The archive.

Against the overriding weight of the German alliance, a Viennese salon hostess imagined another Austria. Engel-Janosi reconstructs Berta Szeps-Zuckerkandl's spring 1917 peace feelers as a small but revealing episode in the monarchy's final crisis, tracing her Francophile, anti-Prussian conviction back through a whole Austro-French lineage—Kaunitz's reversal of alliances, Crown Prince Rudolf's circle, her father Moriz Szeps's liberal journalism, and family ties to Georges Clemenceau. Her idea of a separate peace with France, meant to spare Austria from collapse, was no mere salon fantasy, yet the essay records its bitter irony: speaking freely to Harry Kessler, she saw her secret carried straight to the German envoy Romberg and on to Berlin. Czernin's refusal to break with Germany marks the tragic limit of private diplomacy.

August 1914! Der Krieg! Mich ergriff der allgemeine patriotische Taumel nicht. Ich bäumte mich sofort gegen den Haßrausch auf, der selbst die zartesten Gemüter erschütterte.

English translation: “August 1914! The war! The general patriotic frenzy did not seize me. I at once rebelled against the intoxication of hatred that shook even the most delicate spirits.”

Against Schumpeter and Sombart, who dismissed Vienna as an incomplete anticipation of Walrasian equilibrium, this German essay locates the Austrian school's significance elsewhere: in its introduction of Verstehen, interpretive understanding, into theoretical social science. Lachmann sets three traditions against one another. Classical economics, following Ricardo, imitated natural science—laws of distribution among factor classes, value as a labor-measured substance, man as a homogeneous production factor. The Austrians put the acting individual at the center, turning marginal utility into a logic of choice and plans. And the Lausanne school, needing timeless statics in which every alternative is already given, stands opposite a theory that requires real time because mental acts unfold in time. The closing move extends this interpretive economics toward institutions—supra-individual schemes of thought at which individual plans orient themselves and are coordinated.

Die österreichische Theorie bedarf der Zeitdimension, da geistige Akte nur in der Zeit möglich sind.

English translation: “Austrian theory requires the dimension of time, since mental acts are possible only in time.”

Persistent payments deficits do not prove that trade has failed; they prove, Rueff contends, that the monetary mechanism which should correct them has been switched off. Marshalling the French indemnity payments of 1871, German reparations, and the postwar dollar shortage, he argues that trade balances adjust through relative prices and cash-balance movements to offset every other international payment—reviving his 1929 duel with Keynes over transfer capacity and the alleged 'natural level of exports.' The American deficit endures, on his account, only because the gold-exchange standard returns dollars to New York, so the debtor never feels the loss. Equilibrium is too improbable by chance for its long survival to be accidental; the remedy is restored convertibility and a corrected discount rate, not administrative restraint on foreign spending.

Le principal caractère d'une balance des paiements équilibrée, c'est son extrême improbabilité.

English translation: “The principal characteristic of a balanced balance of payments is its extreme improbability.”

Setting aside Marx the revolutionary, sociologist, and prophet, this retrospective judges only Marx the economist — and finds the system wanting on every count that matters. Haberler locates the fatal defect in the value theory itself: once Volume III introduces equalized profit rates and prices of production, commodities no longer exchange at the labour values Volume I requires, so Böhm-Bawerk's old charge of internal contradiction still stands, now reinforced by Samuelson's analysis of the transformation problem. From logical failure he turns to practical sterility, arguing that even socialist planners improved only by smuggling back interest, scarcity pricing, and comparative cost. The prophecies fare no better: working-class immiseration, the imperialism thesis, and predictions of ever-deepening crises all founder against the economic record.

The assertion that in the capitalist countries real wages have a secular tendency to decline flies in the face of what everyone knows of economic history.

The most elegant formal models exclude exactly what makes a market intelligible—plans, expectations, disappointment, and the revision that follows. That is Lachmann's charge against neoclassical formalism, which swaps causal explanation for closed systems of simultaneous equations and imagines the economy as a single optimizing subject gliding along a maximum growth path. He attacks aggregate production functions like the Cobb-Douglas for dissolving heterogeneous firms and capital goods, and dismisses dynamic equilibria as the preoccupations of economists indifferent to actual markets. In their place he sketches a genetic-causal, open-system theory built on the individual plan: capital as the vessel of entrepreneurial expectations, the stock exchange as a forward market in future yields, competition as a chain of innovation, imitation, and eroded advantage. The project he binds to Eucken, Mises, Hayek, and Röpke.

Dynamic equilibria, maximum growth paths, and similar concepts are notions of economists with little interest in what matters in the market economy.

What presents itself as a review of Hicks's Capital and Growth becomes a sustained challenge to equilibrium growth theory itself. Lachmann admires Hicks as a broker between the Marshallian, Paretian, Wicksellian, and Keynesian traditions, and welcomes his refusal of homogeneous capital, yet he presses one question the models cannot answer: can an economy actually traverse from one growth path to another? During any such transition the capital stock must be reshaped while relative prices, technology, expectations, and wealth distribution all shift, so the price system required for the new equilibrium can never be known in advance. Malinvestment, mentioned only once in Hicks's book, is for Lachmann a normal feature of a world where capital goods embody past plans and expectations diverge, revisable and causally powerful.

In this way he has become a prominent mediator between different strands of thought, a broker of ideas whose influence has been far greater than is often realised today.

Strip a system of its outer layers and something eventually gives way, not gradually but all at once. Morgenstern's essay builds a vocabulary for that threshold, introducing compressibility, the selective reduction of an economy or organization that preserves its defining function, against the kernel, the minimal core below which the thing ceases to be what it was. He resists the picture of total connectedness implied by input-output schemes read as if every cell were indispensable, since such a system would collapse at the first loss. Real economies, armies, and bureaucracies instead shed activities, reorganize, and substitute; war, scarcity, and damage reveal cores that abundance ordinarily hides. Part II turns to economic constants, denying that economics has physics-like constants while insisting on firmer physiological and technological bounds, from caloric minimums to reproduction times, beneath the shifting surface of prices.

A system will be said to be totally connected if the destruction of any of its parts destroys the whole system, i. e., deprives it of all of its functions.

A public quarrel among Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, and Walter Heller over tight money and recession opens this 1966 essay, which Sennholz quickly recasts as a deeper confusion over what inflation even is. Properly, he insists, inflation means the expansion of money and credit; rising prices are only its delayed effect, and by narrowing the word to prices officials shift blame from the central bank to business and labor. Marshaling figures on Federal Reserve credit, Treasury currency, and bank deposits from 1960 to 1966, he builds an Austrian diagnosis: cheap manufactured money signals savings that do not exist, luring investment that later collapses. The 'zigzag course' of 1966 shows a Fed trapped between lowering prices and lowering rates. The ration book, he warns, waits at the end of the road.

The Federal Reserve Banks fathered the Great Society boom through vast injections of money and credit.

Behind the Bretton Woods debates over how much gold and foreign exchange a country ought to hold lies a prior question Machlup insists economists have dodged: whether monetary authorities can be said to need reserves at all. Distinguishing need from desire and demand, he defines a need by the consequences of its absence — devaluation, deflation, exchange controls — and turns that test against the familiar ratios of reserves to imports, money supply, or past deficits, which he finds describe convention rather than requirement. Data from fourteen industrial countries between 1949 and 1965 show variation no single formula explains. His wife's-wardrobe analogy reframes the matter: what a growing world economy needs is not a particular stock but annual additions to reserves, enough to keep governments from lurching toward restriction.

This article will address itself to the question whether it is possible to find any objective criteria for the need of monetary reserves, either for individual countries or for the world at large.

What can sustain a lifelong, costly alienation from the status quo when victory seems distant? Rothbard dismisses the thin answers—liberty as intellectual amusement, or as a route to private profit—and rejects even utilitarian forecasts of abundance as too weak to command sacrifice. The durable ground, he insists, is a passion for justice, and his central move is to distinguish injustice from misfortune: poverty yields only slowly to capital and time, but injustice is an action men inflict on other men and can therefore cease at once. English rule in Ireland, wage and price controls, chattel slavery—each could be ended by will. Invoking Leonard Read's button and William Lloyd Garrison's demand for immediate emancipation, Rothbard casts the true libertarian as a radical abolitionist who states the end without dilution.

In framing principle, it is of the utmost importance not to mix in strategic estimates with the forging of desired goals.

No concept in economic theory, Mahr observes, has been defined in more diverse ways than capital—and much theoretical confusion follows from treating heterogeneous objects and markets as one. He holds real capital and money capital to be two aspects of a single phenomenon, and separates capital in the national-economic sense from private wealth that merely yields income: consumer loans, resold securities, and land purchases may enrich an owner without adding to social productive capacity. The fiction of a single market and a single interest rate dissolves into a short-term money market and a long-term investment market that communicate only imperfectly, their rate differences sustained by liquidity, cycle, and institutional constraint. Interest, finally, is neither a reward for saving nor a mere liquidity premium but an investment premium that restrains hoarding and keeps funds flowing to productive capital.

Der Zins ist weder eine Prämie für das Sparen, noch wird er als Illiquiditätsprämie ausreichend charakterisiert. Er ist vielmehr als Investitionsprämie zu bezeichnen.

English translation: “Interest is neither a premium for saving, nor is it adequately characterized as a liquidity premium. Rather, it is to be designated as an investment premium.”

Rising orders, wages, and profits looked like recovery in 1967; Sennholz hears in them the opening report of a coming collapse. The boom, he argues, is manufactured by expansionary Federal Reserve credit and deficit finance, above all the 'even keel' policy that pins interest rates down while the Treasury borrows heavily—which forces the central bank to create the very money that suppression requires. A proposed tax surcharge, in his view, would only feed further Great Society spending. He dwells on the victims: widows, pensioners, savers, and bondholders who meet inflation as lost purchasing power rather than prosperity, since prices never rise evenly. Artificially cheap credit breeds malinvestment, and the boom carries its own bust within it. Only the federal government, he concludes, can inflate and depreciate the currency—so only it bears the blame.

The inflation that generates the boom is a hidden tax on all money holdings.