The archive.

Neither wealth in itself nor a lever that could hoist an economy out of distress from the monetary side alone, money and credit are for Bayer indispensable but strictly serving institutions. Cast as twenty-two questions for workers' education, this booklet moves from the emergence of money out of barter and the division of labour, through coinage, banknotes, and cashless giro payments, to banking, the credit market, the stock exchange, and the note bank's discount policy. Its governing norm is neutrality: currency serves best when it merely facilitates the course of the economy. From that standard Bayer dismisses the fashionable reform schemes of the day—index currency, and above all Silvio Gesell's depreciating 'Freigeld'—and reads the 1932 Wörgl experiment not as proof of shrinkage-money theory but as an unusual method of collecting municipal taxes, its losses falling on small traders.

Das Geld als Zahlungsmittel ist aber ebensowenig Kapital wie der elektrische Leitungsdraht elektrische Kraft ist.

English translation: “Money as a means of payment is no more capital than the electrical conducting wire is electrical power.”

The more capital goods an economy produces, the lower the return on further investment must fall — so runs the static inference this sharp intervention in trade-cycle theory sets out to break. The confusion, Hayek locates in the ambiguity of "capital": aggregate value versus the concrete form and arrangement of capital goods. Investment comes in complementary chains, and once specific fixed capital is sunk, its owners accept prices barely above operating cost, transferring the expected interest to later stages — so that completing a project begun under a 4 percent expectation stays worthwhile even at rates that would have blocked it. A hydroelectric plant may turn unprofitable yet still generate demand for motors. Past investment can thus raise, not lower, the demand for funds, with credit expansion the chief practical trigger.

The success of current investment will depend upon this expectation being fulfilled.

For the fiftieth-anniversary volume of the Revue d'Economie Politique, Strigl described how economics was actually taught in the universities of his own Vienna — here in the French translation prepared for that Paris series. Long a marginal subject lodged within the law faculties and pushed late in the curriculum, economics had, he explains, been reduced for many students to an examination hurdle despite teaching of the first rank in the Austrian School tradition. He works through the old regulations, the 1935 reform that lengthened legal study and introduced early exercises in basic economic concepts, and the little-used Staatswissenschaft doctorate, before turning to the technical schools and the Austrian Institute for Business Cycle Research. His closing claim is plain: the worldwide reputation of the Austrian School is itself the best evidence for the quality of that teaching.

Pendant longtemps, l'enseignement économique, rattaché exclusivement aux facultés de droit, n'occupait, dans les programmes d'enseignement juridique, qu'une place peu saillante.

English translation: “For a long time, economic instruction, attached exclusively to the faculties of law, occupied only a minor place in the programs of legal education.”

It was not the gold standard's international character that doomed interwar monetary order, Hayek argues, but a world unwilling to run a genuinely international money. Delivered as five lectures at Geneva in 1937, his case defines monetary nationalism as the doctrine that a nation's share of the world's money should be governed differently from the money of its own regions, and traces the resulting instability to national reserve systems perched atop small gold holdings. Variable exchange rates, he contends, magnify rather than tame short-term capital movements, breeding capital flight, trade restriction, and fresh political friction. Under a truly homogeneous international money, national denominations would matter no more than differing units of measurement, and until some international authority exists to supply it, even a mechanical gold rule is preferable to independently managed national currencies.

The Monetary Nationalists condemn it because it is international; I, on the other hand, ascribe its shortcomings to the fact that it is not international enough.

A market with many sellers need not exhibit perfect competition, and product differentiation need not secure lasting excess profits. In this 1937 article, Fritz Machlup separates distinctions that familiar market labels can obscure. His starting point is the seller’s calculation: does a proposed price change require anticipating rivals’ reactions, or only buyers’ responses? This perspective places monopoly alongside competitive positions in one respect, while distinguishing both from strategically interdependent oligopoly. Machlup then separates the shape of perceived demand from the conditions under which entry and adjustment erode abnormal returns. The result gives readers a precise way to examine why similar short-run pricing positions may have different futures—and why a threat of entry can restrain one seller while a temporary advantage encourages another to exploit it.

A productive service is never simply a thing but a quantity applied over an interval, and from that observation Machlup builds a patient dismantling of loose talk about the marginal product. Labour-hours, acre-seasons, machine-days: each unit depends on divisibility, and highly qualified labour may be hired by the minute at one extreme or by five-year contract at the other. 'Efficiency units' tempt the theorist into circularity, since a theory meant to explain factor prices cannot first define factor quantities by those prices. What matters for a firm's hiring, he argues, is neither extra bushels nor their value at an unchanged price, but an expected, dated, discounted money net product framed by a definite competitive situation — marginal productivity rendered conditional rather than emptied of meaning.

This third dimension is, then, the time interval between the application of any productive service, say a labor-hour, and the enjoyment of its product.

A statistical pattern can fit the business cycle without explaining what causes it. In this 1937 abstract prepared for three lectures he was unable to deliver, Joseph A. Schumpeter makes that distinction the basis of a compact research agenda. He urges quantitative researchers to look behind aggregate series at the industrial processes through which disturbances spread: an economy-wide fluctuation need not originate in an economy-wide cause, nor must a cyclical response have a cyclical trigger. His separation of observed facts, formal mechanisms, and causal theories offers a precise way to ask what statistical confirmation actually establishes. Readers encounter not a completed empirical investigation, but a pointed account of the evidence an explanation of the cycle would require.

A common mechanism of contraction need not imply a common cause—or a uniform remedy. That distinction anchors Gottfried Haberler’s 1937 review of R. F. Harrod’s The Trade Cycle. Haberler admires Harrod’s account of investment and consumption reinforcing one another, yet questions whether it explains why expansion must end. His criticism becomes especially concrete when he examines workers temporarily holding their wages: does calling these balances “saving” clarify how investment is financed, or merely rename the receipt of income? Readers encounter a critic willing to accept a particular explanation of the downturn while resisting its elevation into a universal diagnosis. The resulting disagreement over public works turns on what caused the crisis, not simply how contraction spreads.

The process of contraction may be in the main features always the same, but the cause by which it is initiated need not be and probably is not always the same.

A long-term security need not represent a long-term commitment. This distinction anchors Gertrud Lovasy’s 1937 article on international capital movements in 1927–1936. New foreign lending had collapsed, yet European purchases of American securities continued to grow: was capital financing investment abroad, or merely seeking temporary shelter? Lovasy combines evidence from major creditor countries with an account of how currency uncertainty, exchange controls, and trade restrictions disrupt investment and transfer. She argues that some apparently durable inflows may instead be readily reversible flight funds. Her careful separation of financial instruments from investors’ purposes gives readers a concrete way to question what capital-flow statistics actually measure—and why renewed market activity need not signal renewed confidence in foreign investment.

New documents can unsettle an intellectual biography without yet supplying a better one. In this 1938 review of William Robert Scott’s Adam Smith as Student and Professor, Hayek welcomes evidence that clarifies Smith’s economic thinking before his journey to France and challenges received assumptions about physiocratic influence. Yet archival abundance is not enough: poor cross-references, hard-to-read facsimiles and missing bibliographical guidance leave readers to perform too much of the historian’s work. Hayek’s distinctive concern is the distance between establishing evidence and explaining what it changes. This short review shows him weighing discoveries about Smith against the scholarly presentation needed to make their implications intelligible—and asking for a rewritten biography rather than merely an enlarged documentary record.

Assurances that economic planning can coexist with freedom are not explanations of how it would do so. This distinction drives Hayek’s short 1938 review of Findlay Mackenzie’s symposium, whose informative discussions of particular policies he distinguishes from its weaker treatment of comprehensive planning. His criticism draws on tensions within the volume itself: contributors repeatedly address liberty and democracy, while the editor concedes that war could disrupt a planned society more severely than one allowing continuous private adjustment. Hayek turns that concession against the argument for extending planning in preparation for defence. The review offers a compact encounter with his critical method: acknowledging useful scholarship while testing whether advocates have answered the institutional difficulties their own discussions expose.

Kerschagl's 1938 inaugural lecture surveys Austria's contribution to modern economics as both doctrinal history and methodological self-portrait, and its verdict is pointed: scientific economics on Austrian soil begins not with cameralism or mercantilism but with the marginal-utility school. Menger supplies the foundations of subjective value and imputation; Böhm-Bawerk extends them into capital, interest, and taxation; Wieser gives the theory a broader social cast—before Mises, Hayek, Schumpeter, Morgenstern, and Haberler enlarge the field. What unites them, he argues, is not uniform doctrine but an elastic analytical core, and he plays down the Methodenstreit with the German historical school as an exaggerated quarrel. Universalist organic economics, associated with Spann, earns cautious respect: valuable for recalling economists to society, but unable to replace causal explanation with metaphysical totality.

Die Ökonomie kann daher auch selbstverständlich keine größere Sicherheit bieten, als eben die beschränkte der Erfahrung selbst.

English translation: “Economics can therefore of course offer no greater certainty than the limited certainty of experience itself.”