The archive.

Between the causal explanation of what exists and the normative account of what ought to be, Engliš carves out a third, autonomous form of reason: teleology, the logic of whatever is willed. On that foundation the second volume of his teleological system, given here in the German of the 1932 Czech original, constructs the state economy as a purposive order governed not by any individual's satisfaction but by an objective 'human and national ideal.' Needs, utility, cost and yield reappear as formal categories, and from them he derives a theory of taxation in which burdens fall first on the highest incomes, producing a steep progression that levels from above, checked only by the need to preserve productive incentive. A sustained critique of Hans Ritschl's rival doctrine closes the book, faulting it for lacking any central ordering purpose.

Proportionalität oder Progressivität sind keine Steuergrundsätze, sondern bestimmte Konstruktionen von Steuersätzen, die sich erst aus den Steuergrundsätzen ergeben müssen.

English translation: “Proportionality or progressivity are not principles of taxation, but particular constructions of tax rates, which must first be derived from the principles of taxation.”

Taking up Karl Knies's proposal to rank means of exchange as a third class beside consumer and producer goods, Mises, read here in the English translation of the 1932 original, builds a subjective theory of money's value. Its worth, he argues, springs from demanded monetary services, not from any intrinsic material use, and analysis must start from the individual's cash balance rather than aggregates like velocity or the equation of exchange. He rescues the quantity theory's core while discarding its mechanical version: new money enters through particular hands and redistributes wealth before prices adjust, never proportionally or all at once. A sharp line separates money proper, fully backed certificates, and unbacked fiduciary media, the last being what truly moves prices and interest. Perfectly stable money, he concludes, is a wish to escape the temporal nature of capitalism itself.

Only with the use of money is it possible to compare the marginal utility of goods in all alternative employments.

When one people takes over the tools, rites, and ideas of another, what is adopted rarely keeps its old function. Acculturation, Thurnwald argues here, is a dynamic socio-psychological process rather than a mechanical transfer, driven by individual learning, imitation, and leadership, and passing through distinct phases: initial suspicion, eager imitation, the fear of losing one's identity, and eventual recovery or self-assertion. He distinguishes selective, rejective, eliminative, and transformative responses, drawing on New Guinea, Africa, Japan's reopening, Europe, and Indigenous North America, and stresses that what passes between peoples depends on the receiving culture's own traditions. Wars, migrations, and political upheavals, he concludes, are only the visible climaxes of these deeper and slower adaptations in the life of cultures.

The acquisition of any civilizatory accomplishment is not limited to the act of acceptance like the moving of an object from one case in a museum to another.

No stable middle ground exists between a free economy and a fully controlled one — that is the verdict Vleugels reaches after examining the neglected theory of officially bound prices. Following Mises, he separates Ordnungstaxen, which merely track competitive prices and disturb little, from echte Taxen, genuine controls set below them, and shows how the latter set off a chain reaction. A maximum price below the market cuts supply, diverts goods elsewhere, and forces controls onto substitutes, then onto factors of production and wages, until — invoking Wieser's notion of production relatedness — the whole price structure must be bound together. Neither an enduring order nor a gentle bridge to socialism, genuine price-fixing emerges here as a primitive interventionist measure that harms the very people it means to protect.

Ebensowenig wie ein ausgebautes Taxsystem als Endzustand der Volkswirtschaft denkbar wäre, ebensowenig kommt es praktisch auch als Anfangszustand zur Überleitung in eine sozialistische Wirtschaft in Frage.

English translation: “Just as a fully developed system of price fixings is inconceivable as the terminal state of an economy, so too is it practically out of the question as an initial state for the transition into a socialist economy.”

The Great War left Europe's monetary circulation almost wholly in the hands of central banks, which now furnish money rather than merely regulating it — the departure point for Reisch's practical observations, built on Menger, Mises, and Wieser. He reconsiders the banknote itself: once cash payments were suspended, its promise of redemption became a fiction, so the modern Schilling note is better read as a certificate of value whose parity the bank must defend. A discount rate held below the natural rate, he warns, drives production into overlong roundabout processes that end in liquidation and crisis; a wholly cashless economy, against Hahn, remains a fantasy; and the central bank stands as a primus inter pares disciplining the giro-money creation of private banks.

Es ist daher gewiß richtig, wenn die Federal Reserve-Banken die ihnen überreichlich zufließenden Goldmengen in weitem Maße „unausgenützt“ in ihren Kellern einsperren und nicht als Grundlage weiterer Kreditexpansion verwenden.

English translation: “It is therefore certainly correct that the Federal Reserve Banks largely lock away "unused" in their vaults the excessively abundant gold flowing to them, and do not use it as a basis for further credit expansion.”

The gold standard did not fail of its own defects; it was disabled, and then blamed for failing. First published in 1932 and reissued here with two supplements because the same misunderstandings still shaped policy, Hayek's report pins the interwar monetary collapse on central banks, above all the Bank of England, that refused to let gold outflows force the domestic credit contraction and wage adjustment the system demanded. Britain's 1925 return to prewar parity left costs too high; cheap money and appeals for central-bank cooperation masked the weakness rather than curing it. Behind the crisis lies his attack on price-level stabilization: propping up prices that ought to fall with rising productivity is inflation by another name, breeding the misdirected production that made 1929 unavoidable.

All this means that there has not been too little but too much cooperation between central banks, and that not the gold standard, but efforts aimed at making the gold standard inoperative are the causes of the present monetary troubles.

No explanation of the world crisis can dispense with the business cycle, and none can make do with it alone: from that double warning Schumpeter narrows a broad diagnosis to Germany's emergency policy of cutting prices and incomes together. Were every price, income, and value to fall at the same instant and in equal proportion, nothing real would change, but because book values, debts, inventories, and expectations cannot adjust uniformly, administrative deflation breeds the paralysis it claims to cure, driving unemployment toward seven million. Its one rational function is temporary, a strategic thrust to strengthen the mark and shift the reparations argument, to be dropped the moment it succeeds or clearly fails. The essay closes on fiscal causality, arguing through counterfactual that disciplined spending since 1924 could have spared Germany, since here public finance is destiny.

Für Deutschland sind die Finanzen Schicksal, rationelle Wirtschaft Lebensfrage.

English translation: “For Germany, finance is destiny, and rational economic management is a matter of life and death.”

The one hopeful element in Franco-German relations, Schumpeter argues in this 1932 view written for Lloyds Bank Monthly Review, is the economic factor, yet economics alone cannot overcome a political psychology shaped by victory, defeat, and the memory of war. Reparations are the crucial mixed case: economically damaging, since Germany cannot pay while creditor nations bar the exports that would earn the foreign exchange, but politically indispensable to a France that reads them as right and security, so that no ministry can revise them without courting political death. Against nationalist rhetoric he insists the two economies are complementary rather than antagonistic; agriculture divides them little, and disputes in porcelain, nitrogen, potash, coal, and automobiles are negotiable through committees and cartel-like compromise. French capital cannot substitute for confidence; loans that merely paper over political maladjustment only postpone the crisis.

No party or ministry can afford to neglect them unless it is prepared to encounter political death.

Can wage cuts help restore employment without shrinking the purchasing power on which recovery depends? In this 1933 lecture, Alfred Amonn answers by distinguishing wage rates from total wage income, and relative prices from the general price level. His case is not for indiscriminate deflation: he argues that reducing still-high manufactured-goods prices could revive sales and demand for raw materials whose prices had already collapsed. With monetary means held constant and productive capacity idle, he maintains, lower prices can support greater output, while expanding employment may offset lower wage rates. The revealing tension lies between this proposed outcome and the disruptive transition towards it. Amonn acknowledges postponed purchases and international obstacles, but gives priority to completed adjustment—a choice that makes the lecture a focused statement of the assumptions behind his defence of price and wage reductions.

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.”

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.

Could a better science of business cycles let policymakers smooth the waves of boom and bust? Mises answers that this is a matter of policy and popular pressure, not theory. Writing in 1933 and here in English translation, he takes the circulation-credit, or monetary, theory of the cycle as the prevailing doctrine, then asks why governments keep returning to credit expansion. The appetite for low interest rates, the contradictory political demand for high producer prices and low consumer prices at once, and union wage rates held above market levels all conspire to make pump-priming perennially attractive. He warns that entrepreneurs will not take the bait once they expect expansion to be curtailed, and singles out falling prices as the terrain where economic theory remains weakest.

The credit expansion which evokes the upswing always originates from the idea that business stagnation must be overcome by "easy money."