The archive.

How does one write the life of a statesman without dissolving it into general history or shrinking it to private psychology? Engel-Janosi answers with a political biography of Alexander von Hübner, the illegitimate Viennese boy, rumor made Metternich his father, who rose through the State Chancellery to become one of Franz Joseph's sharpest diplomatic observers. The book follows him through the 1848 collapse in Milan and his near-lynching at Brescia, the Paris embassy under the Second Republic and Napoleon III, his advocacy of the Crimean alliance against Russia, a brief tenure as police minister, and finally Rome, where he watched the temporal power of the papacy fade. Formed by late-Romantic Catholic legitimism, Hübner distrusted mass politics and industrial modernity, holding to a unifying imperial idea over any written formula.

Die Konstitutionen lassen sich nicht erfinden.

English translation: “Constitutions cannot be invented.”

Can a local currency succeed without vindicating the theory behind it? In this 1933 article, Richard Reisch tests promotional claims for Wörgl’s depreciating municipal money against the financing of its public works. He draws attention to subsidies, recovered tax arrears, and the relending of banknotes held as backing—resources and mechanisms obscured by an emphasis on faster circulation. Yet his criticism does not end in dismissal. Reisch credits Mayor Untergugenberger with mobilizing civic trust and tax compliance, and allows a place for regulated local experiments. The article offers a pointed distinction between monetary innovation and collective cooperation: visible improvements may be real even when their advocates’ explanation remains unproven.

The health of business-cycle research is measured, Hayek insists in this 1933 Festschrift essay, not by the mounting heap of contemporary statistics but by insight into causes—facts being the ever-changing object against which theory is tested, never its substitute. Crisis theory, he judges, has outrun the theory of depression. He gathers the Wicksellian, Misesian and Spiethoffian strands into one diagnosis: credit expansion unbacked by voluntary saving lengthens and distorts the structure of production, and the resulting 'capital shortage' is identical with relative overconsumption. What remains unsolved is recovery—how relative prices, stocks and the direction of resources must be revalued, and how to distinguish price falls that undo prior maladjustment from secondary deflation that persists past its use. Capital maintenance, wage rigidity, expectations and cash balances he names as the field's next work.

Austria's spring 1933 gold-clause and foreign-exchange ordinances did not revalue every gold debt at a stroke; they built a classified transition from nominal schilling parity to regulated value payment. Writing as the paper schilling broke openly from gold—127.49 paper schillings for 100 gold schillings on 28 March—Kerschagl turns a vague “gold clause” controversy into a sequence of legal tests: whether an obligation is effective or merely a value clause, whether it sounds in foreign valuta or gold schillings, what kind of debt it is, and whether its Stichtag has arrived. His reading of the Goldschuldenerleichterungsverordnung shows the pattern plainly—revalued mortgage capital paired with longer maturities and reduced interest, temporal redistribution rather than repudiation. Throughout, he insists that technical wording is distributive power.

Also mithin: bei Hypothekentilgung: gleiche Raten, aber mehr Raten, bei Pfandbriefen: aufgewertetes, aber später zu leistendes Kapital.

English translation: “Thus, in short: for the amortization of mortgages, equal installments, but more of them; for mortgage bonds, revalued capital, but payable at a later date.”

How could central banks defend gold-based currencies while easing a credit crisis? In this 1933 article, Richard Kerschagl examines the Lima conference’s answers through the practical tensions between reserve security, emergency lending, and foreign debt. He stresses that longer credit maturities and exceptional rediscounts came with collateral requirements and stronger central-bank supervision—not an unrestricted licence to expand credit. His account also preserves disagreements over exchange controls, relating Colombia’s defence of gold-flow restrictions to its particular economic circumstances. Most sharply, he reads the debt resolutions as acknowledging a choice of monetary stability over international credit standing. Readers encounter both Kerschagl’s commitment to gold and his guarded hope that cooperation among central banks could give inter-American integration a practical foothold.

Rising production is not recovery unless buyers can keep pace. In this 1933 newspaper article, Emil Lederer examines Roosevelt’s economic program as an attempt to close that gap: wages and public works must turn renewed confidence into purchasing power before unsold inventories make further expansion dangerous. His distinctive concern is the timing of intervention—whether emergency supports can generate an upswing that eventually sustains itself. He also connects price recovery to the protection of mortgages and insurance claims, showing why financial obligations make passive waiting untenable. Without predicting success, Lederer offers a concrete account of how the measures might work together, and why America’s resources and monetary position do not make its experiment a readily transferable model for Europe.

Optimismus allein schafft aber noch keine Käufer.

English translation: “Optimism alone, however, does not yet create buyers.”

Medicine can name and treat the body's diseases; the science of society, by contrast, has barely learned to diagnose the disorders of collective life. Rejecting cheap analogies from biology and mechanics and the abstractions of German philosophical sociology, Thurnwald makes personality the "atom" of social analysis, with character understood as a dynamic product of biological potential and environmental fate. From this unit he builds family, male associations, leadership, and the problem of fitting the right man to the right place through automatic or planned social sifting. American Prohibition serves as his cautionary case of law enacted without regard to social psychology, breeding illegal trade and corruption; race questions in Hawaii and Fiji become social-psychological problems, and Germany, he argues, needs social inventions to match its technical ones.

Wir werden vielfach irregeführt von dem Gedanken, daß Verordnungen, Gesetze, Vorschriften ausreichen, das Gesellungsleben zu regulieren.

English translation: “We are frequently misled by the notion that ordinances, laws, and prescriptions suffice to regulate communal life.”

A plot of fifteen hundred to three thousand square meters, enough for vegetables, potatoes, fruit, poultry, rabbits, perhaps a goat, anchors this Depression-era proposal for Vienna. The wager is that industry, even in recovery, will not again employ everyone eight hours a day, so the unemployed need a supplementary livelihood rooted in the soil rather than merely healthier housing. Mahr designs the whole settlement economy: land secured by lease or hereditary building right rather than costly purchase, construction cheapened through voluntary labor service, serial building, and local materials, even an industrial labor service in which future settlers make their own bricks and window frames against credited wage claims. Financed by domestic loans at roughly fifteen hundred Schilling per holding, Stadtrandsiedlung leaves a lasting productive asset where ordinary public works leave none.

Aus diesen Gründen erscheint die Behauptung durchaus gerechtfertigt, daß die Förderung der Stadtrandsiedlung gegenwärtig unter den Zielen der staatlichen Wirtschaftspolitik an erster Stelle stehen sollte.

English translation: “For these reasons, the assertion appears entirely justified that the promotion of suburban settlement should presently stand in first place among the aims of state economic policy.”

Read as an economic program rather than a devotional text, Pius XI's encyclical Quadragesimo anno becomes, in Bayer's hands, a diagnosis of the Depression. He begins from the paradox of apparent overproduction: goods stand abundant while unemployment destroys the income that would buy them, each production cut breeding fresh joblessness. Against this he defines the economy's rational goal as durable maximum value—rising output adapted to need, income tied to contribution, distribution as even as possible—and finds it confirmed in the encyclical. His remedy is neither socialist planning, which lacks price formation and calculation, nor unrestrained competition, which decays into destructive underbidding and then monopoly. Bayer locates the world crisis above all in monopoly pricing by finance-controlled cartels and in the 'Fehlrationalisierung' of misdirected investment, prescribing a flexible corporative order to hold competition within bounds.

Es ist also weder die freie Konkurrenz noch die mit ihr in ursächlichem Zusammenhang stehende Monopolgestaltung in der Lage, aus sich heraus eine Heilung der Volkswirtschaft herbeizuführen.

English translation: “Thus neither free competition nor the monopoly formation causally bound up with it is able, of itself, to bring about a healing of the national economy.”

Would restoring silver to monetary use revive trade—or chiefly rescue its producers and holders? Writing in 1933, Richard Kerschagl separates currency stability from support for a falling commodity price. His distinctive approach brings monetary institutions into contact with the stubborn economics of silver: much is mined as a by-product, while private hoards can return to market precisely when higher prices are meant to restore confidence. Giving competing reform proposals substantial space, he tests their promises against these constraints and the needs of silver-using economies. Readers can discover why credit expansion need not require silver, why official stock agreements cannot control private selling, and why Kerschagl objects to imposing obsolete monetary arrangements on Asian borrowers in the name of assistance.

Mandeville and Adam Smith showed that a market can turn private self-interest into social coordination; Strigl's 1933 offprint, printed for the Association of Austrian Banks and Bankers, denies that this licenses the state to grant favors to particular firms and trades. He tests the interventionist slogan that every branch of national labor has a claim to protection and finds it hollow: imports do not make employment vanish but merely shift it while raising costs, wages, and consumer prices, and rescuing loss-making firms diverts scarce capital from productive uses. Such policy he names anti-selectionist, since it freezes existing arrangements against necessary structural change, and he traces a self-reinforcing spiral in which crisis breeds intervention and intervention deepens crisis. Every measure, he insists, must face one objective test: whether it serves the whole or only a favored few.

Eine gefährliche Schraube ohne Ende.

English translation: “A dangerous screw without end.”

Can economics establish laws that hold across different societies without treating human beings like objects in a laboratory? In these methodological essays, presented in the 2003 third English edition, Ludwig von Mises grounds economic knowledge in purposeful choice rather than statistical regularity or psychological motives. His claim that action is rational does not mean that people are wise or selfish: pursuing honor, religious devotion, or political power also involves choosing ends and sacrificing alternatives. Against historicism, he argues that even accounts of unique events presuppose general concepts of exchange, cost, and value. The central tension is between the universality Mises claims for economic theory and the diversity he acknowledges in human purposes. His distinctions clarify what economics can explain—and why, on his account, it can neither prescribe ultimate ends nor predict numerical outcomes.