The archive.

A rise in production or employment can signal recovery—or conceal growing economic imbalance. In this 1937 article, Karl Pribram shows why business-cycle statistics cannot settle such questions without assumptions about the system they measure. His distinctive concern is the meeting point of economic theory and statistical practice: monetary and structural explanations assign different meanings to the same movements, while national data may obscure forces operating across the world economy. Rather than choosing a winning theory, Pribram makes their underlying commitments explicit. Readers can discover why selecting an indicator is already an act of interpretation, and why treating a nation as a self-contained economic unit requires justification rather than merely convenient data.

Scientific objectivity does not absolve scholars of responsibility for the questions they choose. In this 1937 address, Emil Lederer defends rigorous analysis while challenging the ideal of intellectual detachment: freedom’s moral worth may resist scientific proof, but inquiry cannot proceed without freedom to choose hypotheses. Speaking for the Graduate Faculty and honoring Thomas Mann, he links this methodological necessity to the defense of personal liberty against dictatorship. His account of authoritarian appeal turns on the burden of freedom—the desire to escape decisions and responsibilities by submitting to compulsory conformity. The address offers a precise distinction between fidelity to evidence and indifference to the conditions that make evidence-based inquiry possible.

But trust in mere analysis caused the intellectual to forget that every question he asks involves a decision.

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 state can outlast its members and persist through periods of inactivity—but what makes it the same social whole? In this 1937 review essay, Alfred Schütz examines Tomoo Otaka’s attempt to understand social associations as ideal formations with historical actuality. Schütz takes the problem seriously while questioning whether Otaka’s appeal to shared membership already assumes the association it is meant to explain. His defence of Weber’s interpretive sociology and criticism of Otaka’s selective use of Husserl bring the inquiry back to actors’ meanings and the processes through which collective objects become identifiable. The essay offers a precise encounter between competing accounts of social reality: recognizing an association’s enduring identity is one task; explaining how that identity arises through social action is another.

Uncertainty can drive people to hoard cash—or to flee a currency altogether. What, then, makes it an explanation of liquidity-preference? In this 1937 article, Ludwig Lachmann locates the decisive uncertainty in the relationship between debtor and creditor: obligations must be discharged in money, while repayment demands and renewed credit cannot be taken for granted. His challenge to Keynes turns on market organisation rather than psychology: investors able to hedge through forward markets need not express bearish expectations by holding cash. The reader can discover why Lachmann separates expectations about asset prices from the institutional reasons for seeking liquidity, and how that distinction changes his diagnosis of banks whose pursuit of cash after a crisis may deepen the contraction.

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.

Can a party guarantee work and subsistence while retaining private capital and wage labour—and expecting national loyalty to reconcile employers and workers? In this 1938 English translation, Karel Engliš tests the Sudete German Party’s economic programme against the institutions its promises would require. His distinctive approach classifies economic orders by their purposes and rules of allocation, rather than ownership alone. That framework gives practical force to his objections: agricultural protection can damage export-dependent industry, while removing machinery from farms cannot create employment without costs. Engliš also asks who falls within the promised community of care. His critique connects unresolved economic conflicts with ethnic exclusion and party discipline, while exploring how democratic taxation and public spending might accommodate minority needs without breaking the unity of the state.

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.

Logical symbolism can repel nonmathematicians through reverential awe as readily as through aversion. In this brief 1938 newspaper review, Felix Kaufmann praises the German translation of Alfred Tarski’s introduction for addressing that obstacle without demanding advanced mathematics. His judgement rests on concrete teaching choices: minimal symbolism, secondary-school prerequisites, and exercises that let readers test their understanding. The review offers a compact account of what Kaufmann values in an introduction to logic—not merely ease of exposition, but preparation for harder study and clearer reflection on research methods. His particular recommendation to researchers and students concerned with the methodology of their own disciplines connects an elementary textbook with questions beyond mathematics.

An anonymous attempt to promote Hume’s poorly received Treatise also generated a mistaken story about the young Adam Smith. In this brief 1938 review, Hayek endorses Keynes and Sraffa’s attribution of the 1740 Abstract to Hume himself: the pamphlet anticipates revisions published later in the Treatise. He then draws out a biographical consequence. The “Mr. Smith” in Hume’s correspondence appears to have been a Dublin bookseller, not the seventeen-year-old philosopher. Hayek’s concise assessment shows how textual chronology and a corrected identification undermine supposed evidence of an early meeting between Hume and Adam Smith.

A catalogue of books owned is not the same evidence as a list of titles encountered. This distinction anchors Hayek’s 1938 review of William A. Shaw’s edition of Joseph Massie’s bibliography of early economic writing. An omitted manuscript note records the sale of most of Massie’s collection in 1760, undermining Shaw’s account of its continued ownership. Hayek welcomes the printed volume but tests its usefulness against the manuscript: missing subject headings, cross-references and author identifications preserve knowledge that abbreviated titles alone cannot supply. This brief review shows Hayek at work as a exacting bibliographical critic, explaining concretely why a convenient printed checklist may remain an unreliable substitute for its source.

Economics supplies mathematics with problems, not merely a field for applying established tools: this is the distinctive emphasis of Gerhard Tintner’s 1938 review of R. G. D. Allen’s Mathematical Analysis for Economists. Tintner asks whether mathematics’ close historical association with physics and astronomy has narrowed its attention. Industrial location, monopoly pricing and saving offer concrete alternatives, linking economic questions to geometry, optimization and the calculus of variations. His praise of Allen thus becomes a case for changing what mathematicians study and teachers use as examples. This short review lets readers examine a reciprocal view of mathematical economics: economists acquire analytical methods, while mathematicians encounter problems that may broaden their subject’s customary priorities.

Would it not be interesting for any mathematician to supplement the well known and worn out examples from physics by some economic applications?