The archive.

What holds together a philosopher’s work in mathematics, law, and social science without making it a closed system? In this memorial essay, Alfred Schütz locates Felix Kaufmann’s intellectual coherence in his investigation of scientific reasoning—and in his willingness to leave some questions deliberately unresolved. Schütz’s personal recollections give this methodological portrait its particular force: kindness in discussion coexists with an uncompromising refusal of evasions. His account also distinguishes Kaufmann’s participation in Vienna Circle debates from adherence to its doctrines. A closing exchange between the two thinkers sharpens the essay’s central distinction: restricting an inquiry’s scope is not the same as denying the importance of what lies beyond it.

Central planning, full employment, and inflationary pressure dominated postwar policy across most of the world, yet only the second, Hayek argues, is worth wanting in itself, and even it has been corrupted into a technique of permanent monetary stimulus. The Keynesian reflex treats all unemployment as deficient aggregate demand, ignoring the commoner case where idle labour in some trades coexists with scarcity in others. Extra spending cannot reach those workers; it only pulls labour into sectors that survive as long as credit expands, especially capital-goods industries, storing up displacement for when it stops. Worse, the causation runs in a circle: inflation invites price controls and rationing, controls sap the economy's resilience, and the resulting stagnation is then cited as proof that still more expansion is needed.

A government which uses inflation as an instrument of policy but wants it to produce only the desired effects is soon driven to control ever increasing parts of the economy.

Multilingual, mountainous, and federal, Switzerland struck many postwar observers as a Europe in miniature, standing proof that peoples divided by language and creed might still be bound together. Writing in 1950, Rappard measures that hope against the institutions hastily built between 1947 and 1949—the Economic Commission for Europe, the Brussels Pact, the OEEC, the Council of Europe, and the North Atlantic Treaty—and finds them frameworks for cooperation among sovereign states rather than the federation Churchill had gestured toward at Zurich in 1946. Swiss neutrality, he explains, forbids military alliance and counsels reserve; a united Western Europe without Britain he doubts, judging an Atlantic federation of free peoples, after Lionel Curtis and Clarence Streit, the likelier safeguard against Soviet power.

Ce n'est pas d'institutions dont l'Europe a besoin. C'est de liberté.

English translation: “It is not institutions that Europe needs. It is freedom.”

A patient can identify a knife as an apple parer yet fail to call it a knife. Does this indicate a loss of abstract thought, or a changed relation to the situation in which naming occurs? In this essay, republished in 1967, Alfred Schütz examines Kurt Goldstein’s investigations of aphasia through the phenomenology of everyday experience. He shifts attention from categorical reasoning to the familiar types, selective interests, memories, and expectations that make objects meaningful before explicit judgment. His alternative remains a hypothesis: language disturbance may involve a narrowing of the temporal horizons that connect present experience with other possible uses and encounters. The clinical puzzle thus gives readers a concrete way to examine what ordinary naming presupposes—and why knowing an object need not mean classifying it abstractly.

Cap the price of milk below what the market sets, and marginal producers cut back; to restore supply the government must then control the price of feed, of the factors behind the feed, and onward until it directs all production, at which point, Mises argues, capitalism has quietly become socialism. This 1950 New York address presses that logic against every middle-of-the-road program. Interventionism is no golden mean but a separate third system, and an unstable one; price controls, minimum wages that breed unemployment, credit expansion that ends in slump, foreign-exchange control, and confiscatory progressive taxation each push toward comprehensive planning. He points to Hitler's Zwangswirtschaft and Attlee's Britain as the destinations, and insists the drift is not inevitable, that only a positive case for the free market, not mere anti-socialism, can halt it.

The middle-of-the-road policy is not an economic system that can last. It is a method for the realization of socialism by installments.

Economic figures acquire authority because they look precise, and that appearance, Morgenstern argues, is often typographical rather than epistemic. His revised methodological study insists economics learn what the natural sciences long ago accepted: every observation carries an error, and no serious use of data can ignore its size. Ranging across foreign trade and gold-movement statistics, business accounting, national income, and growth-rate computation, he shows how paired export and import reports fail to match, how revisions never settle, and how deliberate concealment distinguishes economic data from a nature that does not lie. The demand is not for less quantification but for more honesty about it: reliability estimates, stated error ranges, and a refusal to let refined econometric operations amplify the illusion of knowledge. Data, on his account, become scientific information only when integrated with theory.

We must carefully distinguish between what we think we know and what we really do and can know.

Rebuilding a scholarly discipline after a world war is partly a matter of statutes, dues, and committee votes — and this report captures economics doing exactly that. Writing for the American Economic Association, Haberler argues for joining the newly forming International Economic Association, whose design meets the conditions Princeton had set: a modest structure resting on existing national bodies, financed but not governed by UNESCO, and cheap to support at $200 in annual dues. He recounts the April 1949 Paris meeting, the draft statutes reviewed paragraph by paragraph, and the interim slate of officers awaiting the Council's confirmation. Behind the procedural surface lies a real transition: economics reconstituting itself as an organized international profession through deliberately limited cooperation.

In accordance with the Interim Arrangements provided in the Draft Statutes, the Interim Committee nominated Professor Schumpeter as President, M. Rueff as Vice President, and Ronald Walker (Australia) as Treasurer of the I.E.A.

Different statistical aims can lead to closely related estimating equations without making the methods interchangeable. In this mathematical article, Gerhard Tintner connects canonical correlation, principal components, weighted regression, and discriminant analysis through constrained optimization. His distinctive move is to identify the matrices and normalization conditions that give a shared algebraic structure its different statistical meanings: a covariance matrix paired with the identity in principal components, for example, becomes sample covariance paired with error covariance in weighted regression. Readers can discover how apparently separate procedures meet through reductions to common stationary equations—and why their objectives and assumptions still matter. Tintner confines the comparison to estimation, leaving sampling distributions outside the argument.

Haberler builds the theory of comparative cost from a two-country, two-commodity opportunity-cost model, then presses on the imperfections that critics invoke to justify protection. A mere catalogue of deviations from the competitive ideal, he insists, proves only possibility, not necessity: factor immobility alone leaves trade welfare-improving so long as factor prices stay flexible, and it is rigid wages—especially those maintained by unions—that generate the unemployment which can make trade inferior to autarky. Even then protection is a second-best, largely short-run remedy. He extends the same discipline to external economies, showing how unrecognised ones can make a country appear to hold a comparative advantage in the wrong commodity, and to the infant-industry argument, which he accepts in principle while noting it can equally counsel freer trade.

It can be easily shown, however, that what really causes trouble and may make trade detrimental and justify protection is rigidity of factor prices, which may or may not be associated with immobility of factors.

Two rival redrawings of the φ-surface, one by J. Mars and one by H. G. Johnson, prompt this comparison, though the stakes are conceptual rather than merely graphical. Shackle defends a deliberate division of labour: the φ-surface locates the standardized focus-values of a venture, while a separate indifference-map registers the chooser's temperament toward possible gain and loss. Mars's version, by making φ algebraically summable across gains and losses, would let the surface rank ventures on its own and render that map redundant, dissolving the independent representation of an individual's attitude to uncertainty. Through profiles, translated lines, and 'crank-handle' constructions Shackle exposes the cost, and defends his 'subliminal' region, where tiny gains under extreme potential surprise command no attention. Johnson's wooden three-dimensional model he treats more warmly, as suggestive but not decisive.

By abandoning, or drastically circumscribing the role of, the gambler indifference-map, Mr Mars loses an essential ‘degree of freedom’ which my system possesses.

Does unified income taxation threaten federalism, or does that objection leave the costs of fragmented taxation unexamined? In this 1950 reply to Theo Keller’s criticism of his Bundesstaatliche Finanzordnung, Alfred Amonn demands concrete grounds for resisting Swiss fiscal reform. His perspective is conditional rather than categorical: a debt sustainable today may constrain tomorrow’s borrowing, while a one-time levy on existing wealth may permit relief from recurring taxes. The article’s interest lies in how Amonn separates these claims from the political labels attached to them. Readers encounter a pointed dispute over what would count as evidence against reform—and where constitutional loyalties require an argument about practical consequences rather than an appeal to attachment.

Choosing a course of action is not like selecting between two objects already on a table. In this article, Alfred Schütz asks how alternatives themselves take shape during deliberation, as both the imagined projects and the person considering them change. His distinctive starting point is that we envisage an act as already accomplished, then work back towards the means of achieving it. Such anticipation depends on present knowledge that the action itself may alter. Bringing phenomenology to ordinary practical reasoning, Schütz shows how biography and interests give possibilities their weight, and how doubt becomes a decision without yielding final certainty. The analysis gives readers a precise way to question social-scientific models that treat actors’ alternatives as fixed and their motives as fully transparent.