The archive.

Dismantling nationalist myths does not guarantee a convincing account of the past—or a democratic future. In this 1948 review of Rustem Vambery’s Hungary, To Be or Not To Be, Richard Schüller praises the author’s attack on Magyar self-glorification while questioning his treatment of Habsburg rule and his confidence in Soviet-backed reconstruction. Schüller’s distinctive objection is that Vambery hopes for a Danubian federation and customs union while discounting the regional integration the Austrian Empire had provided. Minority expulsions, political purges, and restrictive press legislation further test those hopes. This brief review offers a pointed distinction between the courage required to criticize an old ruling order and the judgement needed to assess its successor.

How did two reformers turn private conviction into institutional influence? Reviewing Beatrice Webb’s Our Partnership, Hayek admires the Webbs’ patient, often anonymous work through journalism, education, hospitality, and cross-party contacts while opposing the collectivist ends it served. His sharpest tension concerns independence: he argues that private resources enabled their socialist campaigning in ways their preferred society would not permit. The memoir’s accounts of Poor Law Commission work also prompt him to ask whether their research tested political commitments or assembled support for settled conclusions. This 1948 double review, closing with a brief, favourable assessment of Edgar Reichel’s study of Fabian socialism, offers a concrete account of intellectual influence alongside Hayek’s critical scrutiny of claims to disinterested expertise.

When does economic research justify policy advice, and when do its conclusions outrun its assumptions? In this 1948 review of the National Bureau of Economic Research’s anniversary collection, Fritz Machlup tests the reasoning that connects theory, evidence, and intervention. He challenges Harold G. Moulton’s claims to have displaced obsolete doctrines and questions Jan Tinbergen’s case against exchange-rate adjustment, distinguishing domestic-currency import expenditure from demand for foreign exchange. His praise for John Jewkes’s analysis of British employment policy supplies a contrasting standard: practical experience should sharpen questions about inflation, administrative limits, and the evidence still needed. The review offers a compact encounter with Machlup’s critical method—asking whether a proposition holds generally, under what conditions it holds, and whether those conditions support the policy proposed.

An economist’s legacy can reside as much in the research he makes possible as in the books he writes. In this brief 1948 obituary, reprinted in 2013 with editorial annotations and a correction, Hayek honours Wesley Clair Mitchell’s empirical study of business cycles, his role in American institutionalism, and his ability to sustain collective inquiry through the National Bureau of Economic Research. Hayek distinguishes Mitchell’s dissatisfaction with theory from ignorance of it, offering an appreciative account of a different conception of economic science. The portrait gives readers a concrete view of how teaching, collaboration, and institution-building became part of Mitchell’s scientific achievement, while preserving his wider concern with the social sciences’ function in society.

Thurnwald divides his science in two: ethnography gathers the facts, ethnology interprets their tangled connections of time, people, thing, and place. Writing in 1948, he defends German ethnology against the charge of having been mere colonial propaganda, then lays out the fieldworker's discipline—long residence, repeated checking, no suggestive questions smuggling in high-gods or the Oedipus complex. He weighs evolutionism, the Kulturkreislehre of Frobenius, Gräbner and Schmidt, and Malinowski's functionalism, and settles on two leading factors: the procurement of food and contact between cultures. The unilinear march from hunter to herder to farmer is rejected; cases such as the Iramba plateau and the colonial dissolution of Ngoni order show culture as an uneven, accretive process rather than a ladder of stages.

Der Weg des Fortschritts ist holperig.

English translation: “The path of progress is bumpy.”

The consumer faces a problem no equilibrium diagram quite states: how to bring an unrechenbarer Nutzen, a utility that cannot be counted, into the arithmetic of money. Schönfeld-Illy's answer reconstructs Wieser's marginal law, stripping away its accretions until the value it names turns out to be not an inner quantum of feeling but the consumer's demand price. Marginal utility becomes a rule of economical simplification: a disposition found admissible at the margin can be carried over to a whole stock without appraising each unit. From there the book turns on static equilibrium theory, rejecting the Walrasian Universalrechner that would solve prices and demand from outside the economy — whoever manages an economy calculates for himself — and substitutes a dynamic account built on expected data and forward-looking plans.

Die Preise werden durch die Nachfrage determiniert, die Nachfrage wird durch die Preise determiniert!

English translation: “Prices are determined by demand; demand is determined by prices!”

An economy can produce more goods without giving everyone the material security needed to develop their abilities. In this 1948 article, Hans Bayer makes that gap the test of economic freedom: what matters is not merely the independence of enterprises, but the opportunities production and income distribution afford each person. His case for purposeful economic organization turns on concrete tensions—technical progress can encourage industrial concentration, while abundant productive capacity can coexist with unemployment and deprivation. Yet Bayer does not treat planning as unconstrained political command. Economic organization must work with the regularities of development and exchange, much as an engineer uses natural laws. The article offers a compact account of why collective coordination might serve individual development, and why its necessity does not guarantee its feasibility.

The transformation of a loose league of sovereign cantons into a modern federal state in 1848 is the pivot of this centenary study, commissioned by Pro Helvetia and read here in A. Lätt's German translation of Rappard's French original of the same year. He works backward from the French invasion of 1798 through the Helvetic Republic, Napoleon's Act of Mediation, the restorationist Pact of 1815, the Regeneration, and the Sonderbund War, then dissects the charter the revision commission assembled in six weeks—the American-inspired bicameral Assembly, the collegial Federal Council, the deliberately weak Federal Court. Three forces, he argues, made the federal state: the need for national security, for free economic development, and for political liberty and equality. It was, he insists, no foreign import but the act of a nation.

Die Einheit ohne Glieder ist eine leere Masse, die Glieder ohne Einheit sind ohnmächtig.

English translation: “Unity without members is an empty mass; members without unity are powerless.”

Market freedom, for Wilhelm Röpke, requires more than removing state restrictions—and defending it need not mean accepting the factory, the metropolis, or concentrated ownership as desirable forms of life. In this 1948 article, he joins an argument for competitive markets to a critique of industrial society. His proposed “decentralism” seeks dispersed property and humane communities while preserving prices as a means of coordinating consumer wishes. The tension lies in deciding which public interventions sustain that order and which replace it with administrative command, particularly in investment and full-employment policy. Readers can discover why Röpke rejects both laissez-faire complacency and collectivist remedies, and where his willingness to accommodate intervention meets a stringent boundary against economic planning.

American aid could keep Europe supplied—but what would enable Europe to pay its way again? In this 1948 article, William Emmanuel Rappard examines the Marshall Plan through the distinction between unequal wealth and an imbalance that makes exchange unsustainable. Reading the European recovery programme as both economic evidence and an appeal to Congress, he questions its optimistic forecasts and its evasions over repayment. His perspective places obligations on both sides of the Atlantic: European modernization and less fragmented markets require American willingness to admit imports. The article shows why food, fuel, machinery, monetary stability, and trade barriers belong to the same recovery problem—and why aid justified by political aims cannot by itself establish durable economic relations.

Removing tariffs is not the same as creating the conditions for beneficial trade. In this two-installment journal extract from his Genoa congress lecture, Hans Bayer asks how war-damaged European economies can liberalize without sacrificing employment, essential imports, or recovery. His case for “directed free trade” turns on concrete failures of automatic adjustment: displaced workers may find no new jobs, rising exports may reflect falling domestic consumption, and national monopolies may become international ones rather than disappear. Yet Bayer argues for European economic union, not permanent protection. Coordinated planning and transitional safeguards are, in his account, means of making integration possible. The article offers a pointed distinction between expanding trade and improving welfare—and shows why a commitment to freer exchange can entail enforceable international institutions.

What divides this presentation from Stackelberg's popular textbook is method, not subject matter: modern theory, Amonn insists, must be learned as a mode of reasoning rather than gathered as a heap of results. He builds from supply and demand as functional relations through equilibrium and market price to monopoly, duopoly, and the imperfect competition of Joan Robinson and Chamberlin, grounding demand in marginal utility and supply in subjective cost. He rejects the marginal-productivity theory of factor values as circular, substituting his own principle that product prices must be differentiated by the quantities of factors each good requires, and derives wage, interest, and rent from it. The argument runs on through money and the quantity theory, business cycles, and comparative costs to a welfare doctrine that weighs competition's productive power against the inequality it breeds.

Der Preis keines Gutes ist unabhängig von denen der anderen bestimmt, sondern alle sind zugleich, «simultan» bestimmt.

English translation: “The price of no good is determined independently of the others; rather, all are determined at once, "simultaneously.”