The archive.

How did opposition to war cease to be a defining commitment of the American Right? In this historical essay, Murray N. Rothbard sympathetically reconstructs a coalition whose resistance to overseas intervention grew from its hostility to government expansion at home. Figures such as John T. Flynn and Howard Buffett linked military commitments to conscription, debt, economic regimentation, and executive power—not simply to the costs of fighting abroad. Rothbard follows their displacement by Cold War conservatism while showing how former left-wing critics of imperialism came to be classified as reactionaries. His account challenges the equation of conservatism with military activism and offers a concrete history of the tension between defending liberty and maintaining a permanent global security role.

An elected government may possess almost unlimited authority yet remain captive to the groups whose support keeps it in office. This paradox drives Hayek’s 1978 article: democracy’s capacity to replace rulers peacefully does not, he argues, justify every use of power authorized by a majority. His distinctive concern is the difference between general laws binding everyone and measures bargaining away advantages to particular interests. When one assembly both directs government and writes its legal permissions, constitutional restraints can become instruments of convenience. Hayek proposes separating those functions between independent democratic assemblies. The article offers a compact way to examine why electoral accountability and government under law may come apart—and why, in Hayek’s view, defending democracy requires limits on what elected rulers can do.

But the sovereignty of the law and the sovereignty of an unlimited Parliament are irreconcilable.

Can restricting immigration preserve the movement toward equal treatment, or does it let prejudice set that movement’s limits? In this 1978 letter to The Times, republished here in 2022, Hayek defends Margaret Thatcher’s warning about immigration by recalling changing attitudes toward Jewish residents and refugees in Vienna. He attributes the spread of antisemitic sentiment partly to sudden arrivals—a causal judgement grounded in personal recollection, not demonstrated by the letter. His distinctive tension is between free movement as an ultimate liberal ideal and his fear that pursuing it immediately would revive nationalism. This brief intervention exposes how Hayek’s commitment to universal rules encounters his belief that people extend equal treatment only slowly beyond those they perceive as similar to themselves.

Why call socialism reactionary rather than progressive? In this lecture essay, republished in 1983, Friedrich August von Hayek locates its appeal in the wish to extend the solidarity of small, familiar groups to an entire society. His counterargument turns on a moral tension: serving people we know feels compelling, yet impersonal exchange can meet needs we never see. Property and contract, he argues, enabled cooperation beyond shared purposes long before anyone understood how they worked. Particularly revealing is his criticism of large businesses as well as government organizations: both can teach habits of directed cooperation that obscure the wider market order. The essay offers a compact encounter with Hayek’s account of how inherited institutions, emotional loyalties, and demands for rational justification can pull social judgment in opposing directions.

Between the Depression and the Deutsche Mark of 1948, the mark was destroyed a second time—and Sennholz, in this 1978 lecture, insists the destruction was political, not merely monetary. Nazi full employment after 1933 he grants as fact but reinterprets as coerced cost-cutting: unions abolished, wages frozen, and deficits disguised through special intermediaries issuing discountable bills. As the Reichsbank was subordinated and Schacht fell, wartime finance proved his central point—that inflation need not first appear as rising official prices. Rationing, price controls, and prosecutions defended posted prices while money surpluses fed black markets, hoarding, and substitute monies, the American cigarette emerging as a more honest currency than state fiat. The 1948 reform he judges ambivalently: it worked, he argues, only because Ludwig Erhard simultaneously abolished controls—proof that honest money depends on free exchange and property rights, not expert currency management.

No central bank can safeguard the currency from the inflationary expenditures of government.

Can a theory begin with the actor’s subjective perspective yet leave the specifically social character of action unexplained? In this private letter to Talcott Parsons of 17 March 1941, presented in its 1977 German translation, Alfred Schütz presses that question while trying to repair a strained intellectual exchange. His objection is not that Parsons should abandon action theory, but that he must examine what it presupposes: how actors orient themselves toward others, and how their understanding differs from the social scientist’s interpretation. Schütz’s account of turning to philosophy through problems in economics and law gives his demand for conceptual clarification a concrete grounding. The letter lets readers see how a foundational disagreement becomes entangled with the difficulty of having exploratory criticism received as an attempt at shared inquiry.

Alfred Schütz’s letter to Talcott Parsons of 21 April 1941, presented in its 1977 German version, separates confidence in a question from confidence in one’s answers. His own book might be inadequate or even wrong, Schütz concedes, without making the social-scientific problems it addresses any less genuine. Thankful that theoretical disagreement has not damaged their personal relationship, he asks that their exchange continue on this basis—not as a defence of his standing alongside Weber and Durkheim. This brief letter offers a concrete glimpse of the tact required to sustain intellectual disagreement, and of the frustration of conducting it at a distance, where misunderstandings must await another letter rather than immediate clarification.

Could a newspaper’s prolonged shutdown become a public benefit? In this brief 1979 letter to The Times, reproduced here in 2022, Friedrich August von Hayek endorses an editorial published as the paper resumed production after an industrial dispute. His approval turns on a condition: the newspaper must not merely learn from its difficulties but persist in teaching their lessons. The accompanying editorial note identifies the reform programme he was endorsing—greater productivity, technological change and restrictions on trade unions’ legal immunities. The letter offers a compact glimpse of Hayek’s support for turning an institution’s own experience of conflict into sustained public advocacy, without developing a separate argument about union power.

Is pure entrepreneurial profit won by sheer luck, or by a superior ability that markets ought to price like any other factor? Presented in an American Economic Association session, this chapter refuses both horns. Profit exists only where the same or economically equivalent good is valued inconsistently—where Jevons's Law of Indifference has not yet been fulfilled—and competition steadily grinds it away. Kirzner works the puzzle through Robinson Crusoe: true "Crusonian" profit appears not in windfalls or in the mechanical conversion of means into ends, but when Crusoe discovers he had misvalued his own time, seeing boat-building as suddenly worth more than catching fish by hand. Menger's Law then reimputes that value and the profit fades. Alertness, he concludes, is no resource hired in advance, so profit is not a marginal-productivity return.

With complete knowledge, pure profit is impossible.

A commercially sophisticated tradition, fluent in the language of projectors, undertakers, and speculators, nonetheless denied the entrepreneur any distinct place in its theory—this is the puzzle the essay sets out to solve. English classical economics, Kirzner argues, submerged the entrepreneurial role into that of the capitalist, treating profit as a return on stock varying with capital advanced rather than with alertness or judgment. Adam Smith is the decisive case: even his self-employed Scottish pebble-gatherers earn only "wages," where Cantillon had already seen undertakers bearing uncertainty. Kirzner canvasses the explanations—the fusion of owner and manager in British firms, the wage-fund doctrine, Smith's tidy triad of wages, rent, and profit—and locates the deepest in the classical hunger for long-run natural prices, which makes speculation and discovery appear merely accidental.

The price at which the contract was valued was fixed and the entrepreneur bore the risks of profit and loss from the bargain.

Observed employment records how many people work—not how many would work, or how many employers would hire, at the prevailing wage. Bernhard Böhm and Gerhard Tintner make this distinction the basis of their econometric study of Austria’s labour market in 1954–1975. Their model treats employment as constrained by whichever is smaller: labour supply or labour demand. The resulting estimates suggest that registered unemployment can conceal the extent of involuntary unemployment during downturns, even when average rates broadly coincide. Yet the authors also expose the fragility of that inference: different starting values change the estimated market regimes, and a higher statistical likelihood need not produce an economically credible result. This essay offers a concrete encounter with both the interpretive possibilities and the numerical limits of disequilibrium modelling.

Because economists model choice as maximization among given alternatives, they narrow freedom to a matter of execution—whether the agent can reach the optimum the data already imply. Kirzner's essay recovers the dimension they miss: liberty is not merely the power to attain ends already fixed, but the entrepreneurial freedom to discover which ends, means, and opportunities exist at all. Drawing on Mises, Shackle, and Lachmann against the Robbinsian model, he shows how freedom collapses into mere power once ends are treated as data. The argument answers Stigler's demand that critics of the expanding state name the liberties it has actually impaired: some losses stay invisible precisely because they suppress the discovery of what might have been chosen. Restriction's deepest harm, echoing Hayek's knowledge problem, is epistemic—it numbs alertness.

A free society is one in which individuals are free to discover for themselves the available range of alternatives.