The archive.

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.

Machines wear out; an income stream does not renew itself automatically. In this 1936 article, Friedrich August von Hayek challenges Frank H. Knight’s treatment of capital as a permanent fund, asking what actually enables consumption to continue while resources are committed to replacing equipment. His defence of time in capital theory also challenges the Austrian notion of a single average period of production. The alternative is concrete and forward-looking: heterogeneous goods support different possible streams of future consumption, depending on how they are combined and used. Readers can discover why an unchanged crop-growing cycle need not mean unchanged investment periods, and why replacement becomes an economic problem when circumstances depart from expectations. The controversy brings into focus what an aggregate measure of capital can conceal: choices about waiting, scarcity, and adaptation.

Can interest remain positive when tastes are constant and capital accumulation has stopped? In this 1936 article, Hayek challenges a premise shared by otherwise opposed theories: that stable tastes imply equal valuations of present and future goods. His alternative treats stability as consistency of choice, not indifference to time. Using indifference maps of an isolated saver, he distinguishes what governs the pace of saving from what determines the return on investment. The resulting argument gives productivity a leading role while accumulation continues, without denying the importance of preferences in determining where it ends. Readers can discover why, for Hayek, explaining the cessation of saving is not the same task as explaining interest throughout the process of accumulation.

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.”

What makes a collection of tributes evidence of a teacher’s influence? In this brief 1937 review of the volume honouring F. W. Taussig, Hayek points to its restriction to former students and colleagues—and to the editors’ success in keeping forty-eight contributions concise without sacrificing substance. His praise concerns a scholarly community’s collective achievement rather than particular theoretical positions, which he explicitly declines to adjudicate. Readers encounter Hayek as an appreciative reviewer attentive to editorial discipline and intellectual breadth: he notes that “Wages and Capital” encompasses distribution and monopoly theory, while Taussig’s bibliography records interests wider than younger colleagues may know. The review offers a compact account of how teaching, personal association, and economical exposition can sustain a scholarly legacy.

Making mathematics accessible need not mean relaxing its definitions. In this short newspaper review, Felix Kaufmann praises Friedrich Waismann’s Einführung in das mathematische Denken precisely for preserving rigor while opening foundational questions to philosophically interested nonspecialists. His distinction between genuine knowledge and the dangerous half-knowledge of popular exposition gives the review its critical edge; his hope that Waismann’s account of differential calculus will correct misconceptions about the “infinitely small” makes that standard concrete. Kaufmann also separates pedagogical success from philosophical agreement: he recommends the discussion of disputed foundations while withholding assent from some of its theses, without specifying his objections. The review offers a compact view of what Kaufmann demands from an introduction—clarity that neither dilutes concepts nor conceals unresolved questions.

Making a classic available is not the same as making it reliable to use. In this brief 1937 review, Hayek welcomes the affordable reprint of Jean Baptiste Say’s letters to Malthus while noting what its reproduction of an older English translation preserves—and loses: misprints survive, original pagination disappears, and the French contents and index are absent. His qualified endorsement offers a precise distinction between renewed interest in Say’s Law and the editorial means of studying it. Hayek neither expounds nor defends that law here; he assesses access to its source, also distinguishing the value of Harold Laski’s bibliographical references from his more contestable interpretation of the controversy.

Writing about economic problems before Adam Smith does not, Hayek argues, necessarily make someone his intellectual predecessor. In this brief 1937 review of E. A. J. Johnson’s Predecessors of Adam Smith, he distinguishes influence on public policy debate from contributions to economic theory. Johnson’s attention to mercantilist schemes for increasing productivity prompts Hayek to question the inclusion of writers he regards as planners or propagandists rather than significant economists. Yet he praises the scholarship, especially the research on Postlethwayt’s voluminous publications. The review offers a compact encounter with Hayek’s standards for writing intellectual history: valuable documentation of what once persuaded the public need not establish how a systematic science developed.

What happens to statistical inquiry when political authority denies the existence of independent economic laws? In this 1937 review of the Festschrift honoring Franz Zizek, Karl Pribram tests National Socialist demands for an “organic” conception of the economy against the methods needed to investigate it. He distinguishes this ideological pressure from an older dispute between mathematical statisticians and practitioners of administrative statistics, then asks whether the new vocabulary supplies any workable principles of explanation. His judgment is discriminating: sweeping political declarations do not amount to methodological innovation, yet most contributors continue to pursue useful applied research. The review offers a concrete encounter between probability, governmental statistical practice, and ideological prescription—without treating every essay in the volume as an expression of the regime’s philosophy.

Can clearer definitions of saving and investment obscure an economically decisive distinction? In this 1937 review of J. Marschak and W. Lederer’s Kapitalbildung, Wilhelm Röpke welcomes conceptual precision but objects that equating saving with the supply of liquid funds leaves idle balances out of account. His suggestions concerning income distribution, liquidity preference and the uses of saving show what he thinks capital-market analysis must retain beyond orderly terminology. The review also balances criticism with attention to the authors’ exile and disrupted collaboration: these circumstances explain weaknesses without cancelling them. Röpke’s measured appraisal, culminating in strong praise for Lederer’s statistical research, offers a compact encounter with the economic distinctions behind an apparently technical dispute.