The archive.

History offers no mechanical template for the slump of the early 1930s, yet Schumpeter mines it anyway, 1896, 1825, 1873, for the recurring anatomy of capitalist crisis. Depressions return, he argues, because development repeatedly breeds maladjustments that must be worked out: prosperity brings new methods, firms, and products that displace the old, so the downturn is destructive and reconstructive at once, the means of rebuilding the system on a more efficient plan. Speculation is the visible break, not the cause. But every real crisis is also shaped from outside, and what makes the present one different is not scale but politics, war debts, economic nationalism, gold-standard obstruction, wage and interest policy, so that the drama is dominated less by the mechanism of capitalism than by nations bent on obstructing it. His prescription discriminates: relieve suffering, remove political injuries, but never mistake credit-driven revival for genuine recovery.

What we face is not merely the working of capitalism, but of a capitalism which nations are determined not to allow to function.

No law exists in the abstract, only particular styles of law thrown up by interlocking social conditions: so runs the thesis of this fifth volume of Thurnwald's ethno-sociology of human society. Surveying blood revenge, property, contract, suretyship, inheritance, crime, composition, outlawry, asylum, punishment, and the evidentiary machinery of oath, ordeal, and duel, he locates the psychological root of justice in reciprocity, reading vengeance, compensation, and Wergeld as balanced returns. Blood revenge among sovereign kin groups becomes the seedbed of criminal law, giving way to objective justice only when an authority stands above the parties. Contract moves from symbolic real acts through curse-bound words to consensual agreement under writing and the state. Law's whole development, he concludes, is an act of human self-domestication.

Das primitive Recht kennt keine anderen Beweismittel als Eid, Fluch und Gottesurteil.

English translation: “Primitive law knows no other means of proof than oath, curse, and ordeal.”

Problems of production must be approached first through the real relations of goods, Strigl argues, and only then through the veil of money — the reverse of the usual procedure. Published in the Zeitschrift fur Nationalokonomie in 1934, this essay reconstructs capital as a wage fund: a stock of subsistence goods that carries workers through the roundabout processes of production, bound into intermediate goods by investment and released again as finished consumer goods. He reconciles the old wage-fund doctrine with marginal-productivity theory through the interest rate, which regulates the length of production, and then turns to money capital as an independent factor. Drawing on the Wicksell-Mises circulation-credit theory, he shows how bank credit finances longer processes without a matching subsistence fund, tearing apart the structure of production until liquidation forces a crisis.

Die unzureichende Freisetzung von Kapital in der Gestalt von Fertigprodukten muß Anlaß zur Krise werden.

English translation: “The insufficient release of capital in the form of finished products must become the occasion of a crisis.”

Perfect competition earns its keep here not as a description of any real market but as the benchmark against which every messier case is measured, and messier cases, this 1934 review essay argues, are where most economic life actually sits. Assessing Joan Robinson's Economics of Imperfect Competition, Schumpeter fixes on marginal revenue as her decisive analytical discovery, the tool that restores symmetry to demand-and-supply reasoning and unifies pricing across competition, monopoly, and the territory between. He credits the book's rigor and teachability while faulting its cost: a resolutely Marshallian, two-variable, partial-equilibrium frame that forgoes indifference curves and Walrasian generality. Imperfect-competition analysis, he warns, overturns welfare and policy verdicts, sometimes into the exact opposite of what they were twenty years before.

For any science or part of a science, the first task always consists in establishing the logical autonomy of its field, or rather the conditions under which there is logical autonomy.

Price is not a peculiarly capitalist institution but a coefficient of economic choice — a quantitative index of preference among scarce alternatives that any organized society, socialist planners included, must somehow discover. That is the conceptual pivot of this compact essay reprinted from Economic Reconstruction, aimed at reformers who treated prices and profits as removable obstacles to abundance. Schumpeter carries the argument into a centralized socialist state, where planners would still need citizens to register wants with quantitative precision and would still impute values to means of production; producing whisky rather than bread from rye shows that no line divides the economic 'what' from the merely technical 'how.' Yet the essay withholds any laissez-faire comfort, preserving perfect competition only as a diagnostic instrument, since imperfect competition can yield the opposite of its promised results.

Hence rational production can never rest on exclusively technological considerations, at least not as long as all means of production are not at the command of a society in unlimited quantities.

Monetary nationalism promised escape: independent paper currencies, variable parities, and wide gold points that would seal a national economy off from foreign shocks. That promise, Hayek argues in this contribution to The Economist's debate over a future international order, is a delusion — real international adjustment cannot be evaded, only redirected, and discretionary depreciation breeds fresh conflict. Yet gold too is defective, since shifts in the demand for gold can inflict grave disturbances. His resolution treats fixed parity as a coordinating rule rather than mere attachment to metal, and proposes regulating gold-exchange reserves — central banks' realizable claims on other currencies — with a body such as the Bank for International Settlements varying the permitted ratio to offset gold's swings while leaving national reserves intact.

If an international standard is wanted, the gold standard, in spite of its undeniable defects, is the only practical choice.

Knowing where a tax truly lands, this 1935 treatise argues, must precede any judgment of tax policy. Engländer separates two domains of public finance—general tax theory and the theory of tax shifting—and grounds the obligation to pay not in any equivalence between tax and state service but in the value of the organized community itself. Tracing incidence through his own price theory, he reaches a pointed conclusion: a consumption tax does not merely burden consumers but, by curbing their spending elsewhere, drives down other producers' returns until it merges with the workings of direct taxation. From the Bernoulli-Bentham law of sacrifice he derives progressive rates and exemption of the subsistence minimum, then rejects every single-tax scheme in favor of a system that combines direct and indirect taxes to satisfy competing principles at once.

Nicht die Kaufkraft der Einkommen vermindert sich, sondern indem ein besonderes Staatseinkommen aus Steuern auftritt, vermindern sich die anderen Einkommen.

English translation: “It is not the purchasing power of incomes that diminishes; rather, as a distinct state income from taxes arises, the other incomes diminish.”

Cartelization means isolated planning—that judgment anchors this comparative study of European collective monopolies, written at the Brookings Institution as the United States debated its National Recovery Administration. A cartel, for Pribram, is defined not by its legal form but by its price policy: whether it stabilizes prices, allocates markets, and restrains output to convert competitive uncertainty into administrative allocation. Cartels flourish, he argues, not from industrial maturity but from weak, overbuilt, contracting markets, where the home market comes to look like a fixed quantity to be apportioned; the German movement before and after 1914 supplies his central evidence. Their planning is sectional, privileging producer security over consumer interest and market entry—order, but partial and self-interested, and likely to aggravate the very crises it claims to tame.

The real touchstone enabling the observer to arrive at an adequate understanding of the exact nature of cartels is the price policy they pursue on the controlled markets.

By 1935 Austria's authoritarian state had declared itself built 'auf ständischer Grundlage,' and this concise official guide maps what that meant in practice. Bayer walks through the emerging apparatus of corporatism estate by estate—agriculture, the public service, the Gewerkschaftsbund of workers and employees, and the parallel employer federations for industry, trades, commerce, transport, finance, and the free professions. His argument is made through correspondence: each workers' Berufsverband is to face a structurally matching employer body, so that collective bargaining, consultation, and arbitration can be regularized into 'Arbeitsfrieden' and class antagonism replaced by supervised parity. Membership is nominally voluntary, yet agreements bind all; leaders rise from local units even as ministers keep decisive powers of appointment. The result is Austrofascist ideology translated into concrete administrative machinery for absorbing labour and capital into supervised public structures.

Eine der größten Gefahren der berufständischen Ordnung wäre eine Abschließung der Berufstände gegeneinander; dies würde nichts anderes bedeuten, als daß an Stelle des Egoismus des einzelnen der Gruppenegoismus der Berufszweige treten würde.

English translation: “One of the greatest dangers of the occupational-corporative order would be a sealing-off of the occupational estates against one another; this would mean nothing less than that the group egoism of the occupational branches would take the place of the egoism of the individual.”

Out of the collision and layering of ethnically distinct groups—Überschichtung—Thurnwald derives the state, in this fourth volume tracing political form from egalitarian hordes, clans, and sibs up through sacral chieftainship, feudal tribute, caste, and rationalized despotism. Conquest, pastoral migration, and marriage, not kinship alone, generate rule. He rejects Freud's primal father-horde and Rousseau's unregulated state of nature, holds that society climbs no single ladder from simple to complex, and gathers cases from the Marind-anim of southern New Guinea to Norse Greenland and Polynesian sea-aristocracies. States may rise and vanish, he concludes, yet the knowledge won in building them is never wholly lost.

Der Klan ist eine Extremgestaltung, wobei politische, Kult- und Heirats-Organisation zusammenfallen.

English translation: “The clan is an extreme formation, in which political, cultic, and marriage organization coincide.”

Read through the political vocabulary of the Fascist “new state,” Pius XI's encyclical Quadragesimo anno becomes, in this 1935 tract, the moral principle that saves a corporative order from mere statism. Kerschagl presents Italian fascism as the force that overcame liberal weakness and socialist disorder—liberalism having atomized society into isolated individuals, socialism having overrun weak parliaments—and reads the Lateran settlement as proof that Church and regime can coexist when neither encroaches on the other's sphere. Fascism is redefined as organization: hierarchy, vocational grouping, and service to the whole, with freedom relocated from liberal autonomy to ordered incorporation. The encyclical's contribution, he argues, is a regulative principle the market cannot supply—social justice and social charity—binding both laissez-faire capitalism and class socialism to moral law.

Es soll gezeigt werden, daß ein faschistisches Programm ganz dem Geiste der großen Enzyklika entsprechen kann.

English translation: “It shall be shown that a Fascist program can fully correspond to the spirit of the great encyclical.”

Expanded from two Prague lectures, this 1935 Springer volume confronts a world in which the abandoned gold standard has left currencies isolated and distrusted, with governments reaching for devaluation as a weapon of trade policy. Devaluation, Reisch argues, is merely a valuta dumping that erodes trust and eventually raises the cost of imported inputs and of domestic goods; against it he sets an active policy for 'inländische Auslandwährung,' treating export-earned foreign exchange as a separate mass sold at differentiated rates. He develops Ernst Ružička's plan for a foreign trade bank issuing valuta bonds split into A coupons for vital imports and B coupons for dispensable ones, and offers the scheme as a faster road than devaluation toward a restored gold standard and world monetary peace.

Der Goldstandard war sozusagen die gemeinsame Sprache, das einigende Band im internationalen Handel.

English translation: “The gold standard was, so to speak, the common language, the unifying bond in international trade.”