The archive.

Political liberalism, in this encyclopedia article, names something narrower and older than democracy or progress: the Anglo-Dutch and above all Whig tradition of limiting and binding state power. Hayek condenses its classical form into three interlocking principles — freedom of opinion, the rule of law, and private property with its competitive economy — and traces the idea from post-Glorious-Revolution England through its rationalist French mutation, its late and failing German career under Bismarck, to its revival after totalitarianism. The French turn is his pivot: confidence in free social development gives way to confidence in a plan, shifting the question from limiting power to seizing it. His sharpest warning is that political and economic liberalism cannot be prised apart, contra Croce; replace competition with direction and the rule of law is hollowed out even where basic rights remain.

Tatsächlich hängt die Eigentums- und Vertragsfreiheit auf das innigste mit der Herrschaft des Gesetzes zusammen: die eine ist ohne die andere nicht möglich.

English translation: “In fact, freedom of property and contract is most intimately connected with the rule of law: the one is not possible without the other.”

Ownership gives entrepreneurs control over production—but, in Mises’s account, consumers continually put that control to the test. This encyclopedia entry from the Handwörterbuch der Sozialwissenschaften presents the market as a process in which purchases, profits, and losses redirect productive resources under conditions of uncertainty. Its central tension lies between private command over wealth and dependence on buyers’ choices. Mises sharpens the argument by distinguishing monopoly ownership from the ability to profit by restricting supply, and by explaining entrepreneurial profit as a temporary result of anticipating change rather than a permanent reward for possession. Readers can trace how consumer sovereignty becomes not only his explanation of market coordination but also his standard for defending inequality and criticizing redistribution.

What can an economist’s marked books tell us that his published arguments leave unsettled? In this article, Emil Kauder examines Carl Menger’s library at Hitotsubashi University, using marginal comments, acquisition dates, and uncut pages to distinguish intellectual influence from mere ownership. He argues for an Aristotelian foundation to Menger’s economics: the ordering of human purposes, beginning with life and health, matters more than an undifferentiated calculus of pleasure. The same evidence brings a neglected predecessor, Joseph von Kudler, into view and complicates allegations of plagiarism. Kauder’s Menger also resists easy identification with unrestricted competition. This preliminary investigation offers a concrete encounter with the evidence behind intellectual history, showing how private reading can revise an interpretation without supplying a complete intellectual biography.

Can an economy gain from foreign trade without changing its domestic institutions? In this review-essay on Ernst Heuss’s Wirtschaftssysteme und internationaler Handel, Alfred Amonn examines trade policy through the economic arrangements it sustains. His sympathetic exposition brings out the stakes of Heuss’s approach: exchange controls may undermine market coordination, while tariffs may protect not simply producers but a particular distribution of income. The tension becomes especially concrete when a centrally planned economy bargains as a single buyer and seller against dispersed market participants. By following Amonn’s presentation, readers can distinguish restrictions that Heuss regards as necessary to preserve an economic system from measures that may instead transform it—a different test from asking whether a policy merely increases trade.

Time, in G. L. S. Shackle's De Vries Lectures, is not a neutral point on a calendar axis but the setting where imagination, decision, and expectation occur—his 'moment-in-being' destroying any easy analogy between economics and mechanics. Lachmann accepts the attack on homogeneous naturalistic time yet resists its solipsistic edge: if every present were wholly self-contained, learning and plan revision would become unintelligible. His repair distinguishes the discontinuity of ends from the relative continuity of knowledge about means, adding to subjective utility a subjectivism of interpretation. Where Shackle's dynamics stays close to the isolated individual, Lachmann extends it to forward markets, which give plans a socially observable form and coordinate expectations without predicting them. Economics forgoes positive forecasting but keeps negative prediction and the interpretive reconstruction of purposes.

As soon as we permit time to elapse we must permit knowledge to change, and knowledge cannot be regarded as a function of anything else.

Can growing wealth bring declining returns on capital—and does Ricardo treat that decline as temporary or lasting? In this review of G. S. L. Tucker’s history of British economic thought, Emil Kauder challenges Tucker’s reading of Ricardo by restoring diminishing agricultural productivity to the centre of the explanation: costlier food raises money wages and squeezes profits. He also welcomes Tucker’s recovery of John Lalor, whose distinction between money saving and profitable investment opportunities offers a closer anticipation of Keynes than Malthus’s account of excessive accumulation. Kauder’s concise assessment shows why apparent similarities between economic theories require careful scrutiny of their mechanisms and timescales, while separating Tucker’s substantive discoveries from the book’s weaknesses in organization and historical context.

Machlup gathered definitions of statics and dynamics from Comte through Patinkin and laid them side by side, only to find the terms pulling in incompatible directions: social order versus progress, stationary states versus growth, undated versus lagged variables. His mischievous observation is that economists tend to call their own theories dynamic and their rivals' static. Rather than legislate a single meaning, he builds a six-part typology that lets a theory like Schumpeter's qualify as dynamic under half a dozen headings at once, and shows how the supposed war between equilibrium and evolutionary economics dissolves once the labels are unpacked. His practical advice: retire the two words where possible in favor of exact ones, growth theory, sequence analysis, period analysis, trend analysis.

The trouble, as I see it, is not that the division of economic analysis into Statics and Dynamics makes no sense, but that it makes too many senses.

Nuclear weapons, delivery systems, and the sheer speed of technological change have made national defense a strategic problem that inherited military categories can no longer grasp. Treating the arms race as a grim equilibrium, Morgenstern argues that neither side can safely reduce effort unless reductions are mutual, credible, and enforceable, so survival becomes a constraint prior to any budget. Defense is never a matter of the single best weapon but of strategies tested against an adapting opponent: interception screens answer yesterday's threat while the next generation is designed to evade them, and stopgaps such as keeping bombers permanently airborne founder on fuel and logistics. Cities, valuable and hard to protect, pose the severest problem. Rejecting both panic and wishful thinking, he makes the case that creative technical thinking, not standardized production, will decide survival.

Unilateral action to reduce the arms race is impossible and not compatible with the desire for national survival.

Strip away the geopolitical alarmism, Mises urges, and the contest between socialism and capitalism reduces to a single measurable test: whether socialism raises the ordinary person's standard of living, as its advocates always promised. By that self-chosen standard, he argues, Soviet planning had already failed—decades of plans, purges, and boasts had left the common man far poorer than his counterpart in capitalist Western Europe or the United States. Capitalism, in this compressed Cold War essay, is nothing but mass production for the masses, a system that raises the worker toward the bourgeois level by serving him. The regime's censorship is itself the confession: it endures only by keeping its citizens from learning how ordinary people live under freedom.

Experience has belied all this empty boasting.

We plan by imagining what we will have accomplished—but carrying out a plan changes what we know and what its accomplishment means to us. This tension anchors Alfred Schütz’s inquiry into knowledge of the future. Beginning with Tiresias, whose certain foreknowledge offers no power to intervene, Schütz turns to the less certain but practically useful expectations of ordinary life. His phenomenological perspective locates foresight in socially acquired knowledge, familiar patterns, and the interests that make some possibilities matter more than others. The essay’s distinctive insight is that projects anticipate completed acts rather than merely picturing actions ahead. It gives readers a precise way to understand why expectations can guide conduct reliably without ever capturing an event exactly as it will occur.

Does the merchandise trade balance rise or fall when a nation's economy expands? The empirical record, Mintz found, had scarcely been examined, though contradictory assumptions abounded. Working with quarterly American and British data from 1880 to 1938 and the Burns-Mitchell cycle method, she establishes that both balances swing in long cycles closely tied to domestic business, yet in opposite ways. The American balance moved inversely, sinking in late expansions and recovering sharply in early contractions; the British balance conformed positively before 1914 and then reversed to become perfectly inverse after the war. Refining the picture with a world-cycle chronology of co-phases and counter-phases, she overturns the belief that all creditor or industrial countries share a single cyclical pattern, and traces the British reversal to altered terms of trade rather than to industrialization.

General expansion depressed, contraction improved the trade balance.

Can freely imagining variations of an object disclose its essence—or does the familiar type already determine what we can imagine? In this essay, Alfred Schütz presses that question against Husserl’s accounts of everyday experience and eidetic intuition. Recognizing a dog involves expectations acquired through previous encounters; discovering an essence is supposed to reach beyond such contingent familiarity. Schütz asks what warrants the passage between them. His attention to interest and selective attention makes the difficulty concrete: resemblance alone cannot explain which features count when we recognize something as a kind of thing. Readers can discover how an apparently technical distinction between type and essence bears on the limits of phenomenological method, without mistaking Schütz’s conditional challenge for a dismissal of Husserl’s project.