The archive.

When Cardinal Puzyna pronounced the Habsburg emperor's veto against Rampolla in the conclave of 1903, he closed one era of Catholic great-power rivalry and opened another. This second volume follows Austro-Vatican relations from that Exclusiva through the pontificates of Pius X and Benedict XV to the monarchy's collapse in 1918. Engel-Janosi's paradox is that an "unpolitical" pope, hostile to statecraft, drew the Vatican closer to Vienna than his predecessors ever had—until the First World War exposed the limits of papal mediation. Reconstructed from nuncios, cardinals, and crisis files, the narrative turns on the Roman Question, Italy's demand for the Trentino, Benedict XV's peace note of 1917, and above all Belgium, the moral test the Central Powers let become the war's insoluble knot.

Das Konklave von 1903 erscheint in manchem wie der letzte Nachhall des jahrhundertelangen Ringens zwischen Bourbon und Habsburg, zwischen Frankreich und Österreich, um die Vorherrschaft in Italien, im Kirchenstaate und schließlich an der Kurie.

English translation: “The Conclave of 1903 appears in many respects like the last echo of the centuries-long struggle between Bourbon and Habsburg, between France and Austria, for supremacy in Italy, in the Papal States, and ultimately at the Curia.”

Borrowing the prestige of physics to study human beings is, for Rothbard, not science but scientism—the uncritical transfer of methods fit for stones to creatures who choose. Reprinted from Scientism and Values, this essay grounds a science of man in the axiom of volition: because people possess consciousness and free will, praxeology, psychology, technology, and ethics are intelligible where mechanistic determinism would render them absurd. Rothbard dismantles two families of false analogy—the mechanical, which reduces persons to servomechanisms, equations, and equilibria, and the organismic, which inflates "society" and "the public" into living wholes with purposes of their own. Against Weberian Wertfreiheit he charges that claimed neutrality often smuggles in majority values, and defends an axiomatic-deductive method over positivist experiment.

Scientism is the profoundly unscientific attempt to transfer uncritically the methodology of the physical sciences to the study of human action.

Does spending more on research simply buy more inventions? Machlup's answer is a patient no, or rather, much less than proportionately more. Inventive talent is scarce and its supply inelastic; drawing in extra researchers means paying rents to every incumbent and recruiting steadily less able hands, so marginal costs climb fast. Treating invention as an industry with a production function, he traces diminishing returns as more workers crowd a fixed stock of problems and knowledge, and catalogs ten reasons a swelling flow of raw ideas yields a rising share of rejects. The result is his four shrinkages, each thinning the passage from money spent to inventions actually put to work, a sober correction to any faith that funding alone accelerates technical progress.

These shrinkages are independent of one another; but they may add up with a vengeance.

The claim organizing this survey is that international trade theory is no autonomous doctrine but general price, production, monetary, and welfare theory applied to a world of nations, currencies, and immobile factors. Tracing the line from Hume's price-specie-flow mechanism and Ricardo's comparative costs through Mill and Marshall's reciprocal demand, Haberler shows how opportunity cost and general equilibrium rescued comparative advantage from the wreck of the labour theory of value. He weighs Heckscher-Ohlin factor-price equalization, the Stolper-Samuelson theorem, and Leontief's paradox, always separating sharp theorems from empirically reliable ones, and carries the same caution into terms-of-trade measurement, the foreign-trade multiplier, and purchasing-power parity. The classical free-trade case survives as a powerful benchmark — never an unconditional theorem.

There exist only rudiments of truly dynamic analysis in the field of non-monetary trade theory.

Between early 1954 and early 1957 American commercial exports leapt from $11 billion to $21 billion, then fell to $15 billion by 1959, touching off alarm over the balance of payments. This occasional paper brings eight decades of evidence to bear on whether that drop was an ordinary cyclical movement or signaled a deeper loss of competitive power. Mintz declines to forecast or prescribe, using the historical record to place the 1957-59 decline among earlier contractions and judge it unexceptional once the preceding boom is weighed. Measuring exports against world imports, the imports of the world outside the United States, as her gauge of foreign demand, she argues that shifts in foreign demand govern export swings more powerfully than the domestic cycle, while exports came to track U.S. business cycles more closely after 1921 than before.

Most economists share Mitchell’s view—confirmed by our study—that foreign demand is the most important factor in export fluctuations.

The salaried employee, caught between the working class and management, is the figure through which Bayer traces a wider mutation in economy and society. Three shifts organize the essay: in macroeconomic aims, now converging on dynamic stabilization; in the functions of the enterprise; and in the roles of those who carry it. He coins Blankobedürfnisse, blank general needs whose concrete content advertising and mass production increasingly supply, to explain the swelling tertiary sector and its white-collar ranks. Concentration, objectification, and long-run corporate planning together yield not a return to free competition but an organized market economy, and an institutionalized firm whose enduring tasks bind everyone in it. The old entrepreneur gives way to the manager, whose growing social power makes managerial ethics and countervailing forces urgent against the ever-present danger of Grenzmoral.

Die Entscheidung für die Freiheit aber bedeutet die Aufgabe geistiger Trägheit; sie verlangt Mut und Selbstverantwortung.

English translation: “The decision in favor of freedom, however, means giving up intellectual inertia; it demands courage and self-responsibility.”

Marx's Communist Manifesto lists ten transitional measures for wresting capital from the bourgeoisie, and Sennholz turns them into a scorecard for the United States of 1961. Point by point—land ownership, progressive income and estate taxes, centralized credit, regulated communications and transport, state production, labor obligations, public education—he argues that America has quietly realized much of the program not through outright nationalization but through control that leaves private title merely nominal. The Federal Reserve, in his reading, has already achieved the Manifesto's fifth plank; confiscatory taxation makes government the controlling partner in every enterprise. What separates America from the Iron Curtain, he concludes, is only surviving markets, constitutional restraints, and due process. A 1961 American Opinion polemic fusing Austrian economics with Cold War anti-communism.

As the second item in the communist program, the Manifesto demands “a heavy progressive or graduated income tax.” In this regard we are probably more communistic than the Russians and Chinese.

Foreign aid, in this MIT report, is a temporary instrument for crossing a threshold, not a permanent redistribution of income. Rosenstein-Rodan judges assistance less by the income it creates per dollar than by the additional domestic effort it elicits, higher marginal savings, bolder planning, stronger administration, arguing that a marginal savings rate well above the average is the main lever of any development program. Absorptive capacity, broadly defined to include skilled labor, entrepreneurship, and public administration, sets the amount a country can use well, while repayment capacity should govern the terms, whether grants, soft loans, or local-currency schemes. He distinguishes aid sharply from ordinary capital flows, proposes burden-sharing among donors on a progressive-income principle that would place the largest share on the United States, and closes with country-by-country projections of capital requirements to 1976.

"Foreign Capital Inflow" and "Aid" are not synonymous terms.

The classical gold standard is often imagined as a self-regulating machine; this dense National Bureau study replaces that image with a practical arrangement of tolerable deviations and institutional adaptation. Comparing monthly interest rates, exchange rates, gold points, arbitrage, and central-bank discount policy across the United States, Britain, France, and Germany for roughly 1870–1914 and 1925–1938, Morgenstern shows that mint par was rarely touched, that gold points depended on shipping costs and market practice, and that money markets displayed a bounded 'solidarity' rather than exact convergence. A new quantitative measure of inter-market 'effort' or stress runs through the analysis. World War I emerges as the great structural break, shattering a prewar coherence the interwar gold-exchange standard never restored — and throughout, he insists that fragile statistics cannot bear more theory than their quality allows.

Economic statistics are—in the overwhelming majority of cases—not scientific observations.

Written from New York in November 1961 to thank Alfred Müller-Armack for birthday wishes, this short letter turns quickly to a correction Mises wanted on record: he had been misunderstood as rejecting all political compromise. Theory and program, he insists, must be built consistently and without contradiction, yet the politician who cannot move the majority to adopt them must settle for whatever the given circumstances make attainable. The concession costs him nothing doctrinally—he restates his standing verdict that middle-of-the-road interventionism, in every variety, necessarily ends in full socialism. Writing as a European rather than American liberal, he closes by praising Müller-Armack and Ludwig Erhard for the postwar German recovery, a liberal achievement he can admire without endorsing its every interventionist remnant.

In der praktischen Politik kann man nur selten das Vollkommene erreichen. Man muss sich in der Regel damit begnügen, das kleinere Übel zu wählen.

English translation: “In practical politics one can only rarely attain the perfect. As a rule one must be content to choose the lesser evil.”

Economics grew out of philosophy and never fully left it, and Amonn sets out to reconnect the two. A sweeping historical survey runs from Plato and Aristotle through Aquinas, Locke, Hume, Quesnay, and Adam Smith to John Stuart Mill, tracing how thinkers treated wealth, the just price, and usury under ethical norms before economics became an autonomous, quasi-natural science. From there he builds toward the socialist calculation problem—collectivist planning, lacking freely formed scarcity prices, has no reliable Knappheitsanzeiger—and toward the discipline's foundations in psychology, ethics, and the Methodenstreit over induction and deduction. The closing chapters weigh justice against expediency across property, inheritance, monopoly, taxation, and interest, which he defends through time-preference against the old Aristotelian and canon-law charge that money is barren.

Der Eigennutz im Wirtschaftsverkehr ist also keineswegs ein ethisch verwerfliches Prinzip.

English translation: “Self-interest in economic intercourse is thus by no means an ethically reprehensible principle.”

Equality before the law is one thing; equality of natural endowment quite another—and Mises devotes this seven-part essay to keeping the two from being confused. Human capacities are demonstrably unequal; the question is what a social order does with that fact. Status societies of lords, serfs, and slaves let the abler dominate, whereas capitalism compels them to serve, channeling superior talent into satisfying mass consumers who remain, in the market, always right. Representative government he reads as the political counterpart of consumer sovereignty, and socialism as its reversal—a subjection of the many to the few dressed in democratic language. Along the way he punctures the paternalism of the advertising critics, the faith that mass schooling can erase inborn difference, and the progressive businessman who imagines a secure post under the planners, closing not in fatalism but in warning.

It proclaimed that all men are born equal in rights and that this equality cannot be abrogated by any man-made law, that it is inalienable or, more precisely, imprescriptible.