The archive.

Commodity markets can reach equilibrium while workers remain unemployed: this distinction anchors Emil Lederer’s review of John Maurice Clark’s Strategic Factors in Business Cycles. Lederer values Clark’s account of why automatic market adjustment may fail to restore employment, and reads it as a case for intervention extending beyond central-bank interest-rate control. His assessment connects unstable investment and consumer income to the danger of severe depressions, while questioning the book’s omission of technical progress. This compact review offers a precise encounter with Lederer’s criteria for economic explanation: data require theoretical interpretation, and market balance must not be mistaken for social recovery.

Can a rigorous science of human action accommodate interpretive sociology? In this 1934 review of Ludwig Mises’s Grundprobleme der Nationalökonomie, Alfred Schütz endorses the demand for theoretical foundations while resisting Mises’s treatment of Max Weber. He explains how Mises derives economic categories from the structure of action and assigns experience the task of determining when theoretical propositions apply. But he refuses the implication that Weber’s attention to meaning makes sociology less theoretical. The review offers a compact encounter between two demands that Schütz will not allow to become simple opposites: conceptual rigour and interpretation. Its interest lies in the precision of his qualified agreement, including his recognition that theory is indispensable to history without replacing inquiry into particular events.

The book that Hulsmann's introduction calls the great untranslated work of interwar Austrian economics appears here in its first English edition, rendering the 1934 Kapital und Produktion for readers of capital-based macroeconomics. Strigl builds an entire theory of production on the higher yield of roundabout methods and the wage-fund idea: capital is not an independent force but a way of using labor and land across time, sustained by a fund of subsistence goods. He distinguishes free capital, intermediate products, and fixed capital, and traces how credit expansion — money capital created beyond real saving — lowers interest below equilibrium, lengthens production past what the subsistence fund can support, and immobilizes investment. Two appendices carry the argument into the business cycle, joining Bohm-Bawerk's production theory to Mises's theory of the crisis.

Owning capital equipment can never in itself represent wealth; it only becomes wealth if it can be integrated into the structure of production.

By 1934 the Grundsätze had grown almost impossible to obtain, even as the doctrines it launched spread across Europe—an obscurity Hayek's essay sets out to correct. His claim is that Menger did not merely share the marginal-utility discovery with Jevons and Walras but gave it the causal-subjective form from which Austrian method, value theory, price theory and monetary analysis all descend; the ideas Böhm-Bawerk and Wieser refined were at bottom Menger's own. Reading the Grundsätze closely, he shows economic activity as planning for the future, value as ordinal and quantity-dependent, productive factors priced by imputation, and money emerging through degrees of saleability. The Untersuchungen and the Methodenstreit with Schmoller become a defense of theory itself, grounded in an individualist method and an insight into the unintended order of social life.

But it is not unduly to detract from the merits of these writers to say that its fundamental ideas belong fully and wholly to Carl Menger.

Rappard defines the small state not by population, territory, wealth, or neutrality but by a single constitutional fact: exclusion from the League of Nations Council's permanent seats. That negative definition — Max Huber's 'Nichtgrosstaaten' — lets him read the League as both a rupture with old diplomacy and its continuation, since the nineteenth-century Concert of Europe had already married nominal equality to rule by the principal Powers. Article 4 of the Covenant, he argues, did not merely manage this hierarchy but legalized it, turning long-standing political inequality into open constitutional fact. Tracing the Paris negotiations, where Cecil defended Great-Power control and Wilson supplied democratic language, he shows why intermediate and aspiring states — Spain, Poland, Argentina, Brazil — made resentment inevitable, and why the weak came to prize law as both moral preference and practical necessity.

It is not unnatural, although it may give rise to cynical comment: the nations whose only material bond is a common lack of might are spiritually linked together by a common love of right.

Can monetary policy relieve a depression without preparing the next crisis? In this 1934 German essay, also intended as the preface to the forthcoming English edition of his monetary treatise, Ludwig von Mises tests promises of recovery against their deferred costs. His defense of gold is not a claim to monetary perfection: he distinguishes the damage caused by Britain’s chosen restoration parity from the gold standard itself, and regards dependence on gold production as less dangerous than political control of currency values. Particularly revealing is his extension of monetary reform into international law: secure lending, he argues, requires enforceable protections against unilateral national interference. The essay connects currency policy to the security of contracts and access to foreign savings, while insisting that neither devaluation nor credit expansion can substitute for capital formation.

History offers no mechanical template for the slump of the early 1930s, yet Schumpeter mines it anyway, 1896, 1825, 1873, for the recurring anatomy of capitalist crisis. Depressions return, he argues, because development repeatedly breeds maladjustments that must be worked out: prosperity brings new methods, firms, and products that displace the old, so the downturn is destructive and reconstructive at once, the means of rebuilding the system on a more efficient plan. Speculation is the visible break, not the cause. But every real crisis is also shaped from outside, and what makes the present one different is not scale but politics, war debts, economic nationalism, gold-standard obstruction, wage and interest policy, so that the drama is dominated less by the mechanism of capitalism than by nations bent on obstructing it. His prescription discriminates: relieve suffering, remove political injuries, but never mistake credit-driven revival for genuine recovery.

What we face is not merely the working of capitalism, but of a capitalism which nations are determined not to allow to function.

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.”

No law exists in the abstract, only particular styles of law thrown up by interlocking social conditions: so runs the thesis of this fifth volume of Thurnwald's ethno-sociology of human society. Surveying blood revenge, property, contract, suretyship, inheritance, crime, composition, outlawry, asylum, punishment, and the evidentiary machinery of oath, ordeal, and duel, he locates the psychological root of justice in reciprocity, reading vengeance, compensation, and Wergeld as balanced returns. Blood revenge among sovereign kin groups becomes the seedbed of criminal law, giving way to objective justice only when an authority stands above the parties. Contract moves from symbolic real acts through curse-bound words to consensual agreement under writing and the state. Law's whole development, he concludes, is an act of human self-domestication.

Das primitive Recht kennt keine anderen Beweismittel als Eid, Fluch und Gottesurteil.

English translation: “Primitive law knows no other means of proof than oath, curse, and ordeal.”

Free trade needs more than persuasive economic arguments: it needs interests and political institutions capable of sustaining it. In this 1934 published address, Emil Lederer asks why the forces that once favoured international exchange now encourage national self-sufficiency. His European perspective exposes concrete contradictions: creditor countries demand repayment while resisting imports, and Germany pursues autarchy despite needing exports to finance essential raw materials. Technology, too, changes sides in his account, making diversified domestic production more feasible rather than necessarily drawing countries closer together. Lederer distinguishes the benefits of trade from the conditions under which governments and producers will support it. The result is an explanation of protectionism that connects debt, industrial capacity, and domestic recovery policies with Europe’s fractured sovereignty and the closing of borders under dictatorship.

Militant nationalism does not necessarily produce the same political order everywhere. In this 1934 article, Emil Lederer asks whether Japan’s agrarian distress, military independence, and patriotic mobilization amount to fascism in the European sense. His distinctive emphasis falls on a tension within social organization: family, village, and occupational loyalties may sustain conservative authority yet also obstruct the destruction of independent groups that he identifies with European fascism. The army’s alliance with impoverished peasants further complicates a simple analogy with Italy or Germany. Reading Lederer reveals how similar nationalist slogans can mobilize different interests—and why he regards economic crisis and political violence as threats to, rather than proof of the disappearance of, these structural differences.

Public finance, on this account, is an economic science of the state rather than a technical appendix to tax law—and a theory of taxation that does not begin from the state, Kerschagl writes, is nonsense. His Steuerlehre reads economy, law, coercion, and political purpose together, tracing modern taxation from older real, property, and consumption levies to the fragile arrival of income taxation, which interwar inflation and administrative weakness kept unstable. He dismantles equivalence and insurance theories that assimilate taxes to private exchange, insists that in principle every tax is shiftable, and rejects the tidy contrast between direct and indirect taxes as an account of who ultimately pays. No ideal tax exists in the abstract; a workable system must fit production, property, and constitutional order, as his comparative surveys and Austria's 1934 financial constitution show.

Das Urteil über die Produktivität der Steuern ist in Wirklichkeit ein Urteil über die Produktivität des Staates.

English translation: “The judgment on the productivity of taxes is in reality a judgment on the productivity of the state.”