The archive.

The Methodenstreit had hardened into a war of slogans, naturalism against Verstehen, nomothetic against idiographic, value-free against normative, and this 1936 German treatise sets out to disarm every one of them. Kaufmann offers not a doctrine but a critique of principles: methods earn their place by problem-type and research aim, never by metaphysical prestige. Physical objectivity itself rests on schemas and measurement; social science differs because its objects include alter egos, projects, and socially available meanings, so understanding is indispensable yet never sovereign. Drawing on Weber and Schütz for controlled interpretation, he recasts marginal utility theory as an analysis of purpose-rational choice within a ranked goal-order, treats ideal types as instruments of causal control, and credits Kelsen with purifying legal dogmatics while rejecting the Sein/Sollen dualism. Plurality is preserved; its inflation into pseudo-conflict is what must go.

Demgemäß ist alle Kritik in diesem Buche Prinzipienkritik.

English translation: “Accordingly, all criticism in this book is criticism of principles.”

Beneath the visible quarrels of schools, systems, and policy creeds runs more logical continuity than economists usually grant, and this essay reads the history of theory as sedimentary rather than revolutionary: Ricardo clarifies Smith, while Jevons, Walras, and Menger carry classical work forward rather than discarding it, like geological layers conditioning the ones above them. The occasion is Taussig's Wages and Capital, which Schumpeter credits with finally disposing of the wages-fund doctrine and, alongside Böhm-Bawerk, supplying a theory of capital as a time-structured process that marginal utility and marginal productivity alone could never reach. Along the way he names the Ricardian Vice — presenting simplified models to the public as policy certainties — as the standing temptation the theorist must resist.

There is more logic in the history of those tools of analysis which we have come to call economic theory than either its friends or its foes admit.

Written as the world crisis drove Russia, Italy, Roosevelt's America and Nazi Germany toward state direction of production, these expanded 1935 newspaper essays, here in German translation, ask precisely what 'planned economy' means and where regulation ends and collectivism begins. Engliš distinguishes three rational orders, individualist, cooperative and solidarist, and defines regulated economy as intervention from above that displaces competitive prices while leaving private enterprise and its calculation intact. The decisive threshold is what he calls the critical point: once the state assumes economic responsibility for outcomes, guaranteeing work or absorbing losses, entrepreneurship dissolves and the slide into collectivization begins. Weighing regulation against democratic institutions and Czechoslovakia's dependence on exports, the argument shares its ground with the interwar planning and calculation debates of Mises and Hayek.

Welche Änderungen des Ordnungsprinzipes der Unternehmerproduktion zur regulierten Wirtschaft gehören, ist unsere Kardinalfrage, wir suchen also das Wesen der regulierten Wirtschaft.

English translation: “Which alterations of the ordering principle of entrepreneurial production belong to the regulated economy is our cardinal question; we are therefore seeking the essence of the regulated economy.”

An unfavorable but respectful tribute is how this 1936 review casts its verdict on Keynes's General Theory, granting the book's public impact while charging it with reviving the Ricardian habit of smuggling situated policy into theory disguised as universal law — on every page, Schumpeter writes, the ghost of that policy looks over the analyst's shoulder. His technical objections are sharp: the aggregate demand and supply schedules illegitimately stretch the Marshallian cross to social aggregates; treating employment as an index of output assumes invariant production functions and so assumes away the continuous revolution in production methods that defines capitalism; the propensity to consume enters as a deus ex machina, and liquidity preference names rather than explains. The whole closes with a satirical bow to the spending of Louis XV.

Economics will never have nor merit any authority until that unholy alliance is dissolved.

Bank-created fiduciary media, notes and current accounts unbacked by gold, expand credit, push interest rates below their natural level, and lure entrepreneurs into ventures that look profitable only under distorted conditions. Setting out the Austrian monetary theory of the trade cycle, Mises traces its lineage to the English Currency School while faulting that school for missing current accounts as engines of expansion and for confining its gaze to national rather than international credit. He separates genuine capital accumulation from the artificial boom, explains why sustained expansion must give way to either crisis or currency collapse, and reads depression as the necessary liquidation of malinvestment. Renewed pump-priming only postpones and deepens the reckoning. Wicksell, Boehm-Bawerk, Wieser, Hayek, Machlup, and Robbins stand behind the argument.

It is not the task of the banks to remedy the consequences of the scarcity of capital or the effects of wrong economic policy by extension of credit.

Written for American students in the Governments of Modern Europe series, this account treats Switzerland as a mirror in which the United States might study its own federal habits. Rappard traces the confederation from the 1291 forest-canton alliance through the Sonderbund War to the Constitution of 1848, which consciously borrowed American bicameralism even as Switzerland exported the initiative and referendum back across the Atlantic. He anatomizes the collegial seven-member Federal Council, the supremacy of the legislature, the tenacity of cantonal and communal loyalty, and the slow drift toward etatisme. Neutrality, guaranteed since 1815, he defends as a necessity rather than a virtue, and Switzerland's guarded entry into the League of Nations emerges as the cautious conduct of a small state reluctant to surrender its ultimate safeguard.

For Switzerland, to resort to a more modern metaphor, neutrality is the parachute which she will not abandon until international flying becomes safer.

Frank Knight had reduced capital to a self-perpetuating fund — permanent, self-maintaining, its replacement a mere matter of technology. Against that "mythology" Hayek defends the Austrian insight that capital is no substance behind things but a structure of heterogeneous, perishable goods whose replacement must be economically explained. He concedes that Böhm-Bawerk's single "average period of production" oversimplifies, yet insists Knight's alternative is worse, since it cannot explain how limited capital restricts the choice among known methods. More capitalistic production means investing some factor for longer; a given stock of capital goods offers not one subsistence fund but many possible time-shaped income streams. What matters are prospective returns, not original factors — and the doctrine collapses only under the fiction of perfect foresight.

The theory looks forward, not back.

Here in the English translation of Haberler's 1933 Der internationale Handel, the whole of foreign trade is folded into general price theory: exchange rates are prices formed by supply and demand, balances of payments are not autonomous magnitudes, and comparative advantage is rebuilt on opportunity cost rather than the labour theory of value. The treatise runs from the foreign-exchange market and the gold standard through the transfer problem — with extended treatment of German reparations and the Keynes-Ohlin controversy — to a systematic anatomy of commercial policy: tariffs, dumping, cartels, infant-industry claims and quotas. Throughout, protection is judged by its hidden diversion of resources and its costs to consumers and exporters, not by the visible survival of sheltered industries. Haberler reserves his sharpest hostility for quantitative restrictions, which suppress the price mechanism more arbitrarily than any duty.

It is the increase and not the reduction of duties which is the real economic burden!

An abundant wheat crop lowers prices; dearer labour and cheaper capital spur labour-saving inventions; endangered banks receive central-bank credit — three statements that look logically alike yet do not, Machlup insists, carry equal economic validity. Writing in 1936 amid the quarrels over Lionel Robbins's definition of economics and Ralph Souter's revolt against disciplinary 'regimentation,' he ranks propositions by the anonymity and generality of the conduct they presuppose, a vocabulary he borrows from Alfred Schütz. The payoff is practical. In international transfer theory, a low-generality institutional assumption about central-bank credit gets smuggled into a causal chain as though it were a market law, and the argument collapses. Methodology earns its keep, he concludes, precisely because failing to mark the order of one's statements has serious practical consequences.

The type of the competitive seller is not so likely to disappear from the economic stage as the type of the benevolent central bank manager.

Economic and political liberalism, Mises insists, are of one stock and cannot be divided: strip away market freedom and parliamentary democracy and civil liberty go with it. This short Geneva essay presents the private-property market economy as a form of economic democracy, one in which consumers direct production through their daily purchases while political majorities increasingly vote against that very order. Drawing on William Rappard's study of Switzerland, where democratic expansion marched in step with growing state intervention, he frames the age's central choice starkly, between liberal-democratic freedom and an etatism that, left to its logic, tends toward dictatorship. Interventionism, statism, socialism, and the planned economy figure here not as moderate alternatives but as solvents of the constitutional order itself.

Jeder Groschen stellt einen Stimmzettel dar.

English translation: “Every penny represents a ballot.”

Austrian imputation theory and the Anglo-American theory of cost and returns had grown apart; Strigl's 1936 offprint sets out to build a common foundation for both, citing Bohm-Bawerk and Wieser alongside Sraffa, Chamberlin, and Joan Robinson. From the single assumption of indefinitely divisible factors he derives diminishing returns not as a technical necessity but as a consequence of economic selection among possible combinations, then reproduces the Wicksteed proof that marginal products exhaust the total product. The heart of the essay is the Quantenfaktor, the indivisible factor — above all durable fixed capital — whose original outlay is a merely historical cost, irrelevant to its present value, which residual imputation must nonetheless recover if the good is to be reproduced. From here he reaches free competition, monopolistic competition, and the problem of chronic excess capacity.

Es kann sich der Betrieb niemals in jenem Zustand befinden, in welchem eine Ausdehnung der Produktion zu geringeren Stückkosten führt.

English translation: “The firm can never find itself in a state in which an expansion of production would lead to lower unit costs.”

A brief private note, written two days before Christmas 1937, catches Alfred Schütz in an ordinary moment between his phenomenological labors. Just back from Paris, he has carried home an issue of the Revue de Paris for its essay by Paul Valéry, which he presses on his correspondent with the request that it be returned once read. He adds a book as a Christmas gift, should the friend not already own it, and sends warm wishes to him and his wife. Slight in itself, the letter survives as a small biographical trace of the émigré scholar's Parisian ties and reading life on the eve of war—a fragment of correspondence rather than a work of theory.