The archive.

Must economics explain people’s preferences, or judge whether they are reasonable? In this comparative review of textbooks by Gustav Cassel, Karl Diehl, and W. Gelesnoff, Ludwig von Mises makes that distinction concrete through a dispute over choosing food for parrots rather than meat for oneself. His defence of subjective value theory turns on the chooser’s ranking of satisfactions—not an observer’s approval or an arithmetic measure of pleasure. Mises presents Austrian economics as part of an international development of classical problems, rather than merely a reaction against German historicism. His differentiated judgments reveal what he considers legitimate theoretical progress: criticism may supersede marginal utility theory, but cannot simply bypass its explanations of choice, production, and exchange.

Documenting a return to guild principles is not the same as explaining its intellectual foundations. That distinction sharpens Mises’s brief 1922 review of Hugo C. M. Wendel’s study of industrial freedom in Prussia, 1845–1849. He credits Wendel’s diligent use of printed sources but sees different benefits for different readers: little novelty for Germans, an introduction to unfamiliar industrial middle-class politics for Americans. His reservation is precise: the study leaves out the ideas behind the revival of a medieval economic order. This short review offers a compact glimpse of Mises’s expectations of historical explanation, without itself supplying the intellectual history he finds missing.

Asian monetary practice becomes a pointed challenge to German monetary theory in Ludwig von Mises’s brief review of the third edition of William F. Spalding’s Eastern Exchange, Currency and Finance. Mises argues that Knapp and his followers missed the essential identity between the Austro-Hungarian Bank’s foreign-exchange policy and the gold exchange standard used in British India, as well as its connection to Ricardo’s proposals. His recommendation of Spalding is thus more than approval of a useful handbook: it identifies comparative institutional knowledge as a corrective to theoretical misunderstanding. Readers can see precisely why Mises valued Spalding’s otherwise hard-to-access account of wartime and early postwar developments, alongside its practical treatment of Asian trade and customs.

Can an autarkic economic union spanning several nations escape the nationalist motives behind trade barriers? In this short 1923 review of Waldemar Mitscherlich’s Der Nationalismus Westeuropas, Ludwig von Mises questions that proposed compromise between free trade and national self-sufficiency. He credits Mitscherlich’s historical account with fresh insights but argues that nationalism cannot be adequately understood without examining protectionist economics. His criticism rests alongside a pointed distinction: belonging to a nation is not the same as subscribing to a nationalist party’s programme. The review offers a compact encounter with Mises’s insistence on separating linguistic nationality from political allegiance—and on testing schemes for economic union against the motives that would sustain their restrictions on trade.

Once the public stops believing that the inflation will halt, Mises contends, a paper currency financed by the note press is doomed to sudden collapse rather than to endless gradual decline—as the American continentals and the French mandats collapsed before it. The first step of any reform is therefore to shut down the printing press; the second is to bind the mark again to gold, whose quantity answers to mining profitability rather than to state decree. He refutes the balance-of-payments theory of the exchanges, insisting that inflation, not poverty or trade deficits, drives foreign-exchange rates upward, and proposes a monetary constitution forbidding any note issue not covered by gold or foreign exchange. The disorder, he closes, is at root ideological.

An die Stelle des Schlagwortes „Los vom Golde“ muß die Lösung treten: „Los von der staatlichen Beeinflussung des Geldwertes“.

English translation: “In place of the slogan "Away from gold" must be substituted the solution: "Away from state influence on the value of money.”

Every socialist scheme founders on the same rock, the impossibility of economic calculation, and this sequel to the 1920 essay takes up the objections against that thesis one by one. Mises works through Arthur Wolfgang Cohn's revival of Schäffle's administratively fixed Sozialtaxe, Karl Polányi's guild-socialist functionalism, and Eduard Heimann's cost-based pricing, showing that each must collapse either into central planning, where calculation admittedly fails, or into syndicalism, where associations trade as owners and socialism dissolves. He then turns on the Soviet and Marxist replies of Tschajanow, Strumilin, Varga, and Kautsky, arguing that inherited capitalist prices, labor-time reckoning, and the reduction of heterogeneous labor all break down against scarce natural factors. No socialist, he concludes, has yet produced a workable method of calculation.

Man durfte den Sozialismus preisen, man durfte jedoch über ihn nicht nachdenken.

English translation: “One was permitted to extol socialism, but one was not permitted to think about it.”

For Ludwig von Mises, Germany’s monetary catastrophe was not merely a failure of policy: economic writers had helped prepare it. In this brief 1924 review of Gustav Seibt’s Deutschlands kranke Wirtschaft und ihre Wiederherstellung, he praises an economist whose warnings went unheard and whose monetary analysis supported demands to stop printing money and restore a free economy. The revealing tension is between predictive success and public influence: Mises regards Seibt as vindicated by events, yet sees little prospect that discredited doctrines will lose their following. His defence of a book already overtaken in some particulars by the Ruhr occupation and the Rentenmark shows how he distinguishes dated information from enduring theory—and makes intellectual responsibility central to his judgement of economic writing.

Gold’s appeal, for Ludwig von Mises, lies not in perfect price stability but in limiting political control over money. In this 1924 lecture, published as a journal article, he asks whether currencies governed by price indices could offer a better safeguard. His concrete objection is that selecting commodities, weights and averages turns apparently technical measurement into decisions that redistribute wealth between creditors and debtors. Yet his defence of gold also exposes its institutional vulnerability: if central banks hold foreign claims rather than metal, responsibility for the world’s monetary gold falls on fewer countries. Readers can discover both the reasoning behind Mises’s preference for gold and a tension within his proposed restoration—monetary independence from governments secured through international agreements and even punitive tariffs.

Restoring a depreciated currency to its former metallic parity can look like an act of restitution. In this 1924 essay, Ludwig von Mises asks whether it actually compensates those whom inflation injured. His answer turns on a concrete mismatch: money and claims have changed hands, debts have been repaid, and new contracts reflect depreciated values. Appreciation therefore benefits present creditors, not necessarily past victims, while burdening debtors who may never have gained from inflation. Mises distinguishes the legal promise of redemption from money’s subsequent monetary function, and contractual compensation from a general rise in purchasing power. His treatment of sterling’s international standing tests the competing case for restoring confidence. The essay clarifies why repairing a currency and repairing losses are different policy tasks.

A movement can declare war on Marxism while remaining as anticapitalist as the doctrine it fights: this is the paradox Mises anatomizes in republican Germany and German-Austria. Scientific anti-Marxism, he argues, attacks Marxist politics while keeping Marxist categories intact, above all class conflict, resentment against capitalism, and contempt for theoretical economics. Tracing how the Historical School and Kathedersozialismus absorbed Marxian ideas even while claiming to refute them, he sets a utilitarian sociology of the division of labor against every struggle theory, whether of class, race, or nation, faulting them for explaining conflict but never association. Werner Sombart serves as the exemplary critic still caught inside the doctrine he renounces. Only science, not nationalist ressentiment, can overcome Marxism. First published 1925.

Wohlgemerkt: nicht der Sozialismus wird angegriffen, sondern der Marxismus, und dem marxistischen Sozialismus wird zum Vorwurf gemacht, daß er gar nicht der richtige, der wahre, der allein anzustrebende Sozialismus sei.

English translation: “Note well: it is not socialism that is attacked, but Marxism, and Marxist socialism is reproached for not being the correct, the true, the only socialism worth striving for.”

A central bank can hold ample reserves yet undermine monetary stability by refusing to redeem its notes. In this six-page discussion contribution from 1925, Ludwig von Mises makes that distinction central to his replies on European monetary reconstruction. His perspective combines a defence of theory’s practical power—including the destructive power of mistaken doctrines—with insistence on unconditional redemption at parity. Austria supplies a revealing test: rising prices and expanding note circulation, he argues, need not prove renewed inflation when world-market adjustment and returning demand for domestic money explain them. This brief intervention shows Mises testing monetary principles against disputed evidence, distinguishing the appearance of stability from its institutional conditions, and the quantity of notes from the public’s willingness to hold them.

A public that has learned to watch exchange rates may frustrate inflationary finance even when governments have learned nothing. In this second contribution to a recorded discussion in 1925, Mises locates the restraint on renewed note printing in the population’s rapid response to depreciation, not in official wisdom. His reply to Spitzmüller raises a different question: does an economist’s prominence make him responsible for policies he opposed? Mises distinguishes his writings and lectures from the powers exercised by ministers and central-bank governors, naming the 1922 stabilization as the sole adopted Austrian monetary measure consistent with his recommendations. This brief, pointed exchange shows both his account of changed public behaviour after inflation and his resistance to being credited with authority he denied possessing.