The archive.

Written in Geneva in 1938-39 and left unpublished until 1978, this prewar analysis diagnoses the doctrines that made another European war likely. Its subject is not party guilt but collectivism in all its rival costumes, fascism, National Socialism, Bolshevism, socialism, interventionism, militant nationalism, each of which swells the state into an instrument for directing social life in the name of a collective whole. Mises rejects the ordinary map of right and left, traces how a German liberalism built from Western ideas of rights and self-rule was overrun by Prussian militarism, etatism, and protectionism, and argues that National Socialism was the mass-democratic culmination of these currents rather than a primitive relapse into the old Prussian spirit. Nationalism, on his account, is the imperialist by-product of interventionist economics, which turns tariffs, schools, and borders into prizes to be seized.

Staat ist Gewaltanwendung und Bereitschaft, Gewalt anzuwenden.

English translation: “The state is the application of force and the readiness to apply force.”

Two rival traditions, Hayek argues, have long shared a single name. One is British and evolutionary, defining liberty as protection from arbitrary coercion under known general rules; the other Continental and constructivist, rationalist and democratic, bent on remaking society toward collective purposes. Tracing the first from Greek isonomia through Roman private law, the medieval and common-law struggles against personal rule, and the Scottish moral philosophers, he reconstructs liberalism as a discipline of political humility rooted in human ignorance. Its core is equality before the law, not equality of condition; its safeguards are constitutionalism, separation of powers, and a protected private sphere. From this he refuses to divide political from economic freedom, treats social justice as incompatible with general rules, and confines democracy to a method of changing rulers rather than a source of unlimited power.

High and low alike sought liberty by insisting on enlarging the number of rules under which they lived.

Neither a conventional memoir nor a chronicle of events, this intellectual deposition, here in the English translation of the German manuscript Mises drafted in exile in 1940, narrates a life through the doctrines its author believed had wrecked liberal civilization: historicism, etatism, socialism, inflationism, nationalism, positivism. Menger's Principles marks his conversion to economics; the Vienna Privatseminar, with Hayek, Haberler, Machlup, and Morgenstern, becomes his counter-image to institutional decline. He recounts his defensive battles at the Chamber of Commerce against Bolshevism, hyperinflation, and Austrian collapse, claiming only to have delayed catastrophe. Beneath the pessimism runs a methodological insistence that economics judges the fitness of means, not ultimate ends, and that socialism founders on the impossibility of calculation without market prices for the means of production.

I set out to be a reformer, but only became the historian of decline.

No new supranational money is needed to steady world trade, so Hazlitt answers the industrialist Konosuke Matsushita, whose plea for a single global currency followed the yen-dollar swings and the collapse of the Smithsonian agreement. The world already had such a currency, in all but name, from the 1870s to 1914: the gold standard bound the major currencies not to one another but each to a fixed weight of gold, with no central issuer at all. Instability, Hazlitt insists, springs from divergent national inflation, not shifting balances of payments, and the IMF he brands the problem rather than the cure. His prescription is national responsibility, limit each currency's quantity, allow private gold coinage and certificates, restore 100 percent convertibility, perhaps behind a shared unit, the 'goldgram.'

The truth is that the world once did have a common currency, in everything but name. It had such a currency roughly from the last third of the nineteenth century to 1914. It was known as the gold standard.

Read as a demand for clarity rather than a refutation of reason, the foundational crises of modern mathematics, Cantorian antinomies, the intuitionist assault on excluded middle, the arithmetization of geometry, become in Kaufmann's hands symptoms of confusions in language and abstraction. Offered here in English translation, the essay grounds logic phenomenologically: language is not a stock of sounds but a system of rules coordinating signs with intended objects, so speaking about language clarifies rather than retreats. Russell's paradox does not topple logic; it shows what follows when predicates, classes, names, and functions are herded into one undifferentiated domain, and type theory is treated as a useful symbolic device short of the real philosophical solution. Number is derived from ordered counting, induction from the completeness of that form, and Brouwer's challenge is met with stricter interpretation rather than a rival logic.

We have emphasized that language is not a system of acoustic complexes and their configurations, but a system of co-ordinating rules between these and thoughts of objects and facts in the world.

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.

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.

Permanent ignorance is not a flaw to be engineered away but the very starting point of economics, so runs this Ludwig von Mises memorial lecture, given here in the German translation of the English 'Coping with Ignorance.' Hayek recalls his formation in Wieser's Austrian School, his youthful Fabian sympathies, and the decisive jolt of Mises's Socialism and Privatseminar, then argues that the market order exists precisely to cope with each person's unavoidable ignorance of most particular facts. Prices are signals telling producers which costs are worth incurring, not cost summaries, and the theorist meets a second-order form of the same problem. From this follow his defense of pattern prediction over false precision, his warning against equilibrium taken too literally, and a sharp attack on measurement-worship and macroeconomic aggregates that mistake organized complexity for a thermodynamic mass.

Ich bin zu der Auffassung gelangt, daß es sowohl das Ziel der marktwirtschaftlichen Ordnung als auch deshalb der Gegenstand ihrer theoretischen Erklärung ist, die unvermeidliche Unwissenheit jedes einzelnen über die meisten der besonderen Tatsachen, die diese Ordnung bestimmen, zu bewältigen.

English translation: “I have come to the view that it is both the aim of the market order and, for that reason, the object of its theoretical explanation to cope with the unavoidable ignorance of every individual concerning most of the particular facts that determine this order.”

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.

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.

Nozick's entitlement theory defends the market on a single word: transfers are just because they are voluntary. Kirzner accepts the framework but presses a difficulty Nozick never faces—real markets are not states of equilibrium knowledge but processes of correction, and entrepreneurial profit is earned precisely by noticing what a trading partner has missed. If a seller would not have dealt on the same terms under fuller awareness, his ignorance seems to corrupt the voluntariness on which the whole defense rests. Kirzner's answer joins an ethical judgment to an economic one: a "finders-keepers" ethic together with the insight that discovering a good's unnoticed use can amount to creating a new dimension of value. So construed, entrepreneurial gain is not extracted from the seller but brought into being—while fraud and coercion remain excluded from just transfer.

Our discussion has pointed out a third possibility: a thing may be held as the result of the holder having, in the relevant sense, created it ex nihilo, by finding it.