The archive.

Public finance, on this account, is an economic science of the state rather than a technical appendix to tax law—and a theory of taxation that does not begin from the state, Kerschagl writes, is nonsense. His Steuerlehre reads economy, law, coercion, and political purpose together, tracing modern taxation from older real, property, and consumption levies to the fragile arrival of income taxation, which interwar inflation and administrative weakness kept unstable. He dismantles equivalence and insurance theories that assimilate taxes to private exchange, insists that in principle every tax is shiftable, and rejects the tidy contrast between direct and indirect taxes as an account of who ultimately pays. No ideal tax exists in the abstract; a workable system must fit production, property, and constitutional order, as his comparative surveys and Austria's 1934 financial constitution show.

Das Urteil über die Produktivität der Steuern ist in Wirklichkeit ein Urteil über die Produktivität des Staates.

English translation: “The judgment on the productivity of taxes is in reality a judgment on the productivity of the state.”

What the educated layman takes for the chaos of monetary science, this short foreword insists, is only a chaos of dilettantism and a tangle of political wishes — not the absence of a firm analytical apparatus. Written to introduce the German edition of D. H. Robertson's Das Geld, Schumpeter's Geleitwort defends monetary economics as possessing a genuine Organon of concepts that too few economists fully command, and commends Robertson — heir to Marshall alongside Pigou and Keynes — as a bridge for students and lay readers precisely because he helped create what he expounds and refuses to convert theory into advocacy. Science, on this account, hands the reader a tool against nonsense and nothing more; the decision it leaves to him.

Dem Laien erscheint dann als wissenschaftliches Chaos, was nur ein Chaos von Dilettantismus ist. Und er hält für hoffnungsloses Gewirr von wissenschaftlichen Meinungen, was nur ein – freilich hoffnungsloses – Gewirre von politischen Wollungen ist.

English translation: “What appears to the layman as a scientific chaos is only a chaos of dilettantism. And he takes for a hopeless tangle of scientific opinions what is only a—admittedly hopeless—tangle of political wishes.”

Assembled from roughly three hundred pre-war price series across England, Germany, the United States and beyond, this statistical study argues that the trade cycle cannot be read off any single index number. Published in Vienna by Springer with a foreword by Oskar Morgenstern and backing from the Austrian Institute for Trade Cycle Research and the London School of Economics, Tintner applies Anderson's Variate Difference Method and moving averages to decompose each series into trend, cyclical and seasonal components. His finding is that prices move unevenly — metals and interest rates on their own rhythm, textiles and foodstuffs on another — so that the notion of a general price level dissolves. He offers the results not as proof of causes but as ordered material for the theorist, cautiously favouring the monetary cycle theories of Wicksell, Mises and Hayek.

We consider time, on the contrary, only as a kind of auxiliary variable, which we must eliminate in order to bring out the economic relations.

Frank Knight's assault on the Austrian period of production provokes this sharp rejoinder, in which Machlup concedes the term's clumsiness while rescuing the concept it names. Capital, he insists against Knight, is not perpetual: maintenance may be assumed in a stationary model but cannot be smuggled in when the very question is whether capital is preserved, enlarged, or consumed. Renaming it the period of investment, he locates it on the input side—productive services carrying consumption distances—and shows that neither construction time nor average durability exhausts its meaning. The payoff is business-cycle theory: credit expansion stretches the investment period beyond what voluntary saving would support, so the crisis springs from a divergence between individual time preferences and the time structure of production, not from monetary mishap alone.

To explain unemployment (through wage stickiness) is one thing; to explain the business cycle is another.

Long treated as a moral demand or a rational blueprint for society, socialism must instead be judged, Hayek insists in this German-language essay, by whether it can actually coordinate scarce means among competing ends. The distinction he presses is between technical and economic problems: a technician optimizes toward a given end, but a society must weigh forgone alternatives, and only money prices for intermediate goods, capital, and factors of production make such comparison possible. Tracing the debate from Gossen, Pierson, and Barone to its decisive formulation by Mises in 1920, he shows why marginal utility theory made the calculation problem unavoidable, and why historicism and Marxian anti-utopianism had long concealed it. The burden of proof, he concludes, falls squarely on socialism's advocates.

In einer reinen Verkehrswirtschaft denkt niemand über irgendwelche wirtschaftlichen Probleme nach, außer über seine eigenen.

English translation: “In a pure exchange economy, nobody reflects on any economic problems other than his own.”

Add as many mail-coaches as you please, you will never get a railroad by so doing — with that image the essay marks the fault line between growth and innovation that organizes its argument. Reprinted from the Review of Economic Statistics, it brackets the exogenous shocks — wars, weather, gold discoveries — that make every fluctuation historically unique, in order to ask whether capitalism generates an endogenous wave-form of its own. It does, Schumpeter contends: purely economic cycles arise from the clustered insertion and absorption of innovations, financed by credit creation, yielding four phases of prosperity, recession, depression, and revival. From this follows the three-cycle schema of Kondratieff, Juglar, and Kitchin waves, and a sustained warning against monetary and trend-fitting explanations that mistake symptom for mechanism.

If there be a purely economic cycle at all, it can only come from the way in which new things are, in the institutional conditions of capitalist society, inserted into the economic process and absorbed by it.

Where formal precision should have brought clarity, the debate over the elasticity of substitution had instead grown unintelligible, its related but distinct ideas forced under one name. Machlup's clarification separates Robinson's and Hicks's appendix concept—a partial-equilibrium measure of technical substitution—from Hicks's main-text concern with factor shares in the National Dividend. His commonsense rests on substitution within increase: when a factor grows more abundant the economy does not discard the other, but industries rearrange combinations as the community absorbs the larger supply. Distribution theory, he argues, needs an elasticity of total substitution fusing producers' technical substitution with consumers' choice among commodities—and every such elasticity rises with the time allowed for adjustment, since fixed capital yields only slowly.

THE discussion of the “elasticity of substitution” is conspicuous for its unintelligibility.

Hidden inside general-equilibrium theory sits a premise its authors rarely state: that agents foresee the future without error. Morgenstern treats this 'vollkommene Voraussicht' not as a harmless simplification but as a logical fault line running through theories of risk, profit, money, and the business cycle. Pressed for its meaning — whose foresight, of which events, over what horizon — the assumption collapses. In a world of interdependent agents each forecast must include others' forecasts of oneself, and the Holmes–Moriarty regress of anticipated reactions and counter-reactions has no natural stopping point. Unlimited foresight, he shows, is simply incompatible with equilibrium, while total ignorance is impossible too. What remains is a research program: expectations as heterogeneous, fallible, socially distributed variables — an early step toward the strategic reasoning of game theory.

Unbeschränkte Voraussicht und wirtschaftliches Gleichgewicht sind also miteinander unverträglich.

English translation: “Unlimited foresight and economic equilibrium are therefore incompatible with each other.”

When Frank Knight attacked the notion that time plays any distinct role in production, he struck at the core of Bohm-Bawerk's capital theory; this 1935 essay for the Zeitschrift fur Nationalokonomie mounts the defense. Strigl concedes that the older formulations were rigid and sometimes misleading, but reconstructs the essential claim through a vertically integrated autarkic trust and a new concept, Bindungszeit — the time elapsing between a unit of labor and its finished consumer good. Lengthening binding times raises output; shortening them lowers it. Capital multiplied by time thus functions as a genuine factor subject to diminishing returns, so interest can be explained as its marginal product, and every capital good, he argues, must ultimately be traced back to original factors plus these Zinskostenelemente, the cost of time itself.

Daß da ohne Rücksicht auf die Formulierung doch ein richtiger Kern gegeben sein muß, zeigt die schließlich jedem Schulkind bekannte Regel, daß man Zinsen niemals anders als mit der Formel Kapital mal Zeit mal Zinssatz berechnen kann.

English translation: “That there must nevertheless be a correct core here, regardless of the formulation, is shown by the rule known in the end to every schoolchild: that interest can never be calculated except by the formula capital times time times the rate of interest.”

Austria's 1934 constitution, and the authoritarian turn behind it, mark for Voegelin not a sudden rupture but a late episode in a state that never quite became one. Total and authoritarian, he argues, are political symbols forged in struggle rather than scientific concepts, and he assembles their elements—Carl Schmitt's total state, economic Vermachtung, mass activation, the monopoly of propaganda, the education of a people by its elite—before turning to the specifically Austrian problem: an empire of many nations that produced no unified Staatsvolk to will the republic into being. Much of the book is a sustained critique of Kelsen's pure theory of law, whose reduction of the state to a system of coercive norms Voegelin reads as an administrative evasion of political substance, and as the very formalism that made the 1933–34 transition so hard to name.

Die Machtquelle bleibt anonym.

English translation: “The source of power remains anonymous.”

A gift given, a service rendered, a wrong avenged: beneath these Thurnwald finds one impulse toward counter-performance, and here he raises reciprocity into the organizing principle of social life. Association begins in the bio-psychical complementarity of the sexes and ages—marriage as durable mutual care, parent and child bound by deferred return, the living tied to ancestors through offerings. He rejects any primitive communism of products, reads barter, kula, and potlatch as personal repayment rather than impersonal purchase, and interprets Buin shell money as a memory-sign of obligation. Stratification bends reciprocity into clientage, feudalism, serfdom, and slavery—equilibria that turn unjust once valuations shift—while law, morality, and revenge appear as its formalized demands. Cultures decline, he warns, when this balance is lost.

Jede Leistung aus der „Spezialität“ des einen Partners soll zur Erwiderung beim anderen anregen.

English translation: “Every service arising from the "specialty" of one partner is meant to prompt a reciprocal response from the other.”

Three movements organize a century and a half of Swiss constitutional history in Rappard's telling: the emancipation of the individual, the triumph of democracy, and the rise of the state. He begins with the great paradox — that the Helvetic Constitution imposed by French bayonets in 1798, with its liberty, equality, and unitary citizenship, came to shape modern Switzerland more than the old Confederation ever did — and traces the sequence through the Act of Mediation, the reactionary Pact of 1815, the liberal cantonal revolutions of 1830, the federal Constitution of 1848, and the centralizing revisions after 1874. The individual who freed himself from the aristocratic state, and then mastered it through referendum and initiative, ends by surrendering to a federal statism of tariffs, railways, insurance, and subsidies whose swelling debt Rappard reads as the measure of lost independence.

Pour triompher définitivement en Suisse, le libéralisme avait donc dû faire appel au moins libéral des arguments.

English translation: “To triumph definitively in Switzerland, liberalism had thus been obliged to resort to the least liberal of arguments.”