The archive.

Though capital and interest sit at the center of the Misesian system, Mises himself published little on either before 1940, leaving his theory scattered across Socialism, Human Action, and seminar remarks. Reconstructing it, Kirzner presents a radicalized Mengerian subjectivism that severs capital from capital goods: capital is not a physical stock but an accounting concept made possible by money prices and entrepreneurial calculation, while interest expresses the universal preference for present over future satisfaction rather than any productivity of machines or roundabout methods. This purifies Boehm-Bawerk of his residual objectivism, the average period of production and the productivity concessions, and rejects the Clark-Knight vision of capital as a self-perpetuating fund yielding automatic income. In real markets, Kirzner concludes, capitalist, entrepreneur, and factor owner are one, and observed returns blend originary interest with entrepreneurial gain or loss.

Knight correctly characterized Mises as taking an extreme Austrian position on interest by refusing to attribute any explanatory role to the objective, or physical, conditions governing production in a capital-using world.

When John von Neumann published his expanding-economy model in 1937, he gave economics one of its rare transformative events. Morgenstern and Thompson build on it here, synthesizing two decades of work into the KMT model, which removes von Neumann's restrictive assumption that every good figures in every process and admits multiple expansion rates, subeconomies, and game-theoretic solution methods. Across fourteen chapters they extend the framework to open economies that import and export at world prices, to consumption and savings, to trading blocks and a world model bound by a common expansion rate, and, pointedly, to contraction and compression, since resource limits make endless growth no longer self-evidently desirable. Throughout, they insist the models apply to any economy regardless of political organization, deliberately omit money and stochastic elements, and treat expansion, stationarity, and collapse as problems of structure, optimization, and computable linear programming.

Long before Menger, the ideas that would define Austrian economics—subjective value, scarcity, market price as common estimation—had been worked out by Aristotle, the medieval Schoolmen, and the theologians of Salamanca. Marshalling the revisionist scholarship of Marjorie Grice-Hutchinson, Raymond de Roover, and Emil Kauder, Rothbard overturns the familiar story that Adam Smith and Ricardo founded the science; in his telling they shunted it onto a wrong track, displacing a Continental subjectivism with labor and cost theories. He follows the thread from Buridan, Aquinas, and Covarrubias through Grotius, Turgot, and Say, contending that Menger revived a buried tradition rather than inventing one. The result is polemical historiography—a redrawn genealogy meant to restore forgotten predecessors and prove that marginal utility had roots centuries deep.

The just price is found not by counting the cost but by the common estimation.

Did OPEC's quadrupling of crude prices really cause the stagflation of the mid-1970s? Haberler's answer, developed as the lead paper of this symposium, is a firm no: the oil shock was costly but not the master cause. Dearer oil imposes a terms-of-trade loss that a flexible economy would absorb through a once-for-all fall in real income; only downward-rigid money wages convert it into unemployment or inflation. The shock, he argues, struck an economy already destabilized by an unsustainable boom. On the international side he deflates fears of the 'petrodollar,' since OPEC surpluses must return as purchases or investment and the Euro-dollar market had already recycled them. Rejecting official schemes that quarantine oil deficits from the rest, he insists each country confront its overall balance of payments through floating, IMF borrowing, or domestic monetary and fiscal measures.

The oil price rise was not a major factor in bringing on inflation and recession.

An economist who recommends a policy in the name of his science, Rothbard argues, has almost always cheated. Drawing a hard line between ethics—the study of which ends men ought to pursue—and value-free praxeology, he shows that appeals to majority preference, social consensus, or the merits of progressive taxation cannot turn a moral stance into a scientific finding. Demonstrated preference licenses only a narrow claim: voluntary exchange benefits its participants, while state coercion imposes at least one loser. That alone cannot prove laissez-faire. His closing target is Mises, whose utilitarian liberalism assumes men prefer peace and prosperity yet cannot answer those who knowingly choose equality, power, or nationalism. Liberty's defense, he concludes, requires an objective ethics that lies beyond economics.

That leaves him with the first choice: to make crystal clear that he is speaking not as an economist but as a private citizen who is making his own confessedly arbitrary and ad hoc value pronouncements.

Scarcity, valuation, time, uncertainty: Rothbard derives them all from a single axiom—that individuals act consciously toward chosen goals—unfolding an entire economics by verbal deduction rather than equations. Mathematical economics, positivist falsifiability, and econometrics he treats as misreadings of what human choice actually is. The essay's signature move is a friendly break with Mises: where Mises called the action axiom Kantian and a priori, Rothbard grounds it in Aristotelian-Thomist realism, self-evident yet empirical in a sense deeper than post-Humean empiricism allows. He marks praxeology off from psychology, ethics, technology, and history, defends methodological individualism, and denies that heterogeneous historical events can ever test an economic law—though theory remains indispensable for interpreting them.

In short, praxeological economics is the structure of logical implications of the fact that individuals act.

For all its scientific pretensions, socialism's real defence is to place its doctrine beyond criticism by treating every objection as a mere conflict of values. Hayek refuses the manoeuvre, insisting that socialism makes testable claims about means, effects, and institutional compatibility, and that they fail. Once any shared value is admitted, one may ask whether collectivist institutions actually preserve it. He distinguishes the hot socialism of nationalization from the cold socialism of taxation and benefits, restates the calculation debate against Marx, Lange, and planning in natura, and grounds the knowledge function of prices in marginal utility and changing rates of substitution no board can compute. Socialism, he concludes, fails morally, politically, and materially, while an omnipotent democracy that treats every grievance as an entitlement renders society ungovernable.

A society in which everyone is organised as a member of some group to force government to help him get what he wants is self-destructive.

What does an anomalous choice refute: a mathematical construction, its empirical reach, or the experiment used to test it? In this essay, Oskar Morgenstern defends the expected utility theory he developed with John von Neumann while acknowledging experiences its axioms may not capture. His objections to tests involving minute probabilities and imaginary fortunes turn on whether respondents can meaningfully assess the choices offered. Yet his defence leaves room for the pleasure of gambling, the effects of time, and preferences that resist a complete ordering. Writing as a co-architect rather than a detached commentator, Morgenstern exposes a productive tension between confidence in formal proof and uncertainty about human preference. Readers can discover why preserving an axiomatic achievement need not mean treating it as a finished account of decision-making.

A phrase can win moral authority precisely by escaping analysis, and social justice is Hayek's example. Read as a synonym for distributive justice, it presupposes a distributor, yet market incomes are assigned by no collective will, emerging instead from countless lawful actions whose combined result no one intends or foresees. Justice attaches to individual conduct, he argues, not to the aggregate pattern that many just actions produce. The demand for it he traces to atavism: moral instincts formed in the small face-to-face hunting band, admirable among intimates but maladapted to the extended order of strangers that property, contract, and catallaxy make possible. To impose a just distribution is to falsify the price signals that coordinate dispersed knowledge, revert to tribal sharing, and license coercion in the name of an undefined ideal.

The needs of this ancient primitive kind of society determined much of the moral feelings which still govern us, and which we approve in others.

Money re-enters general economic theory through individual action, marginal utility, and market exchange unfolding in time; that is the thread Rothbard follows in reconstructing Mises's monetary theory, which he traces to the 1912 Theory of Money and Credit. The demand for money becomes the demand to hold cash balances, and its purchasing power a heterogeneous array of exchange ratios rather than the inverse of some measurable price level. At the theoretical center stands Mises's regression theorem, which dissolves the apparent circularity of money's value by tracing it back through time to a commodity once valued for direct use. Along the way Rothbard turns the analysis against index-number thinking, Walrasian equilibrium, and government credit expansion, defending commodity money as the one check on political creation of purchasing power.

Every good and service will have an almost infinite array of prices in terms of every other good and service.

Behind Theory of Games and Economic Behavior lay a convergence of two unfinished programs. In this memoir, Morgenstern retraces the path from his 1928 work on economic forecasting, where the distinction between "dead" and "live" variables already anticipated strategic interaction and the Sherlock Holmes and Moriarty chase exposed the paradoxes of perfect foresight, to a Princeton encounter he describes as an instantaneous meeting of minds. What began as a short explanatory article grew, through walks and longhand collaboration, into a book that axiomatized expected utility, deployed minimax reasoning, and turned to convexity after his discovery of Jean Ville's proof. He recounts the Vienna Circle background, von Neumann's expanding-economy model, wartime printing by Princeton University Press, and the reviews and translations that followed, an origin story of game theory that doubles as a memorial to a friendship.

We did an enormous amount of work in a very short time, but it was unceasing pleasure and never a time of drudgery.

Is Germany’s different economic position a European imbalance to remedy, or an example for its neighbours to follow? In this brief letter to The Times of December 21, 1976, Hayek answers Roy Jenkins’s reported concern with a blunt reversal: France, Britain and Italy should abandon what he calls their socialist policies and could then reach Germany’s position within a few years. The letter offers no comparative evidence or definition of those policies; its interest lies in the sharpness of the intervention. Hayek shifts attention from international disparity to domestic political choices, making Germany the model rather than the problem.