The archive.

A moral command means nothing addressed to a slave: this premise opens Mises's 1960 argument that freedom is a postulate not only of politics but of every morality, since only an agent who can weigh alternatives and restrain impulse can be held responsible. From moral anthropology the essay builds outward to the market, where the consumer is sovereign and private property functions as a revocable public mandate rather than feudal privilege. Its decisive claim is the indivisibility of freedom: because every human act requires material means, a state that controls production also controls the paper, presses, halls, and broadcasting through which conscience and dissent must speak. Constitutional liberties, Mises warns, become empty once economic independence from government disappears.

He who monopolizes all media of communication has full power to keep a tight hand on the individuals' minds and souls.

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 closer knowledge of an economy’s complexity discourage intervention—or equip governments to intervene? In this comment on George Stigler, Murray N. Rothbard argues that statistical inquiry and administrative power can grow together, even when researchers have no political program. His laissez-faire perspective centres on a distinction between entrepreneurs’ knowledge of prices, costs, and profits and the aggregate information required by economic planners. Examples ranging from social surveys to input-output analysis give concrete form to his contention that methods of observation can become instruments of control. The comment also exposes a methodological dispute: whether empirical attention to particular problems sufficiently disciplines policy, or whether deductive theory is needed to reveal resource constraints and opportunity costs.

Can social science be objective without discarding what actions mean to the people performing them? In this essay, Schütz argues that subjective meaning belongs to the evidence social scientists must explain. A question and its anticipated answer show why observable sequences alone cannot account for interaction: participants act through expectations about one another’s purposes. Yet understanding them does not require access to their entire inner lives. Schütz connects everyday reliance on typical motives with the investigator’s construction of ideal types—selective model actors whose conduct must remain intelligible to ordinary people. His distinction between intended outcomes and the past experiences behind a project gives readers a precise way to separate purpose from retrospective explanation, while testing where scientific abstraction clarifies social action and where it loses its subject.

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.

Can Marx remain a valuable critic of industrial society if his economic theory is rejected? In this polemical 1960 article, Richard Kerschagl grants Marx a limited achievement as an economic historian while challenging the explanatory foundations of Capital. His most revealing distinction separates capital’s contribution to production from the capitalist’s entitlement to income: acknowledging the former, he argues, need not justify the latter. From this standpoint, Kerschagl charges Marx with allowing demands about distribution to govern explanations of value and production. Readers encounter a critique informed by marginal-utility reasoning whose insistence on separating scientific explanation from political commitment sits uneasily beside its openly adversarial rhetoric. The article makes that boundary—and the difficulty of maintaining it—the central stake of reassessing Marx.

Mathematical precision does not settle whether a model captures the economic problem it claims to solve. In this review of Samuel Karlin’s two-volume Mathematical Methods and Theory in Games, Programming and Economics, Oskar Morgenstern praises lucid proofs and valuable applications while challenging the emphasis on two-person zero-sum games and standard equilibrium models. His objection concerns control: economic participants make decisions under conditions partly determined by other participants, not simply against a fixed background. Readers can discover why he regards n-person, nonzero-sum games as essential to economic analysis—and why his admiration for Karlin’s mathematical achievement coexists with reservations about its modelling choices. His interest in poker as a model of negotiation gives that distinction a concrete, suggestive endpoint.

A social welfare function can make value judgments explicit without resolving what a society should value. Walter Froehlich makes this distinction central to his review of Reimut Jochimsen’s attempt to reorient welfare economics. He locates the book’s originality less in its survey of technical debates than in its search for normative premises concerning personal liberty, social minima, democratic order, and economic adaptability. His response to Jochimsen’s proposed collaboration with philosophers and theologians is cautiously practical: professional biases might counterbalance one another, but cooperation offers no automatic solution. This short review gives readers a sharply defined problem to consider—how economists might move beyond formal consistency toward defensible judgments about public purposes without resorting to improvised philosophy.

Calculation can find an optimum, but can it tell us which rule of choice to adopt under uncertainty? In this review of Boulding and Spivey’s volume, G. L. S. Shackle pairs admiration for mathematical clarity with resistance to making technique a complete account of economic decision. He praises Spivey’s lucid exposition and welcomes Boulding’s challenge to a single standard of rational behaviour. His distinction between describing an optimum and providing a convenient numerical route to it gives mathematical programming practical credit without granting it a conceptual revolution. The review offers a compact encounter with Shackle’s critical perspective: mathematics deserves precision and respect, while decisions, methodological claims, and editorial choices remain open to judgement.

Can it be that Professor BOULDING is here using the word *decision* to mean something other than the doing of sums and reading off the answer?

Does restraining inflation impede economic growth—or protect its long-term prospects? In this review of Gottfried Bombach’s Festschrift for Erich Schneider, Fritz Machlup tests competing answers against distinctions that policy debate can easily obscure: high prices versus continually rising prices, temporary investment stimulus versus sustained growth, and desirable outcomes versus politically feasible measures. He welcomes the collection’s shared focus on inflation but challenges explanations invoking structural rigidities and arguments that assume stabilization must sacrifice growth. His scrutiny of wage policy is especially concrete: recommending stable wages is not the same as explaining how a democratic government could secure them. The review offers a compact encounter with rival accounts of inflation, sharpened by Machlup’s insistence that mechanisms, time horizons, and policy instruments be specified.

A single correlation or average lag can conceal different relationships between short-term fluctuations and long-term movements. In this 1961 Princeton research memorandum, Oskar Morgenstern asks what economists could discover by separating those temporal scales rather than imposing familiar business-cycle classifications. Drawing on communication engineering, he advocates spectral analysis as a way to detect rhythms within aggregate data and examine how series interact at different frequencies. His example of New York money-market rates makes the stakes concrete: longer-term components can show greater lags than shorter-term ones. Yet finer measurement is not economic explanation. Morgenstern’s proposal turns on a demanding tension: longer records improve frequency analysis, but also span institutional and technological changes that may undermine its assumptions. Readers encounter a research program in which statistical discovery challenges theory without claiming to replace it.

A faster aircraft or a larger economy does not automatically confer strategic power. In this published address to a naval aviation meeting, Oskar Morgenstern challenges technical forecasts that overlook qualitative change and military calculations that neglect political purpose. His perspective as an economist and game theorist gives the critique its edge: conflict involves an opponent who conceals, bluffs, and deliberately frustrates plans, not merely conditions to be optimized. Ballistic-missile submarines make the distinction concrete—destroying their bases cannot neutralize weapons already at sea. His proposal to measure national power rather than aggregate growth similarly questions what impressive numbers actually establish. The address offers a pointed encounter between technical confidence and strategic uncertainty, including Morgenstern’s contentious Cold War argument for nuclear capabilities in limited war.

We have to make decisions not against nature, but against a consciously interfering adversary.