The archive.

How can ethnology compare cultures across continents without flattening them into evolutionary stages or freezing them into isolated culture areas? Composed in 1945 and published a decade later, this methodological essay answers by way of source criticism: ethnographic “facts” are produced through uneven encounters between observers who differ in patience, language, and purpose, and cannot be treated as interchangeable units. Thurnwald credits the culture-circle theory of Gräbner, Ankermann, and Schmidt with recognizing diffusion, yet rejects its rigid Kulturkreis schemata; he embraces Malinowski’s functionalism for attending to living institutions, then faults it for excluding history. Insisting that no single continent suffices for developmental history, he treats subsistence — hunting, hoe agriculture, pastoralism, seafaring — as the engine of hierarchy and assimilation, and makes cultural history a form of human self-knowledge.

Wir dürfen uns diese Vorgänge nicht statisch vorstellen, sondern im ganzen dynamischen Ablauf.

English translation: “We must not conceive these processes statically, but in their entire dynamic course.”

A currency may buy goods without giving its holder freedom to choose what to buy. This distinction anchors Richard Kerschagl’s 1955 article on convertibility and economic organization. Ration cards provide his concrete test: when purchasing requires a personal entitlement as well as money, equal nominal incomes no longer confer equal command over goods. Kerschagl argues that monetary rules cannot function independently of the institutions governing production, credit, and trade. Yet his criticism of intervention does not become a blanket rejection of transitional arrangements: multilateral clearing, including the European Payments Union, can help advance convertibility. The article offers a way to distinguish restrictions that diminish money’s general usefulness from arrangements that may widen it, making convertibility a question of economic freedom and institutional compatibility rather than exchange technique alone.

Building more homes does not necessarily put families into dwellings they need and can afford. In this 1955 review essay, Alfred Amonn examines eight reports from West Germany’s housing advisory council with Swiss policy firmly in view. He finds a compelling distinction between financing construction and helping households pay rent: protecting all existing tenants through frozen rents can discourage mobility and maintenance while leaving overcrowded families without relief. His support for cost-covering rents therefore goes together with targeted assistance, not the withdrawal of social protection. Particularly revealing is his attention to indirect effects—smaller new dwellings may free larger homes for families, while cheaper credit can complicate funded welfare provision. The essay offers a concrete examination of why housing finance, household needs, and social assistance must be considered together.

Originality need not mean abandoning inherited tools: that is Shackle’s judgement of J. E. Meade’s A Geometry of International Trade in this short review. Familiar curves and price lines, meticulously drawn, can make the effects of taxes, subsidies and changing market conditions intelligible within a two-country, two-commodity model. Shackle specifies their achievement as qualitative insight—showing directions of adjustment rather than supplying numerical answers. His distinctive interest lies in the connection between analytical precision and visual craftsmanship: a well-placed label or clearly distinguishable curve helps students see economic relationships. The review offers a compact account of why exposition can itself be an intellectual achievement, and why apparently forbidding diagrams may become lucid once readers learn where to look.

What should an economics textbook explain rather than take for granted? In this brief review of F. Zeuthen’s Economic Theory and Method, G. L. S. Shackle defends methodological reflection as part of a student’s education, not a preamble to skip. He values Zeuthen’s account of Walrasian interdependence and the annotated references that lead readers into original research. Yet his praise leaves room for precise objections: counting equations and unknowns does not settle determinacy, and orthodox dynamics still resembles temporary huts beside a ruined static Acropolis. The review offers a compact view of Shackle’s standards for theoretical teaching—clarity without intellectual shortcuts—and his suspicion that economics has yet to reckon adequately with time.

Do economic theories resolve their authors’ psychological conflicts, or answer problems imposed by their methods of reasoning? In this 1956 review of Walter A. Weisskopf’s The Psychology of Economics, Karl Pribram tests the limits of a psychoanalytic history of economic thought. He accepts that ethical tensions can illuminate doctrine, but challenges the inference that Smith’s labor theory of value chiefly glorifies work: inherited scientific procedures offer another explanation. Ricardo, in turn, appears as a logician concerned with consistent premises rather than a moralist reconciling labor with property. More receptive to Weisskopf’s treatment of Marshall, Pribram avoids a blanket rejection of psychological interpretation. This brief review offers a concrete test of competing explanations for economic ideas: unconscious motives, historical inheritance, and the internal demands of analysis.

How much theoretical abstraction helps explain the practical problems of a firm—and where does it obscure them? Walter Fröhlich brings this question to his review of Erich Gutenberg’s production volume in its second edition and sales volume in its first. He values Gutenberg’s sustained application of economics to management and marketing, yet identifies consequential ambiguities: variable input proportions are not clearly separated from returns to scale, and short-run constraints from long-run possibilities. His distinctive judgement rests on choosing the right comparison—not specialist price theory, but management textbooks and Joel Dean’s more empirical Managerial Economics. This compact review offers a concrete test of theoretical ambition: abundant diagrams and business examples can extend analysis without supplying either conceptual precision or empirical evidence.

Does a growing literature on business cycles necessarily mean better understanding? In this brief 1956 review, Richard Kerschagl defends the nearly unchanged republication of Arthur Spiethoff’s early-1920s study while acknowledging its distance from contemporary model-based economics. His pointed judgment is that subsequent research, for all its volume, has added comparatively little to Spiethoff’s treatment of the central problems. Yet his defence is not simply retrospective: he singles out the statistical tables as evidence of what historical inquiry can contribute to economic theory. The review offers a compact statement of Kerschagl’s standards for intellectual progress—analytical reach and useful evidence rather than novelty or quantity.

Can economic planning preserve the market mechanism, and can unions of sovereign states reconcile welfare with defence? These are the possibilities Richard Kerschagl finds worth examining in his brief 1956 review of Meade’s Probleme nationaler und internationaler Wirtschaftsordnung. His interest is qualified by a sharp suspicion: what Meade calls liberal-socialist thinking, Kerschagl argues, begins with liberal theory but ends in socialist practice. Yet this objection does not prevent him from valuing the discussion of economic union or welcoming the German translation. The review offers a compact encounter with a critic who tests Meade’s proposals both against their political implications and against continental scholarship he believes Meade has neglected.

An additional billion schillings may create employment—but where does the billion come from? In this short 1956 review, Richard Kerschagl welcomes Josef Steindl’s empirical study, published by the Austrian Institute of Economic Research, while drawing a firm boundary around its conclusions. Estimates of employment gains, he argues, cannot settle the question of inflation without distinguishing money creation, credit finance and investment backed by real capital. His warning about financing hydropower through banknote issuance gives the objection a concrete edge. The review offers a compact encounter between appreciation of statistical modelling and suspicion of Keynesian assumptions: Kerschagl accepts the study’s findings as valuable, but disputes their sufficiency as an economic assessment.

Industrialization may foster economic self-sufficiency, yet surplus production can renew the need for international exchange. In this brief review of Sven Helander’s Das Autarkieproblem in der Weltwirtschaft, Richard Kerschagl draws out that tension while questioning a predominantly economic account of it. He values Helander’s extensive evidence on autarkic formations as groundwork for future theoretical models, but sees the prospect of overproduction as a reason to consider slower, better-coordinated development. His sharpest reservation concerns political choice: relations between autarky and the world economy also turn on the alternative of “butter or guns.” The review offers a compact distinction between what an empirical survey can establish and what requires an account of political priorities.

Explaining why business cycles fluctuate is not the same as making their course calculable. Richard Kerschagl’s 1956 review of Walter Adolf Jöhr’s Die Konjunkturschwankungen sharpens this distinction: he welcomes social psychology as a means of understanding irregular economic movements, but argues that it leaves calculation largely general and symbolic. His qualified appreciation also challenges Jöhr’s weighting of monetary factors and asks whether a nearly 700-page synthesis delivers proportionate theoretical gains. This brief review offers a concrete methodological dispute rather than a rejection of psychological explanation: how should economists judge an approach that clarifies the direction of tendencies while weakening their capacity to calculate particular processes?