The archive.

Two silent idealizations, Husserl's 'und so weiter' and 'ich kann immer wieder,' hold the everyday world together, and Schütz sets out to show how revocable that stability really is. The life-world is stratified: into zones of actual, restorable, and attainable reach, and into social layers running from the face-to-face Umwelt outward through anonymous contemporaries, predecessors, and successors. Knowledge within it is unevenly distributed and largely inherited as recipes, maxims, and language. What orders the whole is relevance, motivational, thematic, interpretive, by which a life-plan selects interests, a failed routine turns something into a problem, and sedimented knowledge becomes pertinent to solving it. Because types are never neutral labels but deposits of earlier inquiries, the same world admits magical, theological, or scientific reading. Presented here in German translation of the 1966 English essay, the study makes relevance foundational for the social sciences.

Alle Typisierung ist problemrelativ, es gibt somit keinen Typus schlechtweg, sondern nur Typen, die einen problem-verweisenden „Index" mit sich führen.

English translation: “All typification is problem-relative; there is thus no type as such, but only types that carry with them a problem-referring "index.”

When Washington stopped buying and selling gold in August 1971, the official thirty-five dollars an ounce ceased to be a price and became a mere bookkeeping entry — and most of the ensuing debate, Machlup contends, mistook that accounting figure for an operative economic force. Devaluing the dollar in gold would change nothing real: trade, employment, and competitiveness turn on exchange rates set in the market, not on how governments label their gold stocks. He dismisses the talk of burden sharing as claptrap, separates genuine transfer burdens from the mercantilist pseudo-burden of forgone reserves, and warns that raising gold's book value would keep alive the illusion of restored gold convertibility. What matters instead is purchasing power: no asset serves as a reserve unless its holder knows what he can get for it.

Where there are no sales, no purchases, and no exchanges of gold against dollars, there can be neither a price nor an exchange value of gold in dollars.

A young governess at a country house, forbidden ever to appeal to her absent employer, resolves to master the good and evil around her by her own will, and this, in Voegelin's reading of Henry James's novella, is the drama of a demonically closed soul. Employer, governess, and housekeeper stand for God, soul, and earthly common sense; the intercepted letters and the apparitions of Quint mark a theology of non-communication in which salvation becomes self-salvation without grace. The title names not heroic discipline but the escalation of willful virtue into destruction, a 'Black Salvation' that kills the boy it means to save. A 1970 postscript, printed with the 1947 letter, refuses to translate James's symbols into philosophy and instead reads Bly as one more modern Eden, a genteel English garden of closed existence.

Henry James could be fascinated by Edenic existence, but he knew that it was the hell of living death.

The road from chaos to catastrophe is not one the Vatican itself traveled, but the path of Europe seen from the Holy See. That distinction governs this monograph, which reconstructs the interwar Vatican's political mentality through the Austrian diplomatic reporting of Ludwig von Pastor and Rudolf Kohlruss. Engel-Janosi is frank that he pursues judgments and assumptions rather than a chronicle of events: the Paris peace treaties register as a disorder that multiplied grievances while weakening every transnational restraint. From that diagnosis the book descends through the Lateran reconciliation, the condemnation of Action française, the doomed Reichskonkordat and Mit brennender Sorge, to Pius XI's mounting horror of Nazi Germany and the Anschluss he grieved as Europe's ruin. Throughout, moral authority proves unable, by itself, to arrest the slide toward war.

Diese Einstellung entsprach seiner Natur, aber der unmittelbaren, der zündenden Wirkung seiner Worte war sie abträglich.

English translation: “This disposition corresponded to his nature, but it was detrimental to the immediate, kindling effect of his words.”

Where the archive falls silent, historians have long reconstructed missing origins by other means — analogy, probability, and assumptions about a constant human nature. Engel-Janosi anatomizes this Enlightenment procedure, which Dugald Stewart christened conjectural history, tracing it from Schiller's teleological selection of a usable past through Rousseau's state of nature and Hobbes's social contract, both treated as legitimating fictions rather than documented events. Vico supplies the sharpest counterpoint: against those who project modern motives backward, he makes the strangeness of early consciousness the very principle of understanding. The essay admires conjecture as indispensable while warning that it hardens gaps in knowledge into necessity, purpose, or myth — turning plurality into sequence and, in Ferguson and Kant, ignorance into apparent law.

So und nicht anders ist und mußte die „Universalgeschichte“ verlaufen.

English translation: “Thus and not otherwise "universal history" runs — and had to run.”

The textbook Hoover—last champion of laissez-faire, undone by his own passivity—is, on Rothbard's telling, pure mythology. This 1972 revisionist essay recasts him as the precursor of Roosevelt and a principal architect of the twentieth-century corporate state. From his 1919 Reconstruction proposals and Commerce Department activism through the crash, Hoover pressed "voluntary" national planning, Federal Reserve credit allocation, public dams, home-loan banking, union recognition, and countercyclical public works. After 1929 his White House conferences induced industry to hold wage rates up—a purchasing-power doctrine Rothbard blames for deepening unemployment—alongside the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, Farm Board price supports, and mounting deficits. Where voluntary cartels failed, the logic pushed toward compulsion; Hoover recoiled only at Gerard Swope's openly fascistic plan, and that hesitation, ironically, later earned him his reputation as a conservative individualist.

All his life he had sought and employed the mailed fist of coercion inside the velvet glove of traditional voluntarist rhetoric.

"Optimum" sounds like a clear concept and is nothing of the sort. Responding as a discussant to Abram Bergson and Jan Tinbergen, Morgenstern presses two objections that unsettle the confident vocabulary of welfare planning. First, productivity, so intelligible for physical output, becomes one of the weakest ideas in economics once services dominate national income, leaving comparisons across systems on shakier ground than they claim. Second, an optimum invoked rhetorically is not an optimum proven to exist, and recent theory had produced cases where none does. From there he argues that society cannot in principle be fully formalized, that imposed equality raises the unanswered question of what keeps equal incomes equal, and that identical physical circumstances can sustain rival stable orders. Choosing among them, he concludes, is an ethical and political act, not a scientific result.

There is no scientific reason why one system should be preferred over the other.

Persistent payments imbalance, when it will not soon correct itself, is best met by realigning the exchange rate rather than by controls, reserve losses, borrowing, inflation, or deflation — so run these two Horowitz Lectures. Machlup distrusts the notion of a single equilibrium rate, since money, wages, productivity, and capital flows shift too continually, and prefers to speak of alignment and disalignment. The first lecture reduces the choice to its essentials: adjust supply and demand to the rate, or adjust the rate to supply and demand, counting deflation's unemployment and inflation's distortions as the real costs. The second is political economy, explaining why governments delay until a small early move becomes a wrenching late one, and defending crawling pegs, wider bands, and temporary floating.

Currency speculation is a function of disaligned exchange rates that are expected to undergo adjustment by large jumps.

Two classic claims for socialism — that it produces more efficiently and distributes more justly — organize this pointed commentary, in which Machlup largely concedes Bergson's empirical comparison of Soviet and Western performance in order to train his fire on Tinbergen's case for income equalization. Egalitarian welfare economics, he argues, cannot smuggle equality in as a technical result: it rests on ethical postulates that can be assented to but never proved, on an implausible welfare thermometer of interpersonal utility, and on a neglect of incentives, envy doing much of the work solidarity is supposed to do. Push Tinbergen's logic to the globe, Machlup adds, and it demands a redistribution between rich and poor nations no wealthy electorate would ratify. His closing witness is Stalin, quoted condemning wage-leveling.

In a worldwide referendum I would expect a majority to vote for radical redistribution, so that the poor can share the wealth with the rich—with the result that all would be equally poor.

Economic Man — homo oeconomicus — stood accused of materialism, greed, and a degraded picture of humanity, and Machlup treats that hostility as the real subject of inquiry. Sampling the denunciations of Barton, the Historical School, Carey, and Ruskin, he grants that economists often described the construct badly, equating wealth with material goods and maximization with selfishness. But poor descriptions of a model do not refute the need for one. Reconstructing the methodological quarrel among Mill, Senior, Bagehot, Cairnes, and Wicksteed, he argues that maximization is not egoism and that Economic Man is no portrait of the whole person but a premise within a hypothetico-deductive system — a homunculus, not a man, built to explain how agents react when prices, incomes, and costs change.

The ‘bogey’ to whom this essay will be devoted is Economic Man.

More than any other single period, Rothbard argues, the First World War remade the American business system. Wartime mobilization figures here not as a temporary emergency but as the formative episode of American corporate statism—a public-private command economy in which industrialists staffed the very agencies regulating them. Through the Council of National Defense, Bernard Baruch's War Industries Board, Hoover's Food Administration, and railroad nationalization, business leaders fixed prices, allocated materials, standardized products, and "substituted cooperation for competition" under the banner of national service. Rothbard dubs this a twentieth-century New Mercantilism, cloaking monopoly as planning, efficiency, and the common good. The essay then traces its personnel and precedents—Baruch, Peek, Johnson, Swope—forward into interwar associationism and the New Deal, casting the war as the rehearsal for a permanent corporate monopoly state.

Never before had so many intellectuals and academicians swarmed into government to help plan, regulate, and mobilize the economic system.

Grant, for the sake of argument, that pollution is grave: the real question, Sennholz proposes, is whether its cause is private enterprise or political control. Answering the charge that pollution proves the failure of capitalism, he reverses the accusation—the state itself is the chief polluter, through public dumps, incinerators, sewer authorities, and navigable waters treated as common property, with Lake Erie and the Cuyahoga River as exhibits. Urban smog he traces not to the automobile, which he defends as a genuine gain of enterprise, but to zoning, subsidized roads priced as free goods, and transit strangled by regulation. His deeper move recasts pollution as a failure of property-right enforcement rather than of property itself: where law exempts owners from the costs they impose, harm follows. The remedy is not a new bureaucracy but tort liability, damages, and injunctions—an early manifesto of free-market environmentalism.

As government is the prime polluter of our environment we must call on government to cease and desist.