The archive.

Shared vulnerability to aggression does not necessarily make nations willing partners in peace. In this 1943 review of Egon Ranshofen-Wertheimer’s Victory Is Not Enough!, Ludwig von Mises tests proposals for European confederation against the persistence of tariffs, migration barriers and exchange controls. His imagined Ruritanian worker gives the objection a concrete edge: why support a federation that preserves other countries’ wage advantages while blocking access to their markets? Mises argues that political institutions cannot secure lasting peace while their members practise economic exclusion. Yet he warmly values the reviewed author’s realism, informed by experience in the League of Nations secretariat. This short review offers a pointed distinction between recognising a common security interest and accepting the economic changes that cooperation demands.

No sophisticated union-project and no diplomatic makeshifts can make peace durable in an environment of economic warfare.

A charm may shape conduct even when the observer denies it has any power, for what matters is not the physical object but the purpose someone imputes to it. On this footing Hayek defends the interpretive social sciences against the scientism he knew from within, having trained in Mach and logical positivism. The facts of economics, law, and linguistics are teleological concepts: we grasp an action by analogy with our own mind, fitting movement into patterns of purpose rather than reducing it to behavior. Social theory, he argues, is 'compositive,' assembling models of wholes like markets and states from intelligible individual conduct—and it stands logically prior to history, since no historian can bound a fact like a battle or a legal order by space and time alone.

In short, in the social sciences the things are what people think they are. Money is money, a word is a word, a cosmetic is a cosmetic, if and because somebody thinks they are.

Written in 1943 with postwar reconstruction already in view, this chapter poses a constitutional rather than merely tariff question: whether international cooperation should be built through universal institutions or through larger regional and continental federations. Haberler answers cautiously. Larger markets do permit mass production and a wider division of labour, but that gain belongs to nondiscriminatory liberalization, not to protected spheres, so he separates the complete customs union, which genuinely enlarges a market, from the incomplete preference, which merely diverts imports from cheaper outsiders to favoured insiders and hands them a windfall. Dismantling Pan-Europe, Pan-America, and Danubian schemes as geographically incoherent or coercive, he anticipates the later vocabulary of trade creation and diversion, and warns that partial blocs turn cooperation into exclusion.

To put the question the other way around: suppose that some machinery for international co-operation on a worldwide scale, like the League of Nations, is set up; should it be based on regional blocs or on independent states?

Knowing how to get across a city is not the same as knowing how to map it. In this essay, first published in 1943 and republished here in 1964, Alfred Schütz uses the native, stranger, and cartographer to distinguish practical understanding from scientific explanation. His central question is what happens when social scientists judge everyday action by standards of knowledge and consistency developed for theory. Ordinary actors rely on workable recipes; theoretical actors possess motives and information stipulated by their creators. Schütz defends such models without confusing them with living people. Readers can discover both why routine conduct need not be irrational and why a logically coherent explanation must still answer to the meanings an action has for those involved.

How can expectations enter a science of action when the future is uncertain and every observable fact admits rival readings? The answer here refuses two easy paths: against Keynes, Morgenstern, and Myrdal, Lachmann denies that expectations are ultimate data like tastes and resources; against Lundberg and Schumpeter, he denies they can be deduced from objective business situations. A price rise may signal reversion or inflation, so meaning arrives only through the actor's interpretation, and economics needs ideal types and historical understanding rather than deterministic law. From this he builds a theory of plan-guided action and tests it on Hicks's elasticity of expectations and on interest-rate formation, concluding that an Austro-Wicksellian crisis requires a particular expectational climate. The essay makes intelligibility, not determinateness, the proper aim of social science.

The Social World consists not of facts but of our interpretations of the facts.

The gold standard's real merit, on Hayek's telling, lay in nothing intrinsic to the metal but in its being an international, automatic, rule-bound money that no world authority had to administer; its real defect lay in the slowness with which its supply adjusts to demand. Written in German in 1943, the essay seizes the wartime collapse of gold's prestige to propose a rational substitute: the commodity-reserve currency of Benjamin and Frank Graham, under which money is issued and redeemed only against warehouse receipts for a fixed bundle of storable raw materials. The bundle's aggregate price is pegged while relative prices stay free. Hoarding would then pile up wheat, metals, and fibres instead of idle gold, and the scheme would buy in slumps and sell in booms—stabilization by standing rule, not administrative discretion.

Das Horten von Geld würde, anstatt zur Vergeudung von Produktionsmitteln zu führen, wie ein Auftrag wirken, Rohmaterialienvorräte auf Rechnung des Hortenden anzulegen.

English translation: “The hoarding of money, instead of leading to a waste of productive resources, would act as an order to lay up stocks of raw materials on the hoarder's account.”

Openness to new economic ideas need not mean surrender to intellectual fashion. In this brief 1944 review of Oscar R. Hobson’s Can We Afford It?, Hayek praises a financial journalist who states an argument fairly before explaining why it leaves him unconvinced. Hayek’s almost complete agreement with Hobson is explicit, but his judgement also rests on the craft of making difficult questions intelligible in a few paragraphs. The review offers a compact statement of what he values in public economic discussion: attention to immediate policy problems, sensitivity to the ideas behind them, and resistance to treating either yesterday’s paradoxes or today’s commonplaces as final wisdom.

An elegant economic model need not be a convincing explanation. In this 1944 review of Kalecki’s Studies in Economic Dynamics, G. L. S. Shackle examines the distance between the two with admiration and exacting scrutiny. He praises an interest-rate theory whose statistical test could genuinely have counted against it, but presses the business-cycle model on its assumptions about timing and entrepreneurs’ knowledge of cyclical regularities. His objections remain concrete: inventories and working capital cannot contract below zero, a limit that matters for explaining recovery from a slump. This short review offers a focused encounter with Shackle’s standards of explanation—what evidence tests, what algebra conceals, and when simplifying assumptions require further defence.

James Wilson’s relative neglect beside Walter Bagehot gives Hayek’s brief review of two Economist centenary publications its sharpest edge. Why, he asks, does the journal’s founder receive no comparable portrait, and so little attention for his views on the trade cycle? Hayek welcomes the essay volume’s readability under wartime conditions—its archives destroyed and space restricted by paper shortages—without accepting every claim it makes for the journal’s political continuity. His judgments reveal an economist attentive both to neglected theoretical contributions and to the documentary needs of historians. The separate, identically titled pamphlet receives chiefly a bibliographic warning: it contains different material. This is a compact encounter with Hayek as a critical reader of institutional commemoration, balancing appreciation against omissions and evidential limits.

Periodically, in the open air and by collective oath, the Swiss cantons swore their federal pacts anew—an institution Rappard studies under its German name, Beschwörung und Erneuerung der Bünde, from Rudolf Brun's Zurich charter of 1351 to its extinction in 1798. Born of one magistrate's fear of his enemies, the periodic public oath spread through the perpetual alliances and the Covenant of Stans until it formed part of Swiss public law. Then the Reformation turned a rite of unity into a confessional battlefield: Catholics would swear before God and the saints, the Reformed before God alone, and no formula could reconcile the two. The ceremony returned for a single day at Aarau, on the eve of the old Confederation's collapse—the oath, Rappard argues, being the very cement of the Eidgenossenschaft.

Une fois de plus les saints se dressèrent donc entre les Confédérés, non pour les bénir, mais bien pour les empêcher de renouveler leurs promesses de fidélité mutuelle !

English translation: “Once again the saints thus stood between the Confederates—not to bless them, but rather to prevent them from renewing their pledges of mutual fidelity!”

Kaufmann relocates the objectivity of social science from private conviction to public procedure: a proposition is valid only relative to the rules that govern how claims are accepted, rejected, connected, and corrected within inquiry. Written in English under the influence of Dewey's Logic, the book refuses to seek certainty before science begins, holding that every attempt to ground empirical knowledge in self-evident truths is foredoomed. Its recurring operation is a sorting of levels, separating facts, meanings, rules of procedure, and formal relations that disputants habitually let slide into one another. Economic theory supplies his sharpest cases. Demand curves and marginal-utility principles are not empirical laws falsifiable by a single instance but theoretical rules; and Mises's a priori derivation of value and price is shown to be analytic unless tied to empirical rules. Objectivity here is procedural, not absolute; formalism clarifies rather than reduces.

All attempts to base empirical science on ultimate grounds conceived as self-evident truths are foredoomed to failure.

When does a political ideal become a claim that evidence can test? In this 1944 review of Harold J. Laski’s Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time, Joseph A. Schumpeter respects the radical convictions while questioning the diagnosis that makes socialist reconstruction urgent. His distinctive move is to turn Marxist criticism back upon the intellectuals who proclaim capitalism exhausted: a doctrine’s ideological origins do not disprove it, but neither do shared convictions establish its truth. Soviet expansion provides a concrete test of the claim that imperialism depends on capitalism. This brief encounter lets readers see Schumpeter distinguish ethical preference from causal explanation—and acknowledge, in the case of fascism, where criticism has yet to yield an adequate explanation.