The archive.

Twenty-odd centuries of economic reasoning, from Aristotle and the scholastic doctors through Smith, Ricardo, Walras, and Keynes, pass under review in this vast and unfinished history, assembled from Schumpeter's disordered manuscript by his widow Elizabeth Boody Schumpeter. Its governing distinction separates economic analysis, the evolving box of scientific tools, from the surrounding economic thought and political creed. Tracing the filiation of ideas, Schumpeter insists that competent analysis rests on three techniques, history, statistics, and theory, and that every theorist first works from a pre-analytic 'vision' colored by ideology. He crowns Walrasian general equilibrium the summit of theoretical economics, weighs the scholastics' neglected contributions against the British classical tradition he distrusts, and reconceives capital, from the standpoint of analysis, as a set of restrictions.

practically and analytically, a credit theory of money is possibly preferable to a monetary theory of credit.

Georges Sorel, alone among the thinkers who absorbed Marx, added something genuinely new: a cult of action, sabotage, the general strike, and political myth that would echo through Lenin, Mussolini, and Hitler alike. From that observation these lectures range across the fault lines Marx left unexamined - above all the principle of nationality, which Marx dismissed because he expected capitalism to dissolve national peculiarities before socialism arrived. Mises shows why free-trade optimism about the obsolescence of war, shared by Wilson and Norman Angell, collapses in an interventionist world of tariffs, embargoes, and raw-material controls. He follows the shifting vocabulary of socialism and communism from the 1830s through Lenin and Stalin, and reads the First and Second Internationals as bureaucracies that preached peace while ignoring the trade and migration barriers that actually make nations fight.

Lenin, Mussolini, and Hitler were all influenced by Sorel, by the idea of action, by the idea not to talk but to kill.

Profit and loss are signals before they are rewards: in a market economy they reveal what consumers most urgently want and pull capital toward the uses that serve them best. Working from that premise, Mises separates the physical capital goods inherited from the past - often specific, obsolete, or badly located - from the accounting abstraction of capital, and shows why technocratic schemes to scrap old methods for newer ones squander real wealth. Private property, on his account, is a social function, retained only by serving customers cheaply and well, and wholly unlike feudal ownership rooted in conquest and privilege. Taxation and interference, he warns, sap consumer sovereignty by starving new firms of the capital they need to grow. The essay closes by contrasting profit-and-loss management with the bureaucratic kind proper only to policing and other nonmarket services.

But capitalism is not dying; people are murdering it.

No civilization rises without saving - the patient accumulation of capital and the monetary calculation that lets a society know whether it is preserving its stock or consuming it. That is the thread Mises follows here, distinguishing the physical capital goods of production from the accounting concept of capital, and insisting that profit, income, and capital maintenance have meaning only inside a price system. Socialism, denied market prices, cannot make the reckoning at all. He turns his fire on the income-tax laws, inflation, and social-security schemes that quietly erode capital formation, and on the anti-saving and Keynesian doctrines that treat thrift as a danger and dread technological unemployment. More capital, he answers, means higher labor productivity and higher wages - the true engine by which the lives of ordinary workers were transformed.

If the children used up the nets and fish produced by their parents, capital accumulation would have had to start all over again.

Economic theory cannot tell a government which ends to pursue, since those belong to value and politics, yet no rational policy is possible without it. From this double thesis Morgenstern develops the "application problem" at the heart of his 1934 study, reprinted here in the original German: because economics lacks physics-like constants and works through shifting relations, every intervention rests on contested theoretical beliefs about cause and effect. He shows how policy effects scatter unevenly, concentrated and visible losses outweighing dispersed future gains, so organized producers systematically outmaneuver diffuse consumers. Since measures interlock through the price system, the only value-free scientific principle he can offer is consistency, freedom from contradiction. Drawing on Böhm-Bawerk, he treats power as widening the zone of indeterminacy rather than abolishing economic law, and closes with a withering account of the "Vulgärökonomie" of slogans and patent remedies.

Eine flackernde Fackel ist völliger Finsternis vorzuziehen.

English translation: “A flickering torch is preferable to complete darkness.”

Written in the spring of 1933, as Hitler consolidated power, this short essay confronts a comforting misreading head-on: that National Socialism was a conservative or capitalist reaction. Hayek argues the opposite, that it was a genuinely socialist and collectivist movement, the ripened fruit of an anti-liberal current running through German thought since the Bismarckian era. Its hostility to the Marxist parties, he contends, was national and cultural rather than economic, while its intellectual debts ran to Marxian relativism and anti-rationalism. Tracing how collectivist planning tends toward coercion, the suppression of intellectual freedom, and finally dictatorship, he warns that other Western nations expanding state control over economic life court the same descent. A compact statement of the themes Hayek would enlarge a decade later in The Road to Serfdom.

The inherent logic of collectivism makes it impossible to confine it to a limited sphere.

When construction workers marched in 1970 chanting "God Bless the Establishment," the American Right had inverted its own origins. Part history, part memoir, this account traces how the Old Right, the anti-New Deal and anti-interventionist coalition of Mencken, Nock, Garet Garrett, John T. Flynn, and Robert Taft, was captured within the form after National Review's 1955 rise, which kept conservative rhetoric while swapping anti-statism for Cold War militarism. Rothbard follows his own path from minarchism to anarchism, from Republican politics through Cold War revisionism to an improbable alliance with the New Left against Vietnam and conscription. Garrett's warning that the country had crossed from Republic to Empire anchors his lament for a lost antiwar, anti-Establishment tradition.

The Old Right was staunchly opposed to Big Government and the New Deal at home and abroad: that is, to both facets of the welfare-warfare state.

No federal agency is more secretive or less accountable, and that opacity is exactly what Rothbard sets out to strip away. He argues that the Federal Reserve's celebrated independence merely shields the true engine of inflation, tracing money from its market origin in weights of gold and silver through the slow corruption of deposit banking into fractional-reserve warehousing he flatly calls fraud. Central banks, he contends, exist to cartelize the banks and finance the state; the Fed itself was engineered by Morgan- and Rockefeller-linked financiers and sold to the public as Progressive reform, culminating in the secret 1910 conclave at Jekyll Island. His remedy is not a reformed Fed but its liquidation and a return to gold-coin money.

The Federal Reserve System is accountable to no one; it has no budget; it is subject to no audit; and no Congressional committee knows of, or can truly supervise, its operations.

America's first nationwide boom and bust arrived without war, famine, or embargo to explain it, a puzzle that makes the depression of 1819 an ideal laboratory for watching a young republic reason about hard times. Rothbard reconstructs the inflationary land-and-import bubble fed by war finance and the Second Bank of the United States, then the Bank's sharp 1818 contraction that toppled prices, banks, and debtors alike. His real subject is the debate that followed: stay laws and debtor relief, schemes for state and national paper money, demands to restrict bank credit and enforce specie payment, and a rising protective-tariff movement. Sound-money and inflationist opinion, he shows, cut across region and class, seeding the later Jacksonian hard-money politics of Benton, Polk, and Kendall.

Beginning in the summer of 1818, the Bank precipitated the Panic of 1819 by a series of deflationary moves.

Strip profit and loss from the market, Mises argues, and production loses its only compass - the point this 1951 pamphlet drives home. Profit, he explains, is no arbitrary surcharge but the reward for anticipating future prices better than one's rivals and correcting the market's maladjustments, while loss is the penalty for judging wrong; under perfect foresight neither could exist. He then meets the moral condemnation of profit head on, rebutting the slogan of production for use and not for profit, the schemes to abolish or cap entrepreneurial gains, and the demand for equality, which he treats as envy in the guise of justice. The alternative to consumer-directed enterprise, he warns, is not a gentler middle way but socialism - and with it the erosion of representative government and civil liberty.

The consumers by their buying and abstention from buying elect the entrepreneurs in a daily repeated plebiscite as it were.

Beginning from the premise that money emerged from barter rather than state decree, this treatise builds a full Austrian theory of money and then turns it against the banks. Rothbard separates honest loan banking, which lends real savings, from deposit banking that issues more warehouse receipts than it holds gold, fractional reserves he treats as inherently fraudulent, inflationary, and structurally bankrupt. Free banking, he argues, restrains such expansion through redemption by rival banks; central banking exists precisely to remove that limit, monopolizing note issue and pyramiding credit through open-market operations. Tracing the story from the 1694 Bank of England to the Federal Reserve, and debating Lawrence White over Scottish free banking, he closes with a demand for 100 percent gold reserves.

Inflation is a process of subtle expropriation, where the victims understand that prices have gone up but not why this has happened.

Governments will reach for inflation again and again, this 1976 lecture argues, because they answer to voters and organized interests, unless some mechanism restrains them. Hayek's remedy is radical in its simplicity: strip the state of its monopoly over money and legal tender, and let people contract, keep accounts, and hold balances in whatever currency they trust. He traces the disease to the Keynesian faith that expanding aggregate expenditure secures lasting prosperity, and contends that under free exchange rates good money would drive out bad, inverting Gresham's Law. Delivered for the Institute of Economic Affairs and reprinted here with commentaries from Ivor Pearce, Harold Rose, Douglas Jay, and Sir Keith Joseph, it closes with a historical appendix running from the French assignats to the German rentenmark.

Our only hope for a stable money is indeed now to find a way to protect money from politics.