The archive.

Can civilizations follow recurrent patterns without making human freedom an illusion? In this 1949 article, Friedrich Engel-Janosi examines Toynbee’s answer, distinguishing his open-ended comparative history from Spengler’s predetermined cycles of decline. He welcomes the displacement of Europe from the centre of historical inquiry and the recognition of multiple civilizations as subjects in their own right. Yet his sympathy sharpens rather than suspends criticism: Toynbee’s religious defence of freedom sits uneasily, he argues, with a mythic account of creation that risks making divine action dependent on a demonic adversary. The article offers a discriminating encounter with Toynbee’s historical imagination, asking how historians can recognize recurring forms, preserve individual agency, and judge their own age without treating it as either history’s culmination or the measure of every other civilization.

Why does a state that owns enterprises and controls prices still need taxes? Richard Kerschagl’s 1949 article makes this question central to a comparison of American and Soviet public finance. He distinguishes the outward form of a tax from its function within a particular system of ownership and government. American federal, state, and municipal authorities compete over overlapping tax bases; Soviet authorities use taxes to absorb enterprise surpluses, differentiate among ownership sectors, and preserve incentives for skilled work. Kerschagl argues that recognizable fiscal techniques can serve sharply different political and distributive purposes. The comparison gives readers concrete grounds for understanding why progressive income taxes or turnover levies cannot be interpreted apart from price controls, production costs, and the allocation of governmental power.

If buyers’ valuations depend on incomes earned at existing prices, can those valuations explain how prices arise? In this 1949 article, Ewald Schams confronts the circularity objection to Austrian price theory without abandoning its account of subjective motivation. His distinctive move is to place price formation within the circulation of goods, money and income: capital advances finance purchases, sales validate incomes, and receipts replenish capital. On this view, reciprocal dependence is not necessarily a defect in reasoning; it may belong to the economic process being explained. Readers can discover why Schams distinguishes the causal explanation of a particular exchange from the simultaneous relations sustaining a price system—and how isolating one price from that system can manufacture the very logical difficulty theory seeks to resolve.

Farmers building their own oil refineries give Hans Bayer a concrete alternative to accounts of American economic life dominated by free competition or monopoly. In this two-installment journal article, he follows cooperatives that moved beyond purchasing and marketing into production when powerful suppliers threatened their independence. Their expansion raises the central tension: how can organizations acquire the scale needed to confront large corporations without sacrificing democratic control? Bayer locates the answer in federations built from below, linking local initiative to national coordination. His affirmative account lets readers examine economic democracy through practical arrangements—member ownership, collective investment, and representation in agricultural planning—rather than as an abstract ideal. The distinctive interest lies in his treatment of industrial scale as a possible instrument of self-help, not necessarily its enemy.

Does Austrian economic theory necessarily entail a commitment to economic liberalism? In this 1949 article, Hans Bayer argues otherwise, drawing on Hans Mayer’s account of needs, valuation, and income formation to connect Austrian analysis with welfare-oriented planning. His encounter with Keynes is neither rejection nor conversion: he credits the achievement of explaining equilibrium with unemployment while questioning whether aggregate relationships adequately capture differences in income distribution and consumer behaviour. The policy stakes become concrete in Bayer’s argument that unequal bargaining power can depress wages, restrict consumption, and weaken investment. Readers encounter an Austrian perspective in which competition is an instrument rather than an ultimate objective—and in which causal explanation can support institutional correction, planned coordination, and even competitive socialism.

A computer can solve a system of equations without making its answer economically trustworthy. In this brief 1949 discussion contribution, Oskar Morgenstern responds to Leontief’s input-output analysis by asking what calculation can establish when observational errors remain unknown. His concern reaches beyond misleading decimal precision: the many zero entries in industrial tables may make solutions easier and more stable while reflecting gaps in information rather than actual economic relationships. Supportive of the research programme, he nevertheless distinguishes computational feasibility from empirical warrant. Readers encounter an economist treating numerical stability, data collection, and model assumptions as connected responsibilities—not problems that faster machines can settle on their own.

Often accuracy is identified with detail; for example, the giving of figures with many decimal points when the real inaccuracy has already been permitted to enter into a much rougher figure.

Schumpeter traces the entrepreneur through the history of economic thought, from Cantillon and Say who grasped him to Smith, Ricardo, and Marx who dissolved him into the capitalist, in order to isolate a function that ownership, management, and risk-bearing all fail to capture. The entrepreneur is whoever institutes new combinations, breaking routine rather than administering it, and his gain is neither wage nor monopoly rent but a surplus that congeals into industrial fortunes. That function may be corporate or collective as easily as individual, and banks figure not as passive intermediaries but as organs that call new industries into being. The essay's second half turns concept into a research program, pairing theory with the history of firms, finance, and technology, and refusing to equate the cultural imprint of entrepreneurial mentality with direct political rule.

I shall state frankly that I consider power to be one of the most misused words in the social sciences, though the competition is indeed great.

An explanation of interest under perfect foresight need not explain interest under uncertainty. This distinction drives G. L. S. Shackle’s review of Allais’s Économie et Intérêt. After presenting Allais’s reasons why interest remains positive, Shackle questions whether money and liquidity-preference merely obscure deeper forces of thrift and productivity. Might causation also run the other way, with monetary interest rates shaping capital accumulation, income and ultimately time-preference? His objection gives readers a concrete way to distinguish what a model shows to be possible from what it establishes about economic life. Yet the review is no dismissal: Shackle balances his impatience with perfect foresight against admiration for Allais’s analytical precision and the breadth of his investigation.

The fact that a gas-fire can make a room warm does not imply that a warm room must contain a gas-fire.

Six recent English books, by Baster, Franks, Harrod, Jewkes, Meade, and Robbins, give Schumpeter his occasion to ask whether economists have drawn a serious analytic harvest from Britain's postwar experiment in state management. His first move is to prise apart three questions habitually merged under planning: socialism, meaning central control of production; laborism, meaning labor's political ascendancy within a still-private economy; and the sheer readjustment of exports, saving, and solvency after the war. Nationalizing coal or transport, he insists, proves neither socialism nor its absence; the telling fact is that the wage rate has become a political datum, protected as a matter of course while profits and rents are compressed. Britain's dollar shortage he reads as the outward face of domestic maladjustment, conceding that under laborite constraints direct controls may be forced expedients rather than doctrinal choices.

Nevertheless, there is point in keeping these three topics distinct, if only in order to show how they interact to produce the English problem.

Addressed directly to the champions of economic dirigisme, this open letter concedes their ends—higher living standards, human dignity, protection of wage-earners—and attacks only their means. Rueff's wager is that a price held away from its market-clearing level must produce either disorder or coercion: queues, shortages, black markets, rationing, and finally an economic police. Free prices, he counters, are the condition of a society of free persons, and price control is not egalitarian but malthusian, since it organizes scarcity instead of redistributing wealth. The volume pairs the Épître with Le Dilemme français, which frames postwar France's choice starkly: a plan enforced with the coercion of Vichy or Hitler's Germany, or liberated prices disciplined by a balanced budget and honest social intervention.

Dès qu'un produit est taxé, les acheteurs font queue à la porte des boutiques où on le vend.

English translation: “As soon as a product is subject to a price ceiling, buyers queue at the doors of the shops that sell it.”

An investment cannot always be treated as one trial in a repeatable gamble. How, then, can an economist analyse a decision whose consequences may be unique? Shackle locates its motives in present experiences of imagined futures: the gains that excite hope and the losses that command fear. His alternative to numerical probability, “potential surprise,” measures how astonishing an outcome would seem rather than assigning it a share of total likelihood. The resulting model offers a striking account of waiting: an investor may postpone commitment because information is coming, even without knowing what it will say. Readers can examine both the explanatory reach and the psychological demands of a theory in which two compelling possibilities—not an average across all outcomes—govern a venture’s attraction.

How much support does evidence give a scientific theory, apart from the costs of acting on it? Gerhard Tintner approaches this question from econometrics, where choosing between rival economic theories cannot readily be reduced to a calculation of gains and losses. In this 1949 article, he develops Rudolf Carnap’s logical account of confirmation through worked statistical examples. Coin tosses expose a consequential choice: assigning equal weight to patterns of outcomes rather than to individual sequences changes the probabilities used for prediction. Readers can trace how the language used to describe evidence enters the resulting estimates, and why confirming a universal law differs from predicting its next instance. Tintner also marks the framework’s limits: its treatment of categorical attributes does not yet accommodate the continuous variables central to economics and physics.