The archive.

Can a comprehensive account of international trade explain much if its basic concepts are unstable? In this 1931 review of Franz Eulenburg’s Aussenhandel und Aussenhandelspolitik, Gottfried Haberler tests a broad historical and policy survey against exacting theoretical standards. His distinction between selling cheaply abroad and charging different prices at home and abroad makes the stakes concrete: an account of dumping can fail at the level of definition. He likewise objects to tariff analysis that precedes an adequate explanation of comparative costs. While acknowledging useful historical material, Haberler argues that facts require a coherent explanatory framework. This brief, sharply critical review shows what he demands of trade scholarship—and why, for him, theoretical order is more than a matter of presentation.

From his editorial desk in Zehlendorf on 15 June 1931, Thurnwald answers Dr. Ernst Harms with the courteous firmness of a journal editor holding a line. Writing for the Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie und Soziologie, he reports that the contributions to the symposium, already excessively swollen, have been definitively closed, and that Harms's submitted review of Halfdan Bryn's book falls short of the scientific standards the journal is obliged to impose. One door he leaves ajar: a manuscript on the theory of an experimental Völkerpsychologie may be considered once he can examine it in hand, and Harms is directed to the publisher C. L. Hirschfeld about his lecture on folk character and cultural progress. A brief document, it catches the gatekeeping labor behind an interwar scientific periodical.

Government statistics as fiscal bookkeeping or as an inquiry into social life: this distinction anchors Karl Pribram’s compact biographical entry on the Austrian statistician Karl Czoernig. Pribram’s portrait emphasizes practical changes in how knowledge was collected and shared. When cooperation through official channels proved impracticable, Czoernig sent questionnaires directly to more than 7,000 industrial enterprises in 1844; as parliamentary representation widened, he supplemented bulky statistical source books with small annuals. These details give concrete substance to Pribram’s assessment of a reformer who expanded both the scope and accessibility of state statistics. The entry offers a concise account of how administrative coordination, direct inquiry, and public dissemination could become parts of a single statistical programme.

Capital is not a pile of tools, buildings, or accumulated goods but a form of reckoning, so runs the central chapter of this 1931 lecture volume on Kapital und Kapitalzins. Refusing to begin from a definition, Schumpeter lets the phenomenon emerge from the economic process itself, reconstructing the stationary circular flow in which labor and nature enter as productive services and consumption goods emerge as the social product, all financed from prior receipts. Capital here is an accounting form corresponding to money income, distinct from produced means of production. Development changes everything: entrepreneurs carry out new combinations before the goods exist, and bank credit, the distinctively capitalist device, creates the purchasing power that commands labor and materials. From this follow the Konjunkturzyklus of clustered innovation, the self-deflation of productive credit, and interest as an agio on present money born of entrepreneurial profit.

Wir beginnen deshalb nicht mit einer Definition des Kapitals, vielmehr soll sich das Phänomen aus unserer Darlegung von selbst ergeben.

English translation: “We therefore do not begin with a definition of capital; rather, the phenomenon shall emerge of itself from our exposition.”

Is capitalism trapped in a permanent crisis, or merely in the depression phase of a normal business cycle? Schumpeter answers at once for the cycle, then devotes the essay to the qualification that makes the difference. What should have been short and mild turned catastrophic because political lesions, war legacies, protection, fiscal distortion, and deflationary therapy, pressed continuously on the economic organism. Cycles themselves arise when innovations bunch: railways or new raw-material methods become feasible, spread in swarms, expand credit, and then collide with the old, so that depression is a groping toward new equilibrium rather than simple collapse. Politically unfettered, he insists, the capitalist mechanism would scarcely produce symptoms of such severity, and the system as such needs no planning to function, while deflation policy, his chief example, manufactures the very bankruptcies and unemployment it claims to cure.

Das kapitalistische System als solches bedarf keiner Regelung oder Planung innerhalb oder außerhalb der Depression, um zu funktionieren, Erfolge zu erzielen und Zusammenbrüche zu vermeiden.

English translation: “The capitalist system as such requires no regulation or planning, whether within or outside of a depression, in order to function, achieve successes, and avoid breakdowns.”

The opening volume of a five-part survey of human society sets itself against sociology's habit of generalizing from a narrow European sample, and against the Kulturkreis theorists who treated cultural goods as museum objects passed mechanically between peoples. Thurnwald's method is the representative Lebensbild: concrete communities—Polar Eskimo, Bushmen, Andaman Islanders, Copper Eskimo, Maori—shown whole, so that institutions appear functioning inside real cultural systems rather than sorted into ideal types. Foragers are ranged by habitat across ice, steppe, forest, and water, then plant-cultivators and herders. Running through everything is a distinction he presses hard: the irreversible accumulation of technique and knowledge against the reversible, pendulum-like swings between mother-right and father-right. Institutions such as blood revenge or asylum, he warns, cut across so-called culture circles and cannot be identified mechanically with them.

Die Feldbauer sind bei den Expansionen keine „Imperialisten“, sondern eher Gründer neuer Tochtervölker und Niederlassungen, sie sind „Kolonisatoren“, aber keine „Eroberer“.

English translation: “In their expansions, agriculturalists are not "imperialists" but rather founders of new daughter peoples and settlements; they are "colonizers," but not "conquerors.”

The forty-hour week, this 1931 lecture to the German trade-union congress in Frankfurt insists, is no narrow bargaining demand but a response to a capitalism transformed by crisis. Depression at twenty-five percent unemployment differs in kind, not merely degree, from earlier downturns: postwar technical change swept through raw materials, agriculture, transport, and mining at once, cartels and tariff walls held organized prices high while starving smaller export firms of credit, and no automatic compensation reabsorbs the workers machinery displaces. Lederer rejects both autarky, which for a modern nation means poverty and dependence, and isolated currency manipulation in an interdependent world. If technical progress permanently shrinks the necessary volume of labor, work must be shared more evenly — and leisure, rather than mere rest, becomes a terrain of education, solidarity, and emancipation for the working class.

Es ist etwas anderes, ob eine Krise mit 7, 8, 10 Prozent Arbeitslosigkeit oder mit 25 Prozent Arbeitslosigkeit zu kämpfen hat.

English translation: “It is one thing whether a crisis has to contend with 7, 8, or 10 percent unemployment, and quite another with 25 percent unemployment.”

Delivered as a lecture in 1931 amid the deepening Depression, this eight-part address moves from the nature of the market through the business cycle to unemployment, price supports, taxation, and gold. The market, Mises insists, is no anarchy but a form of economic democracy in which consumers, as the final authority, direct production. Crisis appears when policy disables that mechanism: bank credit expansion drives the loan rate below the natural rate, building a boom on sand, while union wages held above market-clearing levels, sustained by unemployment relief, turn joblessness chronic. Price supports for coffee and wheat, protective tariffs, and capital-consuming taxation deepen the disorder. The single way out, he argues, is to abandon every attempt to prevent market prices from shaping production.

Die kapitalistische Marktwirtschaft ist eine Demokratie, in der jeder Groschen eine Wahlstimme gibt.

English translation: “The capitalist market economy is a democracy in which every penny casts a vote.”

Werner Sombart's Der moderne Kapitalismus had synthesized universal economic history and monumental theory; here that theoretical scaffolding is dismantled piece by piece from the standpoint of Robert Liefmann's 'sozialindividualistische' economics. Groß confines himself strictly to Sombart the theorist, attacking in turn the notion of money-seeking as an acquisitive drive, the treatment of Wirtschaftssysteme as historical agents, and the confusion of technique with economy. Against Sombart's grand categories—spirit, institution, productivity, capitalist organism—he sets a theory of individual planning: money becomes an abstract unit of account that keeps plans revisable, and market order emerges from the mutual adaptation of individual plans rather than from any institutional idea. Capitalism, on this reading, is not a productive force but heightened commerce governed by rentability, the quantitative counterpart of a psychically abstract economic principle.

Kapital nennen wir das zum Gelderwerbsmittel gemachte Geld.

English translation: “We call capital the money that has been made into a means of acquiring money.”

Every human gathering, this essay argues, acquires structure almost at once: amorphous mass exists only in the first instant before attractions, repulsions, subgroups, and leaders crystallize out of it. Thurnwald names the winnowing of leaders Siebung and separates it sharply from biological selection—masses actively choose whom to follow—then shows why institutional leadership, fixed in statutes, offices, and inheritance, must sooner or later collide with the natural kind. Sociation itself he treats as process and complementarity: persons associate because they need and complete one another, from sex and age in the family to the division of labor in a workshop. He classifies its forms as Masse, Ballung, and Kristallisation, argues that organizations gain a life of their own by depersonalizing relations, and closes on the conviction that neither individual nor mass alone explains any social form.

Das Führertum ist eine Komplementärerscheinung der Masse. Masse braucht Führertum, der Führer Masse.

English translation: “Leadership is a complementary phenomenon of the mass. The mass needs leadership, the leader needs a mass.”

Stable prices need not mean a stable economy: this is the challenge Gottfried Haberler foregrounds in his 1931 review of Hayek’s Geldtheorie und Konjunkturtheorie. He explains how bank credit can permit investment to outrun real saving without producing a visible rise in the general price level. Yet his sympathetic assessment also finds room for non-monetary explanations: invention or optimism may initiate an expansion that credit makes possible. Haberler’s distinctive contribution lies in separating the initiating event from its monetary enabling condition, rather than insisting on rival theoretical labels. He also marks what Hayek’s book leaves unresolved—how distorted investment culminates in crisis—making this short review an appraisal of both the reach and the limits of the explanation.

L. Albert Hahn's Volkswirtschaftliche Theorie des Bankkredits, revised for its third edition, made credit sovereign over money, savings, capital, interest, and the whole business cycle — and it is exactly that supremacy Reisch sets out to dismantle. Admiring Hahn's dialectical gifts but distrusting his taste for paradox, he rejects the metaphor of the money-holder as a national creditor and the fiction of a cashless economy that has never existed. Where Hahn holds that lending itself conjures the deposits banks lend, Reisch answers with clearing, liquidity, collateral, and public trust; drawing on Böhm-Bawerk's roundabout production, he insists that real capital is machines and subsistence goods, not an abstract power to command them. The book, he concludes, is a veiled plea for inflationary credit.

Niemals aber vermag inflatorischer Kredit „Güter aus dem Nichts zu ziehen“.

English translation: “Never, however, is inflationary credit able to "draw goods out of nothing.”