The archive.

By 1923 the German banking world was consumed, as Hahn puts it, from morning to night with a single anxiety, the preservation of its capital substance, yet the third edition of Adolf Weber's textbook still fought the prewar battle against the great credit banks. Reviewing it, Hahn dismantles three inherited doctrines: Weber's moralized contrast between English deposit banks and German speculation banks, his loose account of liquidity, and his theory of credit and capital. Genuine risk, he insists, sits with merchants and manufacturers, not with bankers. Liquidity, in a clearing economy, means access to central-bank money rather than idle cash. And the only thing that matters about any credit is whether it enlarges the purchasing power already circulating. Inflation, on this reading, came from state finance, not from weak reserves.

Das Kontokorrentgeschäft aber ist zweifellos das unspekulativste Geschäft, das überhaupt möglich ist, denn seine Gewinnchancen sind in den bedungenen Zinsen und Provisionen von vornherein festgelegt.

English translation: “The current-account business, however, is undoubtedly the least speculative business that is possible at all, for its profit prospects are fixed in advance by the stipulated interest and commissions.”

A reading society founded by Viennese jurists and officials in 1840 becomes, in this early study, a delicate instrument for registering the political pressures of the Austrian Vormärz. Engel-Janosi reconstructs the associational law of pre-1848 Austria, the natural-law background, the police suspicion of reading circles, the concession system, and shows how elite patrons such as Sommaruga shielded the club while Sedlnitzky, Kolowrat, and Metternich eyed it warily. Its history, he argues, is largely the chronicle of its skirmishes with the censorship: the struggle to obtain foreign political newspapers, to hold lectures, and to maintain a library under constant supervision and confiscation. Though the society never acted as a revolutionary body in March 1848, Engel-Janosi reads in its restrained conduct a loyal, sorrowful opposition to the imperial order.

Es liegt viel Schwäche darin, gewiß, aber auch Trauer und Treue.

English translation: “There is much weakness in it, to be sure, but also sorrow and fidelity.”

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.”

Contributed to the memorial volume for Max Weber, this essay refuses the abstract rational homo oeconomicus and grounds economy instead in the biological balance of intake and expenditure that humans share with organisms and animals. Economic life, for Thurnwald, emerges from instinct through intelligence, invention, and organization, driven as much by prestige, magic, luxury, and group feeling as by calculation. He distinguishes constant psycho-physiological factors from local geographic ones and from the progressive accumulation of technique, tracing production and exchange values from clan sharing to tribute, primitive money, and finally the coal-and-machine economy that shifts power from land toward finance, industry, and labor. The gathering of prestige objects, he cautions, is not yet capital formation. Economy is treated throughout as a life function shaped by biology, psychology, environment, technique, and politics.

Das Verhältnis der Menschen zum Boden bildet zu allen Zeiten ein Grundproblem der Wirtschaft und der Politik.

English translation: “The relationship of human beings to the soil constitutes at all times a fundamental problem of economy and politics.”

Just as a chemical equilibrium shifts to absorb an external shock, an exchange rate moves to keep a nation's balance of accounts in balance—the analogy to Le Châtelier, Van't Hoff, and Lenz from which Rueff builds a theory of currencies as natural phenomena rather than political accidents. Working from wholesale price indices, he defines the 'disparity' between a currency's purchasing power at home and abroad, then demonstrates, mathematically and against 1912–1922 data for France, Britain, and the United States, that disparity moves to equilibrate the balance of accounts. He reads Britain's postwar unemployment as the cost of negative sterling disparity and dismisses the reparations quarrel: to compel Germany to pay while barring her exports is simply contradictory.

La vie économique, dans son ensemble, et pour un groupe important d'individus, paraît bien ainsi régie par la loi la plus générale de la nature.

English translation: “Economic life as a whole, and for an important group of individuals, thus appears indeed to be governed by the most general law of nature.”

Demand becomes a precise economic concept, in this compact encyclopedia entry for the Handwörterbuch der Staatswissenschaften, only once money mediates exchange and separates the buyer’s side from the seller’s. Strigl’s decisive move is to distinguish mere desire from kaufkräftige Nachfrage — demand backed by the ability and willingness to pay — and to show that price is the device that selects which wants become effective. Because wants outrun the scarce stock, the ranking of demand turns not on urgency of need alone but on wealth and the subjective valuation of money, so price theory explains allocation, not moral desert. He follows the argument to legal maximum prices, where a ceiling below the market-clearing level produces excess demand rationed by queues or cards, and to the Grenzkäufer whose bid guides production itself.

Nur ein Teil der Nachfrage kann jeweils mit dem begrenzten Gütervorrate befriedigt werden.

English translation: “Only a portion of demand can, in any given case, be satisfied out of the limited stock of goods.”

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.”

Kerschagl refuses to be filed under either metallism or chartalism, and builds instead a systematic theory of money as a functional concept embedded in an organic, divided-labour economy. Money value is purchasing power: an internal value measured through prices and index numbers, and an external value that is, strictly, not a value but a price. From these foundations he works outward through quantity theory—dissolved, he argues, into many income quantities—money creation tied to commodity bills, cashless payment, inflation as a pathological overissue of monetary tokens, currency stabilisation, centralized foreign-exchange management, and the postwar debates over gold at Genoa. Austria and Hungary after 1918 furnish his central case of inflation joined to a passive balance of payments. Monetary theory, he holds, is the test of any general economic doctrine.

Wir sehen somit, daß der sogenannte Kurswert eigentlich kein Wert ist, sondern ein Preis.

English translation: “We thus see that the so-called exchange-rate value is in fact not a value at all, but a price.”

Food can always be imported, the doctrine that would subordinate agriculture to industry and trade, had, Schullern-Schrattenhofen argues, been refuted by the World War. Written for Diehl and Mombert's Grundrisse series, this treatment of agrarian policy rather than agrarian law surveys the Agrarverfassung: land distribution, tenancy and Erbpacht, mortgage credit and Rodbertus's rent principle, inheritance and Anerbenrecht, internal colonization, and the postwar expropriation laws from the Reichssiedlungsgesetz to the abolition of the Fideikommisse. Against socialist Bodenreform and the Roman-law conception of absolute ownership, he presses a Germanic idea of property as duty, holding the self-cultivating owner to be the ideal citizen. His standpoint is anti-materialist, moderately agrarian, and insistent that agrarian questions admit only relative, situation-bound solutions.

Die Volkswirtschaft ist demnach nicht Selbstzweck, sie ist vielmehr in erster Reihe ein Hilfsmittel des kulturellen Fortschrittes und hat von diesem Standpunkte aus behandelt und geleitet zu werden.

English translation: “The national economy is accordingly not an end in itself; rather, it is in the first place an instrument of cultural progress, and must be treated and directed from this standpoint.”

Interest is not the wage of the capitalist's pain. Replying to J. B. Clark - here in the German translation of the 1895 English essay "The Origin of Interest" - Böhm-Bawerk rejects the reading of his theory as a disguised abstinence doctrine and grounds interest instead in the objective superiority of present goods, given that fruitful methods of production are time-consuming. He defends the claim that interest can persist in a stationary economy, untied to fresh capital formation, and answers Clark's regress objection by distinguishing capital's absolute historical lineage from the average interval between original inputs and finished consumption goods. Turning Clark's water-mill and steam-mill example around, he shows that an equal financial return over a longer investment period implies greater technical productivity, confirming rather than refuting his analysis.

Professor Clark scheint ferner meine Zinstheorie für eine Art Abstinenztheorie zu halten.

English translation: “Professor Clark further seems to regard my theory of interest as a kind of abstinence theory.”

A balanced state budget, Schumpeter insists, is necessary but nowhere near sufficient for a stable Austrian economy. Writing in Die Börse amid the League of Nations' examination of Austria's stabilization, he judges the projected requirement of 600 million gold crowns heavy but bearable against prewar fiscal capacity - a problem of poor tax distribution, not impending collapse. The graver menace is external: a trade deficit he estimates near a billion gold crowns, rooted in weak sales organization, feeble export propaganda, and backward agriculture. Inflation is inadmissible as a remedy, and without another path adjustment would come through impoverishment and a crisis beside which the present industrial slump would be mere child's play. Only foreign capital, presented as bridge rather than charity, can finance the transition - making stabilization a sequencing problem in which fiscal solvency must rest on productive and credit foundations.

Denn leider sind die Wurzeln der Passivität unserer Zahlungsbilanz so tief im österreichischen Wesen verankert, daß kaum gehofft werden darf, sie ohne den harten Zwang einer solchen Krise in kurzer Zeit beseitigen zu können.

English translation: “For unfortunately the roots of the passivity of our balance of payments are so deeply anchored in the Austrian character that one can scarcely hope to eliminate them in a short time without the harsh compulsion of such a crisis.”

Four American economists, each faulting a different part of the Positive Theorie des Kapitals and each prescribing a different remedy, gave Böhm-Bawerk the occasion to restate his account of interest under pressure. Against Horace White, who traced returns to the shrewdness of captains of industry, he separates entrepreneurial profit from normal capital interest, which must rest on an objective basis like land rent. Against Hugo Bilgram he defends plural cost concepts and locates the demand for present goods in workers selling immature labor for subsistence. To Macvane he grants the productivity of roundabout methods while insisting on diminishing increments distinct from the law of the soil, and against his doubt that future goods can have value, he reaffirms that value is psychical and subjective. Hawley, he judges, had not read the book.

Die Talente und das Glück der seltenen captains of industry haben mit dem zu tun, was man Unternehmergewinn nennt, aber nicht mit dem normalen Kapitalzins.

English translation: “The talents and good fortune of the rare captains of industry have to do with what is called entrepreneurial profit, but not with the normal interest on capital.”