The archive.

Public ownership and cooperative status do not, by themselves, make an enterprise serve the common good. In this report on the first International Congress of the Common-Weal Economy, held in Geneva in 1953, Hans Bayer makes democratic control the decisive test. His account connects social security and workplace participation with a harder question: how can enterprises oriented toward collective welfare counter concentrated private power without fostering either bureaucratic domination or narrow enterprise interests? Drawing on congress debates about cooperatives, nationalized industries, and economic councils, Bayer argues that participation must extend beyond individual workplaces. The report offers a compact view of the institutional choices behind this ambition—and of why Bayer regarded international organization, rather than agreement on principles alone, as the congress’s unfinished task.

Can interest persist in an economy where innovation has ceased—and can it disappear even where capital remains productive? Alfred Amonn’s 1953 article challenges the assumptions behind both questions by distinguishing physical capital goods from present command over them. Against Keynes’s exclusively monetary explanation, he argues that scarce access to goods underlies interest, while money and liquidity preference help determine its rate. His extended example of fishermen acquiring boats and nets makes the distinction concrete: replacement costs, entrepreneurial profit and pure interest need not rise or vanish together. Readers can discover why productivity alone does not explain a positive return, why stationary conditions need not eliminate it, and how monetary and real explanations can be combined without treating either as sufficient.

When the textbooks of Hansen and Schneider reduced the quantity theory of money to the crude claim that prices simply track the money stock, Amonn set out to show they were attacking a straw man no serious theorist had ever held. Tracing the doctrine from Bodin and Hume through Mill and Fisher, he recasts it not as a mechanistic identity but as the application of ordinary supply-and-demand value theory to the special case of money, whose demand and supply enter as simple quantities rather than price-quantity functions. He defends Fisher's equation of exchange against the charge of empty tautology, distinguishes the money actually offered on the market from the total stock, and closes by likening the quantity-theory law to the law of free fall: never perfectly realized, yet valid when other factors are accounted for.

Man wird selbst in der ältesten geldtheoretischen Literatur vergeblich nach einer derart primitiven Fassung der Quantitätstheorie suchen.

English translation: “Even in the oldest monetary-theoretical literature one will search in vain for so primitive a formulation of the quantity theory.”

Reviewing Hannah Arendt's book of the same name, Voegelin reads totalitarianism as the symptom of a putrefaction in Western culture, a cadaveric poison scattering its pathogens through the body of humanity. He praises her eye for the concrete, above all her account of the 'superfluous' human beings left when national societies disintegrate, yet he pushes her origins backward and inward. The deeper source is not imperialism or bureaucracy but the spiritual disease of agnosticism and an immanentist faith that would manufacture salvation within history. His sharpest objection targets the ambition to transform human nature, which he calls a contradiction in terms: to meddle with the nature of a thing is to destroy it. The crisis, finally, is religious, a revolt against the limits of human nature and against transcendence itself.

Die wahre Trennlinie in der gegenwärtigen Krise verläuft nicht zwischen Liberalen und Totalitären, sondern zwischen den religiösen und philosophischen Transzendentalisten auf der einen Seite und den liberalen und totalitären Immanentisten auf der anderen.

English translation: “The true dividing line in the present crisis does not run between liberals and totalitarians, but between the religious and philosophical transcendentalists on the one side and the liberal and totalitarian immanentists on the other.”

What must be assumed before an economic equation can yield a credible number? In this 1953 article, Gerhard Tintner presents econometrics through the gap between theoretical relationships and measurable effects. Demand and supply observations do not automatically disclose separate demand and supply curves; a precise estimate does not establish that its underlying model is adequate. Examples from meat and corn markets make these difficulties concrete, showing how external variables, past prices, and assumptions about error shape what can be inferred. Tintner’s perspective joins technical explanation to methodological caution: numerical estimates can test economic claims and inform choices about taxes or subsidies, but cannot determine policy goals. Readers can discover why the usefulness of an economic coefficient depends on more than its statistical precision.

Harrod’s collected essays offer Fritz Machlup an occasion to distinguish intellectual priority from continuing theoretical relevance. In this short review, Machlup identifies early contributions to imperfect competition while welcoming Harrod’s later challenges to the doctrine of excess capacity and his reconciliation of full-cost pricing with the marginal principle. His sympathy is informed by striking parallels with his own work on sellers’ competition, though it stops short of full agreement on profit theory. Readers can discover where Machlup sees established theory as open to revision—and why historical documentation matters to that judgment. His complaints about missing publication details and an absent index give the favorable assessment a practical edge: these are essays he expects economists to consult and cite.

May an economist honorably use a theory he does not fully believe? Shackle answers that the alternative would abolish the discipline, since every usable theory remains partial, contestable, and interesting precisely because it is not final knowledge. Sincerity thus becomes disciplined awareness of a theory's limits rather than abstention from theory. The essay runs a sequence of tests—on the arbitrary boundaries that wall economics off from psychology and politics, on the incompatible pictures rival abstractions paint, on equilibrium as a mechanical borrowing, on econometrics and its dangerous phrase 'incomplete information.' Because its subject matter learns, imagines, and invents, economics can never treat fitted equations as eternal truths, and its practitioners, Shackle urges, should form an open craft rather than a guarded mystery.

Economics is not physics, it is psychics, the study of men with all their capacity for learning and experimenting and inventing and imagining.

Can communication explain how a shared social world arises if communicating already requires shared signs and reciprocal understanding? This difficulty sharpens Alfred Schütz’s review of Husserl’s Ideas II, first published in 1953 and presented here in its 1970 republication. Reading from the standpoint of the social sciences, Schütz follows Husserl’s movement from bodily perception to the meaningful environments in which people act, interpret motives, and understand one another. He values the accounts of embodiment and habitual experience without smoothing over the manuscripts’ unresolved tensions. His criticism locates a precise explanatory gap: apprehending another person does not yet explain mutual understanding, and communicating individuals do not automatically constitute a collective subject. The review shows both what phenomenology offers social inquiry and where its account of social relations still needs argument.

Fear built cathedrals and greed built banking houses: across Brooks Adams's Law of Civilisation and Decay runs a single contest between the imaginative type—warrior, saint, priest—and the economic type of merchant, usurer, and financier. Engel-Janosi rescues this neglected American philosophy of history, written before Spengler and Toynbee, from the oblivion it met in optimistic America, reconstructing Adams's formation through the family inheritance, Harvard, Darwin, Spencer, and Guizot. Adams's narrative runs from Rome and Byzantium through the Crusades, Venice, the Reformation, England, and India to modern finance, everywhere charting centralization and the triumph of money power. Engel-Janosi finds the determinism crude beside Max Weber, yet preserves the severity of Adams's question: what governs civilization once belief in progress has collapsed?

Der Titel des geschichtlichen Hauptwerks von Brooks ist Beweis an sich: The Law of Civilisation and Decay.

English translation: “The title of Brooks's principal historical work is proof in itself: The Law of Civilisation and Decay.”

Broader education, stronger professional preparation, shorter degrees: Richard Kerschagl’s 1953 pamphlet asks which promises of Austrian university reform can actually coexist. Drawing on economics and experience of Austrian, British, and American universities, he insists that educational ambitions require staffing, funding, and credible qualifications. Small-group discussion and simulated ministries, businesses, and courts interest him as teaching methods—but not as cost-free improvements. Student hardship, he argues, calls for financial support rather than reduced requirements. His openness to pedagogical experiment sits alongside strict boundaries around admission and academic credentials. Particularly revealing is his treatment of degree reform: a qualification below the doctorate changes little if public employers still demand doctorates. The pamphlet makes university reform a concrete negotiation between educational purposes, institutional resources, and graduates’ occupational standing.

How much of marginal utility theory was available before nineteenth-century economists gave it systematic form? In this 1953 article, Emil Kauder traces subjective valuation from Aristotle to eighteenth-century accounts of exchange and diminishing satisfaction. His distinctive concern is the distance between possessing analytical ingredients and combining them into a theory: Galiani explains costs through value, Turgot shows how differing valuations make exchange mutually advantageous, and Bernoulli calculates the utility of additional wealth, yet crucial problems remain unresolved. Kauder argues that these resources might have supported a political economy founded on marginal utility in Adam Smith’s time. Readers can assess that provocative counterfactual while discovering why utility, scarcity, and even diminishing satisfaction do not by themselves explain the value of interchangeable units.

By the mid-1950s managed paper money, deficit spending, and Keynesian full-employment policy had convinced most observers that metallic money was a relic. Mises answers that fiat currency can never be a permanent order, because its stimulus depends on surprise and delay: once prices and wages catch up, the boom dies, and to prolong it governments must accelerate depreciation until the public flees cash for real values. The case for gold, he insists, is not reverence for metal but distrust of political discretion over purchasing power—a supply fixed by nature rather than pressure groups. He rebuts the balance-of-payments objection, recalls the Continental Currency and other inflations, and concludes that restoring gold depends less on mines or conferences than on surrendering the belief that prosperity can be printed.

Most people take it for granted that the world will never return to the gold standard.