The archive.

A movement can declare war on Marxism while remaining as anticapitalist as the doctrine it fights: this is the paradox Mises anatomizes in republican Germany and German-Austria. Scientific anti-Marxism, he argues, attacks Marxist politics while keeping Marxist categories intact, above all class conflict, resentment against capitalism, and contempt for theoretical economics. Tracing how the Historical School and Kathedersozialismus absorbed Marxian ideas even while claiming to refute them, he sets a utilitarian sociology of the division of labor against every struggle theory, whether of class, race, or nation, faulting them for explaining conflict but never association. Werner Sombart serves as the exemplary critic still caught inside the doctrine he renounces. Only science, not nationalist ressentiment, can overcome Marxism. First published 1925.

Wohlgemerkt: nicht der Sozialismus wird angegriffen, sondern der Marxismus, und dem marxistischen Sozialismus wird zum Vorwurf gemacht, daß er gar nicht der richtige, der wahre, der allein anzustrebende Sozialismus sei.

English translation: “Note well: it is not socialism that is attacked, but Marxism, and Marxist socialism is reproached for not being the correct, the true, the only socialism worth striving for.”

An equation can look like a law of cause and effect while stating only an identity — and that, in this early critique, is the charge laid against Schumpeter's monetary formula E = MU = Σpm. Haberler shows that its right-hand side merely restates money income as the sum of prices times quantities consumed, while its left-hand side reduces velocity to the number of purchases each coin intermediates; the whole is a tautology, not an explanation. From this he presses on to the larger quarry, the "objective exchange value of money," which he dissolves into ordinary price relations and denies any existence as a measurable social magnitude. Against Wieser and Anderson he insists that value theory needs only two concepts, subjective value and price, anticipating what he would later call the microfoundation of macroeconomics.

The problem of the value of money is a sham problem!

Stripping the hypertrophy of zeros from a ruined currency, the statute of 20 December 1924 fixed 10,000 depreciated kronen as a single new Schilling. Kerschagl's annotated edition gathers the law, its motives report, his own section-by-section commentary and a sheaf of finance-ministry and National Bank circulars around it. He is at pains to stress what the reform is not: no revaluation, no depreciation—existing notes, deposits and claims keep their worth in a purely arithmetical shift of four decimal places. What it does accomplish is to fix the Schilling's gold value in law, defining the currency's upper limit while the National Bank's exchange policy guards the lower. The volume documents new gold coins, groschen, the long redemption periods protecting old-krone holders, and the daily mechanics of converting a nation's accounts.

Der Vorgang des Ueberganges zur Schillingrechnung ist eine reine Rechenoperation.

English translation: “The process of transition to Schilling accounting is a purely arithmetical operation.”

Behind the wartime slogan of 'Mitteleuropa' lay a technical problem of customs schedules, and it is that problem Gratz and Schüller reconstruct: the secret German–Austro-Hungarian negotiations, from 1915 to their burial in the collapse of October 1918, to fuse the two empires into a single closed economic area. Part of the Carnegie Endowment's economic history of the war, the study tracks the bargaining over preferential tariffs, the last Austro-Hungarian Ausgleich, and the Salzburg framework of gradually reduced Zwischenzölle, then widens into the peace settlements at Brest-Litovsk and Bucharest—Ukrainian grain, Romanian oil, the Danube question, the Polish tangle. Throughout, grand design is forced through protectionist compromise: economic union imagined as a bloc to rival the world's larger markets, yet checked at every turn by incompatible agrarian and industrial interests.

Meine Monarchie braucht unbedingt an ihren Grenzen ein freundlich gesinntes Rumänien.

English translation: “My Monarchy absolutely needs a friendly-minded Romania on its borders.”

A currency can remain a gold currency without ever putting gold into everyday hands—this is the paradox Machlup sets out to define rather than to sell. Separating the monetary standard from the physical medium of payment, he argues that gold need not circulate as coin if it is concentrated as a reserve behind a system held at parity through the Umtauschprinzip, the rule of convertibility between domestic and foreign money at a fixed rate. Tracing the idea to Ricardo's neglected 1816 ingot plan, appended here, and testing it against India, the South American conversion offices, and Austria-Hungary's own krone, he shows the arrangement economizes scarce gold while preserving discipline. The system is not self-enforcing: its sole danger, he insists, lies in inflationary measures.

Goldkernwährung bedeutet Goldkonzentration.

English translation: “The gold-core standard means the concentration of gold.”

Modern dictatorship, in this compact political sociology, appears only after a long reckoning with leadership, mass psychology, and the historical formation of states. Wieser's governing claim is that collective life is never the sum of equal wills: society is structured by command and response, minority direction and mass following, captured in his law of the small number. Power is not merely violence but the formative medium from which order first arises—large societies, he insists, grow from the bitter root of compulsion through conquest before coercion softens into law and custom. Dictatorship is therefore no return of old despotism but a crisis-form of mass politics, arising when peoples set in motion and hungry for freedom are not yet ripened for its use, while finance and press exert their own quieter domination.

Die Menschen stehen unter dem Gesetze der Macht.

English translation: “Human beings stand under the law of power.”

Beneath the noisy quarrels over method, Schumpeter contends, the real work of economics advances quietly, and no one exemplifies that subterranean progress better than F. Y. Edgeworth, a master of exact analysis who founded no school. Formally a review of Edgeworth's collected papers, this 1925 essay becomes an assessment of the discipline's whole achievement. Schumpeter reads mathematics not as decoration but as the natural language of interdependent quantities, and insists that Edgeworth and Marshall, for all their classical rhetoric, stand on ground cleared by Walras, Jevons, and Menger. Taxation, where a levy disturbs equilibrium and its incidence shifts through the entire organism, and monopoly, where discrimination can sometimes beat competition, show why modern theory must analyze classes of cases rather than issue universal maxims of free trade or laissez-faire.

Fast unbekümmert um methodische Moden geht sozusagen subkutan die positive Arbeit der Wissenschaft ihren Weg.

English translation: “Almost unconcerned with methodological fashions, the positive work of science proceeds, so to speak, subcutaneously along its way.”

Two men are inseparable in this 1925 portrait: the founder of exact interest theory and the disciplined servant of a vanishing Habsburg state. Böhm-Bawerk, Schumpeter argues, extended Menger's marginal utility through imputation into a full theory of capital whose decisive innovation was to make time internal to equilibrium, with present goods valued above future goods, longer roundabout production yielding more than proportional output, and interest emerging as an agio rather than a legal or social accident. Schumpeter ranks the Positive Theorie des Kapitales beside Marx's system in ambition but free of its political passion. The essay's second half follows the same intelligence into the 1896 direct-tax reform and the finance ministry under Koerber, where Böhm-Bawerk defended budget discipline against parliament and the army, resigning when military claims could no longer be contained.

Die Angelpunkte einer jeden Theorie des Wirtschaftsablaufes sind die Wert- und die Zinslehre.

English translation: “The pivotal points of any theory of the economic process are the theory of value and the theory of interest.”

Viewed from neutral, republican Geneva — a city shaped by religious refuge and small-state vulnerability — the League of Nations appears to Rappard not as one institution but as three uneasily combined: a League to execute the peace treaties, a League to promote cooperation, and a League to outlaw war. Across these lectures he weighs each function with an insider's candor, praising the Permanent Mandates Commission and the financial reconstruction of Austria while exposing the weakness of Articles 10 and 16, whose sanctions collapsed at Vilna and Corfu once Germany, Russia, and above all the United States stood outside. War cannot be outlawed, he insists, until an impartial legal alternative exists for every dispute; the Permanent Court, not coercive force, is the League's most durable achievement. He closes with an appeal for American participation.

As municipal law is the sole protection of widows and orphans, so is international law, in the last resort, the sole protection of small nations.

From the Bank of England's slow evolution, from privileged private bank to bankers' bank to guardian of the currency, Schumpeter draws a lesson against the reformers: central-bank rules grew organically from the needs of capitalist money, not from theory, and discount policy can correct small disturbances but not panic or structural impoverishment. Across four sections this 1925 article defends the return to gold as second-best rather than ideal, warns that Britain's restoration at prewar parity ignored the gap with purchasing-power parity, and rejects the Keynes-Hawtrey claim that the trade cycle is a monetary disease curable by price stabilization. Credit creation, banks making means of payment that did not previously exist, is capitalism's mechanism for financing innovation. Managed credit, he concludes, would turn money into economic governance and quietly prepare the way for socialism.

Und von diesem Standpunkt versteht man dann diese ganze Gedankenrichtung und besonders den Keynesplan als sehr ernstzunehmende Vorarbeit für einen ernstzunehmenden Sozialismus.

English translation: “And from this standpoint one then understands this entire line of thought, and especially the Keynes plan, as very serious preparatory work for a serious socialism.”

Written for the Berliner Börsen-Courier at the close of 1925, this short essay takes up the anti-inflation orthodoxy of post-stabilization Germany, raise taxes and tighten credit, and turns it against itself. Both tools, Schumpeter grants, were necessary to defend the currency, yet excessive taxation and monetary tightening can paralyze production and deepen unemployment; necessity is not success, and the patient's condition is what matters. His conceptual move is to detach credit policy from the narrow role of servant to the exchange rate. Because the value of money and the tempo of development depend on bank-created means of payment rather than on gold stocks and savings alone, credit becomes an instrument of therapy. The program is selective, not loose: channel credit to firms with real futures, expand capacity, and cut unemployment without endangering the currency.

Man kann damit Konjunkturen schaffen und verhindern, Produktionszweige fördern und drosseln, Richtung und Temperatur der wirtschaftlichen Entwicklung diktieren.

English translation: “By this means one can create and prevent booms, promote and throttle branches of production, dictate the direction and temperature of economic development.”

A decade of stagnation, the young Hayek observes, had settled over general economic theory since Wieser's great synthesis seemed to leave nothing further to do—until Leo Schönfeld's Grenznutzen und Wirtschaftsrechnung. This 1925 review, here in English translation, greets that book as a genuine reopening of the field. What draws Hayek is Schönfeld's attempt to ground marginal utility not in a fixed, independent system of needs but in the process of economic calculation itself, distinguishing a logically complete theoretical reckoning from the abbreviated procedures of practice and building outward through combinations of decisions, isolated individual utilities, and a principle of economic quid pro quo. Hayek doubts whether maximum total utility can really be found by comparing isolated utilities, yet judges the work unusually mature and exact—regretting only that its promised later volumes never appeared.

It was also to remain the last noteworthy achievement in this field for a long time.