The archive.

Against the overriding weight of the German alliance, a Viennese salon hostess imagined another Austria. Engel-Janosi reconstructs Berta Szeps-Zuckerkandl's spring 1917 peace feelers as a small but revealing episode in the monarchy's final crisis, tracing her Francophile, anti-Prussian conviction back through a whole Austro-French lineage—Kaunitz's reversal of alliances, Crown Prince Rudolf's circle, her father Moriz Szeps's liberal journalism, and family ties to Georges Clemenceau. Her idea of a separate peace with France, meant to spare Austria from collapse, was no mere salon fantasy, yet the essay records its bitter irony: speaking freely to Harry Kessler, she saw her secret carried straight to the German envoy Romberg and on to Berlin. Czernin's refusal to break with Germany marks the tragic limit of private diplomacy.

August 1914! Der Krieg! Mich ergriff der allgemeine patriotische Taumel nicht. Ich bäumte mich sofort gegen den Haßrausch auf, der selbst die zartesten Gemüter erschütterte.

English translation: “August 1914! The war! The general patriotic frenzy did not seize me. I at once rebelled against the intoxication of hatred that shook even the most delicate spirits.”

Against Schumpeter and Sombart, who dismissed Vienna as an incomplete anticipation of Walrasian equilibrium, this German essay locates the Austrian school's significance elsewhere: in its introduction of Verstehen, interpretive understanding, into theoretical social science. Lachmann sets three traditions against one another. Classical economics, following Ricardo, imitated natural science—laws of distribution among factor classes, value as a labor-measured substance, man as a homogeneous production factor. The Austrians put the acting individual at the center, turning marginal utility into a logic of choice and plans. And the Lausanne school, needing timeless statics in which every alternative is already given, stands opposite a theory that requires real time because mental acts unfold in time. The closing move extends this interpretive economics toward institutions—supra-individual schemes of thought at which individual plans orient themselves and are coordinated.

Die österreichische Theorie bedarf der Zeitdimension, da geistige Akte nur in der Zeit möglich sind.

English translation: “Austrian theory requires the dimension of time, since mental acts are possible only in time.”

Consumers never merely weigh today's helping of a good against tomorrow's; they confront recurring subsistence needs, postponable wishes, durable purchases, future-only aims, and precautionary reserves. On that typological insight Mahr rebuilds the theory of intertemporal choice, which he judges to have sought one general law where none exists. Present restraint, he shows, is undertaken not to enjoy the same want more intensely later but to fund a different project altogether—dissolving Böhm-Bawerk's doctrine of systematically undervalued future goods; where earlier satisfaction is genuinely preferred, the cause is stronger anticipatory pleasure, not faulty foresight. Interest therefore cannot rest on a universal discounting of the future, and long-term rationality can be judged only by the tendencies discernible when the decision was made, never by its later outcome.

Die Regel ist, daß Einschränkungen an der gegenwärtigen Bedürfnisbefriedigung nur vorgenommen werden, um in der Zukunft neue, anders geartete Bedürfnisse befriedigen zu können.

English translation: “The rule is that restrictions on present want-satisfaction are undertaken only in order to be able to satisfy new, differently constituted wants in the future.”

A group of reformers, impatient with the patchwork of anti-poverty measures, proposed to abolish poverty at a stroke: guarantee every citizen an income sufficient to live "with dignity," worked for or not. Assembling his 1966 reply alongside the proposals of Robert Theobald's circle and the federal automation commission, Hazlitt treats the guaranteed income not as administrative tidying but as a new theory of rights—one enforced against producers and taxpayers. His counter is to translate "income" back into goods and services that someone must still produce. Fears that cybernation would soon erase jobs he dismisses as a recurring fallacy; static cost estimates he faults for assuming behavior would not change. Even Friedman's negative income tax, he warns, would swell under political pressure into an unconditional floor, severing reward from effort and eroding the surplus relief depends on.

Nearly all of them seem to share the belief, for example, that the growth of automation and "cybernation" is eliminating jobs so fast (or soon will be) that there soon just won't be jobs for even the most industrious.

The most elegant formal models exclude exactly what makes a market intelligible—plans, expectations, disappointment, and the revision that follows. That is Lachmann's charge against neoclassical formalism, which swaps causal explanation for closed systems of simultaneous equations and imagines the economy as a single optimizing subject gliding along a maximum growth path. He attacks aggregate production functions like the Cobb-Douglas for dissolving heterogeneous firms and capital goods, and dismisses dynamic equilibria as the preoccupations of economists indifferent to actual markets. In their place he sketches a genetic-causal, open-system theory built on the individual plan: capital as the vessel of entrepreneurial expectations, the stock exchange as a forward market in future yields, competition as a chain of innovation, imitation, and eroded advantage. The project he binds to Eucken, Mises, Hayek, and Röpke.

Dynamic equilibria, maximum growth paths, and similar concepts are notions of economists with little interest in what matters in the market economy.

How can an action be judged rational—or morally defensible—when its consequences depend on uncertain events and other people’s deliberate responses? In this 1966 paper, Oskar Morgenstern approaches that problem through economics, game theory, and a reconsideration of Jacques Rueff’s account of scientific knowledge. He distinguishes learning from physics’ standards of inquiry from borrowing its models: a strategic opponent cannot safely be treated as a passive source of statistical regularities. The ethical stakes become concrete in resource depletion, pollution, and remote warfare, where distant or dispersed harms complicate responsibility. His speculative question about nature’s possible hostility remains unresolved; it tests confidence in discovery rather than asserting a cosmology. The paper’s distinctive connection is between economic decision and moral judgment: both require reasoning about consequences that knowledge cannot fully secure.

Institutions can keep their legal form intact while their social meaning quietly reverses—and reforms that once made sense become, in Mises's word, atavistic. Written for a 1966 Festschrift honoring Jacques Rueff, the essay pursues the claim through two cases. Egalitarian land redistribution answered a feudal order where property tracked caste, conquest, and privilege; under the market it is incoherent, since consumers decide anew each day who shall own the factors of production and owners hold their land only by serving buyers efficiently. Favoritism toward debtors once meant relieving the poor against wealthy lenders, but capitalism has flipped the class map: ordinary people are the creditors, through savings and pensions, while the rich borrow. Gottfried Feder's Nazi slogan against interest slavery becomes Mises's emblem of the confusion, answered by the gold standard's protection of the common man's savings.

The owners are mandates of the consumers as it were, bound to employ their property as if it were entrusted to them by the people.

Keynes made an unforgettable impression even on those who could never accept his monetary theories, and Hayek, friend since their 1928 meeting and sparring partner after his 1931 move to London, begins here in that key of admiration. But recollection turns to reckoning. Recalling his laborious review of the Treatise on Money, only for Keynes to change his mind, Hayek explains why he never mounted a comparable assault on the General Theory, and locates his true objection not in any detail but in the whole macroeconomic approach. The Keynesian Revolution's lasting effect, he contends, was to elevate measurable aggregates over the relative prices and capital structures through which an economy actually coordinates, encouraging a sophisticated inflationism by assuming resources everywhere lie unused. He predicts the episode will one day appear a temporary aberration.

But the assumption that all goods and factors are available in excess makes the whole price system redundant, undetermined and unintelligible.

Shackle opposes reason to imagination and probability to poetry, without discarding knowledge: business policy, he argues, is an originative art conducted under radical uncertainty, not the solving of a well-posed problem. He builds a scale of openness from dice and cards, which yield a complete list of outcomes, through horse-racing to new enterprise, which has no card of runners and no book of rules. Decision is commitment to a future that does not yet exist, and therefore choice among imagined possibilities rather than known facts. Where probability demands an exhaustive list of contingencies, he substitutes judgments of possibility, surprise, and ascendancy, with focus-gain and focus-loss standing for an enterprise in deliberation. Success, he concludes, needs not only the axial mind that reasons toward a solution but the radial imagination that sees outward into an expanding field of possible histories.

My first proposition is that decision is choice amongst the products of imagination.

What presents itself as a review of Hicks's Capital and Growth becomes a sustained challenge to equilibrium growth theory itself. Lachmann admires Hicks as a broker between the Marshallian, Paretian, Wicksellian, and Keynesian traditions, and welcomes his refusal of homogeneous capital, yet he presses one question the models cannot answer: can an economy actually traverse from one growth path to another? During any such transition the capital stock must be reshaped while relative prices, technology, expectations, and wealth distribution all shift, so the price system required for the new equilibrium can never be known in advance. Malinvestment, mentioned only once in Hicks's book, is for Lachmann a normal feature of a world where capital goods embody past plans and expectations diverge, revisable and causally powerful.

In this way he has become a prominent mediator between different strands of thought, a broker of ideas whose influence has been far greater than is often realised today.

A public quarrel among Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, and Walter Heller over tight money and recession opens this 1966 essay, which Sennholz quickly recasts as a deeper confusion over what inflation even is. Properly, he insists, inflation means the expansion of money and credit; rising prices are only its delayed effect, and by narrowing the word to prices officials shift blame from the central bank to business and labor. Marshaling figures on Federal Reserve credit, Treasury currency, and bank deposits from 1960 to 1966, he builds an Austrian diagnosis: cheap manufactured money signals savings that do not exist, luring investment that later collapses. The 'zigzag course' of 1966 shows a Fed trapped between lowering prices and lowering rates. The ration book, he warns, waits at the end of the road.

The Federal Reserve Banks fathered the Great Society boom through vast injections of money and credit.

Behind the Bretton Woods debates over how much gold and foreign exchange a country ought to hold lies a prior question Machlup insists economists have dodged: whether monetary authorities can be said to need reserves at all. Distinguishing need from desire and demand, he defines a need by the consequences of its absence — devaluation, deflation, exchange controls — and turns that test against the familiar ratios of reserves to imports, money supply, or past deficits, which he finds describe convention rather than requirement. Data from fourteen industrial countries between 1949 and 1965 show variation no single formula explains. His wife's-wardrobe analogy reframes the matter: what a growing world economy needs is not a particular stock but annual additions to reserves, enough to keep governments from lurching toward restriction.

This article will address itself to the question whether it is possible to find any objective criteria for the need of monetary reserves, either for individual countries or for the world at large.