The archive.

The label social liberalism promised a synthesis; Mises reads it instead as an equivocal name for anti-liberal intervention. Framed as a review of the Brentano Festgabe, the essay treats that volume as evidence that Kathedersozialismus and the Historical School have exhausted their scientific content while keeping their political influence. His wedge is ownership of the means of production: liberalism, socialism, and syndicalism are rival institutional arrangements, not moral temperaments, and property as immediate control over production is indivisible. He counts the Methodenstreit settled against the historicists, denies that unions can raise labor's income as a whole by force without cost, and portrays Max Weber breaking painfully from Prussian statism toward liberal conclusions. Socialism, he insists, foundered not on resistance but on its own impracticability.

Nationalökonomische Erkenntnis führt notwendigerweise zum Liberalismus.

English translation: “Economic understanding leads necessarily to liberalism.”

What can a people be made to pay without destroying the conditions that make future payment possible? Amid Weimar fiscal strain and the reparations debate, Schumpeter recasts tax capacity as a problem of national time rather than an accounting residue, and rejects the seductive arithmetic that takes national income, subtracts a subsistence minimum, and hands the remainder to the state. Fiscal extraction is not a neutral transfer of purchasing power; it changes conduct, and reparations cost more than their nominal sum by worsening export terms. His decisive distinction is between short emergencies, which citizens endure without changing their habits, and permanent high taxation, which reshapes savings, ambition, entrepreneurship, and capital formation. Protect saving, he urges, and load the burden onto consumption; a society cannot demand capitalist performance while suppressing capitalist motives.

Die unmittelbaren Wirkungen einer Politik oder einer bestimmten Maßregel springen in die Augen.

English translation: “The immediate effects of a policy or of a particular measure leap to the eye.”

Bankrupt firms and idle workers are political facts no government can ignore, yet Schumpeter refuses to treat postwar business stagnation as one uniform European disease, insisting that depression, inflationary aftermath, war damage, and each nation's fiscal position combine differently across Germany, Austria, England, and France. His sharpest objection to general subsidy is that a state funding relief out of the very income stream already sustaining private demand creates no new purchasing power but merely reroutes what exists. The essay's original turn takes up Alfred Mond's proposal to convert unemployment relief into employment subsidies, which Schumpeter reads not as demand stimulus but as a cheapening of labor costs that permits lower prices and greater output. He grants the risks of propping up weak firms, yet concludes the policy is no logical absurdity.

Subventionen müssen ja aus Quellen stammen, die ohnehin den Strom der Wirtschaft speisen, und wer der Wirtschaft damit aufhelfen will, erhält infolgedessen eine fatale Aehnlichkeit mit Münchhausen, der sich an seinem eigenen Zopf aus dem Sumpfe zog.

English translation: “Subsidies, after all, must come from sources that already feed the stream of the economy, and whoever wishes to help the economy in this way therefore acquires a fatal resemblance to Münchhausen, who pulled himself out of the swamp by his own pigtail.”

By the 1880s American economics had broken from English classical laissez-faire, and this survey—Fetter's contribution to a German comparative handbook, read here in that German translation—maps what grew in its place. He tells how German-trained scholars like Ely and Clark founded the American Economic Association, how Simon Patten's emphasis on consumption and psychology prepared the ground, and why Austrian marginal utility found unusually fertile soil in a country already reading Jevons and J. B. Clark. Fetter defends the 'psychological school' as a shift of interest from the outer physical world to human wants and valuations, blames the mistranslation of Nutzen as 'utility' for false charges of Benthamite hedonism, and answers Veblen and the institutionalists of The Trend of Economics before laying out ten trends he expects American theory to pursue.

Über die Unwirklichkeit des „homo oeconomicus“ wird nicht länger disputiert und es wird eingesehen, daß die ökonomischen Motive ihre Quellen in allen Bereichen des menschlichen Lebens haben können.

English translation: “The unreality of the "homo oeconomicus" is no longer disputed, and it is recognized that economic motives may have their sources in all spheres of human life.”

Every restriction of contractual freedom imposed in favor of workers: that, at its most general, is what Lederer and Marschak mean by Arbeiterschutz, which they place at the juridical core of social policy under industrial capitalism. Worker protection is not paternal charity but a legal limit on the formally free contract, making the employment relation itself an object of public intervention. Their longest analysis concerns working time, the classic breach in liberal contract freedom, from bans on child and women's labor through Sunday rest to the postwar eight-hour day and the Washington Convention. Truck prohibitions, minimum-wage boards, factory inspection, and occupational-disease law extend the account, until enforcement passes to unions, works councils, and labor courts as much as to statute. A closing section carries it into the ILO founded under Part XIII of Versailles.

Am unmittelbarsten und elementarsten zeigte sich die verheerende Einwirkung des Industriesystems und der Einführung von Maschinen auf Kinder und Frauen.

English translation: “The devastating impact of the industrial system and of the introduction of machinery showed itself most immediately and most elementally upon children and women.”

Everyone says prices have risen or money has lost purchasing power, yet no single formula makes such statements exactly measurable — the obstacle, Haberler contends, is not missing data but the vagueness of the concept being measured. Steering between naive faith in index arithmetic and total skepticism, the book first works through the whole apparatus of index theory — arithmetic, harmonic and geometric means, Laspeyres, Paasche, Fisher's "ideal" formula, the circular and reversal tests — to show that formal criteria alone can never fix economic meaning. Only indices traceable to the money cost of one definite bundle of goods are intelligible. Grounding the argument in subjective value and methodological individualism, he concludes that a price level exists only relative to a person or group: there is no objective, supra-personal purchasing power of money to be found.

Das volkswirtschaftliche Preisniveau — ein statistischer Zufall.

English translation: “The economy-wide price level — a statistical accident.”

There is no unified state of science in economics, only a disorderly interaction of problems and traditions, and so this survey of German-language economic theory quickly becomes an anti-nationalist argument about method. Schumpeter accepts Marshall's claim that the nineteenth century built qualitative analysis and that the next task is quantitative and institutional; theory, he insists, is an apparatus, not a worldview. He praises the factual richness of Schmoller, Sombart, and Max Weber while diagnosing German economics as lacking a sustaining tradition and squandering energy on epistemology and methodological labels. Writing after the Methodenstreit, inflation, and the international triumph of marginalism, he defends marginal utility not as one competing doctrine but as the single common instrument of contemporary price theory, shared by Walras, Pareto, Marshall, and the Austrians alike.

Mit keinem dieser „ismen“ ist die Theorie auf Gedeih und Verderb verbunden, mit jedem kompatibel — hören wir doch auf, während ringsum die Probleme locken und drängen, diesen Sand zu pflügen und uns damit zu bewerfen!

English translation: “With none of these "isms" is the theory bound for better or worse; with each it is compatible — let us therefore cease, while problems all around are beckoning and pressing, to plow this sand and to pelt one another with it!”

A tjurunga is not a soul but a second body, binding an Aranda man to his totem ancestor and arming him with creative power; kugi, in central New Guinea, names an undifferentiated swarm of the dead, of illness, and of the uncanny. Assembled as a reader in the history of religion, this 1927 volume gathers source accounts of Australian, Papuan-Melanesian, and Polynesian-Micronesian belief, arranged so that each idea sits inside its own social and material culture. Thurnwald sets tjurunga songs and kangaroo-increase rites beside the Kai notion of Seelenstoff—soul-substance clinging to shadow, name, and voice—and the Marind-anim Majo cult of coconut fertility. The Polynesian materials turn on mana, against which no one can prevail, and on tapu, which means not holy or defiled but forbidden through sanctity or custom.

Die Welt der „Seelenstoffe“ umgibt den Eingeborenen ringsum mit geheimnisvollen Kräften, so daß er kein Ding, keine Begebenheit, abstrakt betrachten kann.

English translation: “The world of "soul-substances" surrounds the native on all sides with mysterious forces, so that he cannot contemplate any thing or any event in an abstract manner.”

Because modern bank credit creates purchasing power rather than merely transferring existing savings, it needs an external restraint, and gold, for all its flaws, supplies one. Written after Britain's 1925 return to gold, the essay concedes every fashionable objection: gold circulation is a superfluous luxury, money need not be materially backed, and gold discoveries can trigger arbitrary price revolutions. Against Keynes, who would free credit policy from exchange parity to fight unemployment and stabilize prices, Schumpeter argues that discretion alone is not safer. His theory of credit as forced saving, with entrepreneurs outbidding old users of labor and machinery and then repaying as new goods appear, explains cyclical price movements without reducing the cycle to money, as he thinks Hawtrey wrongly does. Gold is defensible because it works automatically yet still permits development.

Und wirklich, die Goldwährung wirkt wie eine Bremse an der Maschine des Kredits, indem sie bei freier Einlöslichkeit der Kreditinstrumente der Kreditausdehnung dort eine Grenze setzt — sonst aber nie —, wo die Parität zwischen Goldgeldeinheit und Kreditgeldeinheit in Gefahr kommt.

English translation: “And indeed, the gold standard acts like a brake on the machinery of credit, in that—given free redeemability of the credit instruments—it sets a limit to credit expansion there, but never otherwise, where the parity between the gold-money unit and the credit-money unit comes into danger.”

Industrial capitalism gathers workers under shared technical and disciplinary conditions, so that, Lederer and Marschak argue, their conduct can never be explained by the isolated choices of classical market theory. Workers react not as individuals but as a class, and the labor market itself is transformed once unions and employers' associations bargain as collective subjects. Collective agreements move to the center of the analysis: they translate antagonism into general rules, and autonomous bargaining typically precedes the law that later codifies it. From this the study follows the whole institutional apparatus, from strikes and lockouts, conciliation, and yellow unions to works councils, labor exchanges, and the reach toward economic self-government. First drafted in 1913 and expanded by Marschak through the 1920s, it binds the workplace formation of class to the larger problem of governing a modern economy.

Der „Arbeitsmarkt“ ist jetzt nicht mehr unter dem Bilde einer Auktion oder eines Bazars aufzufassen, mit individuellen Käufern und Verkäufern, sondern die Gesamtheit von Arbeitern und Unternehmern ist es, welche zu je einem Subjekt zusammenwächst.

English translation: “The "labor market" is now no longer to be conceived on the model of an auction or a bazaar, with individual buyers and sellers; rather, it is the totality of workers and of entrepreneurs which coalesces into a single subject on each side.”

Once industrial societies no longer answer to a shared universal moral authority, the reformer who shortens hours or insures the sick in one country soon collides with unregulated competition in the next. From that impasse Pribram derives international social policy, examined here through the League's newly created International Labour Organization: its tripartite conferences of governments, employers, and workers, its conventions and recommendations, and the stubborn problem of a minimum standard that burdens each nation differently according to productivity, wages, and capital. The Versailles principle that labour must not be treated merely as a commodity gives the project its ethical charge, while the Washington eight-hour convention exposes its limits. International social policy, he concludes, is less one doctrine than a compromise among incompatible worldviews.

Vor dem Kriege hing die Vorbereitung der Konventionsentwürfe von allen Zufällen politischer Konstellationen ab; heute ist sie in einer dauernden, vom Völkerrechte getragenen Einrichtung verankert, an der nahezu sämtliche Kulturstaaten beteiligt sind.

English translation: “Before the war, the preparation of draft conventions depended on all the accidents of political constellations; today it is anchored in a permanent institution, borne by international law, in which nearly all civilised states take part.”

Bracket race entirely, and the real question sharpens: why do social classes exist at all? Set in an ethnically homogeneous milieu precisely to isolate that problem from the ethnological factors stressed by Gumplowicz, this theoretical essay argues that classes are real social organisms, not the income categories economists invent, recognized by manners, association, and above all connubium, socially accepted intermarriage. Schumpeter makes the family, not the individual, the true unit of class theory, and grounds a class's rise or fall in the social importance of its function and its success in performing it. The long case is the Germanic nobility, rising as warrior-leadership becomes vital and declining through patrimonialization once war ceases to be its living function. Classes endure, he argues, even as their constituent families are ceaselessly replaced.

Jede Klasse gleicht während der Dauer ihres Kollektivlebens oder der Zeit, während welcher ihre Identität angenommen werden kann, einem Hotel oder einem Omnibus, die zwar immer besetzt sind, aber von immer andern Leuten.

English translation: “During the duration of its collective life, or the time during which its identity can be assumed, every class resembles a hotel or an omnibus that is always occupied, but by ever different people.”