's book falls short of the scientific standards the journal is obliged to impose. One door he leaves ajar: a manuscript on the theory of an experimental Völkerpsychologie may be considered once he can examine it in hand, and Harms is directed to the publisher C. L. Hirschfeld about his lecture on folk character and cultural progress. A brief document, it catches the gatekeeping labor behind an interwar scientific periodical.

Government statistics as fiscal bookkeeping or as an inquiry into social life: this distinction anchors Karl Pribram’s compact biographical entry on the Austrian statistician Karl Czoernig. Pribram’s portrait emphasizes practical changes in how knowledge was collected and shared. When cooperation through official channels proved impracticable, Czoernig sent questionnaires directly to more than 7,000 industrial enterprises in 1844; as parliamentary representation widened, he supplemented bulky statistical source books with small annuals. These details give concrete substance to Pribram’s assessment of a reformer who expanded both the scope and accessibility of state statistics. The entry offers a concise account of how administrative coordination, direct inquiry, and public dissemination could become parts of a single statistical programme.

A factory can be technically obsolete yet economically worth keeping. In this 1931 Festschrift essay, Ludwig von Mises examines the gap between the productive arrangements one would build from scratch and the choices justified by equipment already in place. His distinctive emphasis is on scarce capital: replacing a serviceable machine may consume resources better used elsewhere, while recognizing a mistaken investment need not justify abandoning it. This distinction gives his criticism of tariff protection a pointed consequence: plants built under protection can remain worth operating after protection ends. By separating technical efficiency, book values, and prospective earnings, Mises offers readers a precise way to assess modernization—and to understand why rational adjustment does not simply erase the material legacy of past decisions.

Capital is not a pile of tools, buildings, or accumulated goods but a form of reckoning, so runs the central chapter of this 1931 lecture volume on Kapital und Kapitalzins. Refusing to begin from a definition, Schumpeter lets the phenomenon emerge from the economic process itself, reconstructing the stationary circular flow in which labor and nature enter as productive services and consumption goods emerge as the social product, all financed from prior receipts. Capital here is an accounting form corresponding to money income, distinct from produced means of production. Development changes everything: entrepreneurs carry out new combinations before the goods exist, and bank credit, the distinctively capitalist device, creates the purchasing power that commands labor and materials. From this follow the Konjunkturzyklus of clustered innovation, the self-deflation of productive credit, and interest as an agio on present money born of entrepreneurial profit.

Wir beginnen deshalb nicht mit einer Definition des Kapitals, vielmehr soll sich das Phänomen aus unserer Darlegung von selbst ergeben.

English translation: “We therefore do not begin with a definition of capital; rather, the phenomenon shall emerge of itself from our exposition.”

What makes a legal command binding, rather than merely a proposition whose content jurists can establish? In this 1931 essay, Erich Voegelin turns to Kant’s account of the “ought” to separate the experience of obligation from its rationalist explanation. His focus is the divided human will: capable of recognizing a moral demand without necessarily obeying it. Voegelin preserves this tension while challenging Kant’s abstraction from embodied, historically situated persons. The resulting distinction between feeling bound and knowing what is right opens a further problem: personal obligation cannot by itself explain rights against others or the authority of legal commands. Readers can discover here a precise point of departure for legal theory—one that requires inquiry into community and relations of rule rather than deduction from a universal moral formula.

Is capitalism trapped in a permanent crisis, or merely in the depression phase of a normal business cycle? Schumpeter answers at once for the cycle, then devotes the essay to the qualification that makes the difference. What should have been short and mild turned catastrophic because political lesions, war legacies, protection, fiscal distortion, and deflationary therapy, pressed continuously on the economic organism. Cycles themselves arise when innovations bunch: railways or new raw-material methods become feasible, spread in swarms, expand credit, and then collide with the old, so that depression is a groping toward new equilibrium rather than simple collapse. Politically unfettered, he insists, the capitalist mechanism would scarcely produce symptoms of such severity, and the system as such needs no planning to function, while deflation policy, his chief example, manufactures the very bankruptcies and unemployment it claims to cure.

Das kapitalistische System als solches bedarf keiner Regelung oder Planung innerhalb oder außerhalb der Depression, um zu funktionieren, Erfolge zu erzielen und Zusammenbrüche zu vermeiden.

English translation: “The capitalist system as such requires no regulation or planning, whether within or outside of a depression, in order to function, achieve successes, and avoid breakdowns.”

Restrictions on foreign borrowing can make a country’s finances more precarious rather than safer. In this 1931 Festschrift contribution, Wilhelm Röpke examines how German controls on long-term borrowing encouraged dependence on short-term debt—a concrete test of intervention’s unintended effects. His defense of international capital mobility is not an assumption that national and global interests always coincide: capital flight and defective credit institutions can disrupt productive investment and justify corrective policies. The crucial distinction is between suppressing the quantity of capital crossing borders and improving the forms and channels through which it moves. Readers can discover a liberal argument that judges controls by their practical consequences, while asking when foreign investment’s future returns compensate a country for resources surrendered in the present.

Three schools of subjective value theory—or three ways of expressing one principle? In this 1931 contribution to Probleme der Wertlehre, Oskar Morgenstern compares Austrian, Lausanne, and Anglo-American approaches by asking what each contributes to explaining prices. His reconciliation is not neutral: he favors Austrian analysis for its treatment of planning, substitution, and adjustment, while finding substantial agreement beneath differences in terminology and mathematical presentation. Concrete problems give the comparison its force: how recurring needs shape present choices, why a good’s utility depends on the rest of one’s possessions, and how production costs express sacrificed alternatives. Readers can discover both the common ground Morgenstern identifies and the unresolved tension between describing equilibrium and explaining how an economy moves toward it.

The opening volume of a five-part survey of human society sets itself against sociology's habit of generalizing from a narrow European sample, and against the Kulturkreis theorists who treated cultural goods as museum objects passed mechanically between peoples. Thurnwald's method is the representative Lebensbild: concrete communities—Polar Eskimo, Bushmen, Andaman Islanders, Copper Eskimo, Maori—shown whole, so that institutions appear functioning inside real cultural systems rather than sorted into ideal types. Foragers are ranged by habitat across ice, steppe, forest, and water, then plant-cultivators and herders. Running through everything is a distinction he presses hard: the irreversible accumulation of technique and knowledge against the reversible, pendulum-like swings between mother-right and father-right. Institutions such as blood revenge or asylum, he warns, cut across so-called culture circles and cannot be identified mechanically with them.

Die Feldbauer sind bei den Expansionen keine „Imperialisten“, sondern eher Gründer neuer Tochtervölker und Niederlassungen, sie sind „Kolonisatoren“, aber keine „Eroberer“.

English translation: “In their expansions, agriculturalists are not "imperialists" but rather founders of new daughter peoples and settlements; they are "colonizers," but not "conquerors.”

Stable prices can be a sign of economic distress rather than resilience. In this two-installment article, Oskar Morgenstern argues that recovery depends on changing relationships among prices, not simply on a rising or falling general index. His concrete concern is the manufacturer caught between declining selling prices and inputs kept expensive by cartels and tariffs. German iron-cartel rebates add another difficulty: secret discounts leave firms unable to judge their competitors’ costs. Austrian iron, coal and food prices show how unevenly adjustment proceeds. Morgenstern connects these cases with accounting practices and buyers’ expectations, distinguishing obstacles to price reductions from monopoly income that could absorb them. The article offers a precise account of why apparent price stability may conceal shrinking production—and why Morgenstern favours removing protective tariffs over imposing administrative price cuts.

The forty-hour week, this 1931 lecture to the German trade-union congress in Frankfurt insists, is no narrow bargaining demand but a response to a capitalism transformed by crisis. Depression at twenty-five percent unemployment differs in kind, not merely degree, from earlier downturns: postwar technical change swept through raw materials, agriculture, transport, and mining at once, cartels and tariff walls held organized prices high while starving smaller export firms of credit, and no automatic compensation reabsorbs the workers machinery displaces. Lederer rejects both autarky, which for a modern nation means poverty and dependence, and isolated currency manipulation in an interdependent world. If technical progress permanently shrinks the necessary volume of labor, work must be shared more evenly — and leisure, rather than mere rest, becomes a terrain of education, solidarity, and emancipation for the working class.

Es ist etwas anderes, ob eine Krise mit 7, 8, 10 Prozent Arbeitslosigkeit oder mit 25 Prozent Arbeitslosigkeit zu kämpfen hat.

English translation: “It is one thing whether a crisis has to contend with 7, 8, or 10 percent unemployment, and quite another with 25 percent unemployment.”

Delivered as a lecture in 1931 amid the deepening Depression, this eight-part address moves from the nature of the market through the business cycle to unemployment, price supports, taxation, and gold. The market, Mises insists, is no anarchy but a form of economic democracy in which consumers, as the final authority, direct production. Crisis appears when policy disables that mechanism: bank credit expansion drives the loan rate below the natural rate, building a boom on sand, while union wages held above market-clearing levels, sustained by unemployment relief, turn joblessness chronic. Price supports for coffee and wheat, protective tariffs, and capital-consuming taxation deepen the disorder. The single way out, he argues, is to abandon every attempt to prevent market prices from shaping production.

Die kapitalistische Marktwirtschaft ist eine Demokratie, in der jeder Groschen eine Wahlstimme gibt.

English translation: “The capitalist market economy is a democracy in which every penny casts a vote.”