The archive.

Because needs, supplies, and costs never stop shifting, any price a government fixes by law is soon an obsolete one — which is why Hazlitt's blunt answer to his title question, that the market should set prices, forecloses most schemes to raise, lower, or freeze them. No price stands alone; each is knotted to every other through joint production, substitution, and the competition of all goods for the consumer's dollar. Export supports for rubber or wheat must choke supply into quotas that breed bureaucracy and invite substitutes; wartime ceilings on necessities drain margins until controls metastasize across wages, imports, and inputs. Flexibility is the corrective, since a soaring price both rations scarce goods and summons new supply. He carries the case into monopoly and antitrust, doubting any court can price a competition that never existed.

Price control always reduces, unbalances, distorts, and discoordinates production.

Multiplier theory, as Keynes bequeathed it, sums an endless sequence of income effects without ever fixing the accounting period national income actually requires—and for Mahr the neglect of the time factor is its cardinal defect. Since income is reckoned by the year, the multiplier too must be annual: he redefines it as the coefficient linking a rise in circulating money to the rise in monetary national income, and identifies it with the marginal velocity of circulation, the number of income-forming turnovers a newly issued unit performs within the year. Hoarding, on this account, is not an external leakage but a lowering of that average velocity. The Keynesian investment multiplier and the export multiplier become mere special cases of a broader principle: supplying a growing economy with means of payment. Marked here as previously unpublished.

Der entscheidende Mangel der herrschenden Multiplikatortheorie liegt in der Vernachlässigung des Zeitfaktors.

English translation: “The decisive defect of the prevailing multiplier theory lies in the neglect of the time factor.”

Hayek draws a distinction that, once stated, seems obvious yet is constantly confused: the rules an individual follows are not the same thing as the order of actions that emerges when many follow them. A rule may be innate or learned, genetic or cultural, and need never be consciously known; what natural selection tests is not the isolated rule but the viability of the whole group order it helps sustain. Moving from the flight patterns of geese and insect division of labour to kinship, property, and succession, he shows coordination arising without any actor grasping the design. He calls the theoretical reconstruction of such processes conjectural history, aligns social science with biology and geology rather than mechanics, and, invoking Mandeville, Hume, and Smith, defends explanation by function without any designing purpose.

Norms are thus an adaptation to a factual regularity on which we depend but which we know only partially and on which we can count only if we observe those norms.

Exchange crises, draining reserves, balance-of-payments alarms: the international monetary problem, Mises contends, is a domestic policy problem wearing a foreign mask. Governments inflate and cheapen credit at home while pledging fixed exchange parities abroad, then blame tourists, importers, and speculators for the contradiction they created. Reasserting the purchasing-power-parity theory against the balance-of-payments doctrine, he argues that currencies exchange according to what they buy, so a state that expands its money supply must watch its currency's external value fall; what the press calls an attack is only the market correcting an official falsification. He distinguishes inflation, the increase of money beyond demand, from inflationism, its deliberate fiscal use, and dismisses reserve pooling and new international facilities as schemes to spread one country's inflation to others. An appendix shows how anticipated depreciation corrupts interest rates and business accounting alike.

Inflationism is not a variety of economic policies. It is an instrument of destruction; if not stopped very soon, it destroys the market entirely.

Behind the single German word Rechtsordnung, Hayek finds two things habitually run together: the order of legal rules and the Handelnsordnung, the order of actions that arises when people follow them. Written in German across twelve sections, the essay defines order as a factual relation among recurring elements that lets us form reliable expectations from partial knowledge, with no ordering will required. The market is his central case: it solves the problem of using more knowledge than any single mind possesses, adjusting through prices by what he calls, borrowing from cybernetics, negative feedback. From this he mounts a sustained assault on 'social' justice, on Carl Schmitt's concrete-order thinking, and on the welfare state's drift from private-law rules toward public-law command, arguing that only human conduct, never an unintended outcome, can be called just or unjust.

Gerecht oder ungerecht kann nur menschliches Verhalten oder dessen beabsichtigte Ergebnisse sein, aber nicht eine bloße Tatsache, die niemand absichtlich herbeigeführt hat oder herbeiführen könnte.

English translation: “Only human conduct, or its intended results, can be just or unjust, but not a mere fact that no one has intentionally brought about or could have brought about.”

The separation of powers, the founders' chosen guard for liberty, has failed, hollowed out, Hayek argues, once law came to mean whatever a legislature enacts rather than a particular kind of rule. First published in Il Politico, this essay locates the deeper error in the doctrine of sovereignty: the assumption that ultimate power must be unlimited because power can be checked only by another power. Against Rousseau, legal positivism, and unlimited majority rule, he revives the distinction between law as an abstract rule of just conduct and command aimed at chosen outcomes. His remedy splits the assembly in two, a partisan governmental chamber for services and budgets, a nonparty lawmaking chamber for universal rules, and, illustrating the design through taxation, names the result demarchy.

In the last resort it rests on the misconception that the ultimate ‘sovereign’ power must be unlimited, because, it is thought, power can be checked only by another power.

Between the natural and the artificial, Hayek argues, lies a third and decisive category that Western thought has persistently missed: the institutions and rules that are the result of human action but not of human design. Markets, customs, language and law belong there, neither given by nature nor invented by any mind. Tracing the insight through Mandeville, Montesquieu, Hume, Ferguson and Smith to its revival in Carl Menger, he turns it against legal positivism, which mistakes law for the mere command of a legislator and so severs it from justice. Law, he counters, is older than legislation; justice is discovered by testing rules for compatibility within an inherited order, never deduced from pure reason nor invented by sovereign will.

There never has been and there never can be a ‘gap-less’ (lückenlos) system of formulated rules.

Machlup’s presidential address returns to the 1946 American Economic Review battlefield twenty years on, asking not which theory of the firm is realistic but what each is built to explain. The governing distinction is between the firm as an analytical construct and the firm as an actual organization: competitive price theory uses a deliberately simplified agent to infer how prices and outputs move when wages or taxes change, and treating that fiction as a miniature General Motors commits the “fallacy of misplaced concreteness.” Behavioral and managerial models — Baumol’s sales maximization, Williamson’s expense preference — are not refutations but tools for different problems, above all monopoly and oligopoly, where discretion widens. His verdict is a disciplined pluralism that matches each model to the question it was designed to answer.

Thus, instead of a heated contest between marginalism and managerialism in the theory of the firm, a marriage between the two has come about.

A central bank can be charged with protecting purchasing power while lacking authority over the wages, taxes, and public spending that help determine it. This mismatch drives Richard Kerschagl’s 1967 article. He treats interest rates and reserve requirements not as reliable levers but as instruments whose effects depend on business financing, confidence, and government policy: higher rates may even increase production costs. His proposed remedy is strikingly political—cabinet participation with veto rights over economic decisions and decisive influence on wage-price policy. Giving currency stability priority over full employment, Kerschagl nevertheless resists turning central banking into comprehensive economic planning. The article exposes the tension within that position: how much power over the wider economy can a guardian of monetary stability acquire without compromising the market order it seeks to preserve?

Textbook models of perfect competition assume away the very thing real markets accomplish: because they presuppose that all relevant facts are already known, they make rivalry look wasteful and pointless. Hayek turns the objection around, arguing that competition earns its keep precisely as a discovery procedure, a way of eliciting information about scarcities, uses, and capacities that no participant or planner holds in advance. He reframes the market not as an economy governed by a single ranking of ends but as a catallaxy, a self-correcting order steered by negative feedback and price signals, whose value can be judged only by comparing societies rather than by predicting particular outcomes. Along the way he defends pattern prediction, rejects the language of equilibrium, and warns that incomes policy freezes adjustment exactly when circumstances demand movement.

But which goods are scarce goods, or which things are goods, and how scarce or valuable they are – these are precisely the things which competition has to discover.

Scholarly prestige, curial trust, and diplomatic office fused in a single man when the impoverished Austrian republic sent Ludwig von Pastor, the famous historian of the popes, as its envoy to the Holy See. Engel-Janosi's study of that 1920–28 mission argues that Pastor's fame gave a weakened state a Roman voice out of all proportion to its power: Cardinal Gasparri spoke to him with a freedom rarely extended to other heads of mission, making his dispatches a privileged source for Vatican thinking. Through them the interwar Curia appears anti-Versailles, conservative, intensely political, and suspicious of the postwar order, tempted by "providential" strongmen yet unwilling to surrender ecclesial independence. The narrative runs through the Roman Question, Fascism, South Tyrol, the Anima dispute, and the still-unsettled question of Anschluss.

Der Österreicher betont die Vorsicht und die Selbständigkeit dieses Papstes, auf den niemand, selbst kaum sein Staatssekretär Einfluß auszuüben scheint.

English translation: “The Austrian emphasizes the caution and the independence of this Pope, upon whom no one, scarcely even his Secretary of State, appears to exert influence.”

Inherited words—order, law, economy, democracy—make spontaneous social orders look like purposive organizations, and this 1968 essay in political semantics sets out to break their spell through a series of paired corrections: Kosmos against Taxis, spontaneous order against made arrangement; Nomos against Thesis, the universal rule of just conduct against the organizational command; Katallaxie against Wirtschaft, the market as a discovery procedure against the household writ large; and finally Demarchie against Demokratie. Only a Kosmos, Hayek insists, can sustain an open society among strangers who share no concrete ends, so 'social' or distributive justice—the justice of an organization—loses all meaning where no one distributes the results. The tract anticipates Law, Legislation and Liberty, turning the reform of language into a servant of liberal constitutionalism.

Wir wünschen die Meinung der Mehrheit als letzte Autorität, aber wir wollen nicht dulden, daß die nackte Gewalt der Mehrheit den einzelnen regellos Gewalt antut.

English translation: “We desire the opinion of the majority as the ultimate authority, but we do not want to tolerate that the naked power of the majority does violence to the individual in a rule-less manner.”