The archive.

For Alexander Mahr, Alfred Amonn exemplified an economics in which conceptual precision served practical judgment rather than becoming an end in itself. This obituary brings that standard into focus through Amonn’s Austrian intellectual formation, his teaching in Bern, and his recovery of Sismondi’s analysis of crises and market dynamics. Mahr’s portrait turns on a productive tension: he praises theoretical explanation while rejecting models he considers too unrealistic to guide policy. His account of Amonn’s influence on younger Swiss economists gives this distinction an institutional setting, where theory had to establish its place against historically oriented teaching. Readers encounter both a compact scholarly remembrance and Mahr’s own criteria for useful economics: causal understanding, critical independence, and attention to the consequences of policy.

Change one assumption—that India needs three units of capital to yield one of output, not the 2.2 the Pant and Little memoranda supposed—and the arithmetic of the Third Five Year Plan turns forbidding. Working through three numerical models for 1960 to 1966, Rosenstein-Rodan shows how heavily national income, taxation, borrowing and required savings all hinge on this single ratio. Model b, demanding a 38 percent marginal savings rate on meagre foreign aid, he dismisses as a reductio ad absurdum; a plausible rate lies nearer 23 percent. His preferred model c couples the realistic 3:1 ratio with substantially higher aid—some 3,000 crores—as the only path to 4.8 percent annual growth without crushing austerity. A quiet lesson in how development plans live or die by their coefficients.

The assumption of a capital-output ratio 2·2:1 seems, however, to be dangerously optimistic.

Ricardo's wine-and-cloth doctrine, stripped of its labour theory of value and restated in general-equilibrium and welfare terms, still governs agriculture and primary exports, so Haberler argues against a mid-century development economics eager to bury it. He grants that perfect competition and the absence of externalities never fully hold, but denies that the sheer pervasiveness of such impurities refutes the theory. Point by point he dismantles the objections: the ECLA-Kaldor claim that farm exporters face monopolistic industrial sellers, the Prebisch-Singer thesis of secularly deteriorating terms of trade, which he shows unsupported by Lipsey's data, and the notion of agricultural labour with zero marginal product. His one real concession is the genuine external economy of training a skilled, supervisory, and entrepreneurial workforce, the only sound version of the infant-industry case.

But no theory, however complicated and refined, can offer more than a simplified or idealized picture of the infinite complexities of the real world.

In 1956 nuclear power seemed a natural answer for coal-poor, grid-rich economies like Europe and Japan; three years later, Rosenstein-Rodan argues, that case had quietly collapsed as coal and oil cheapened and technical progress favoured conventional thermal plants instead. Turning to underdeveloped countries, he marshals four structural objections—reactors demand large generating units, dependable grids, very high base-load factors, and punishing capital intensity—and insists India apply a shadow interest rate near 10 percent. Recomputed on realistic load factors, coal-fired power comes out 50 to 60 percent cheaper than nuclear. The essay dismantles H. J. Bhabha's proposed million-kilowatt programme and the optimism surrounding third-generation thorium reactors, counselling India to wait rather than sink scarce capital into uneconomic early plants it could ill afford.

When a man is hungry he may pay a high price for a meal, but he should not proceed to buy a restaurant.

Government is neither evil nor dispensable: peace among people requires an apparatus able to restrain violence, and Western history is largely the effort to confine that apparatus by rights and law. From this limited defense Mises turns to the deception named in his title, the interventionism that claims to preserve private property while subjecting every business decision to official permission whenever rulers invoke the public interest. Such a policy, he argues, is no coherent third system between the market economy of consumer sovereignty and the command economy of political orders; the two assign final authority to different agents and cannot be fused into a workable composite. Each intervention disappoints its own authors and provokes the next, until the market determination of production and consumption is, decree by decree, eliminated.

The subjugation of a free nation by the forces of the most tyrannical regime history has ever known is called "liberation."

Affluence has not made people happier: that unsettling premise drives this 1964 study of modern industrial society. Full employment, rising productivity, and mass consumption are genuine achievements, yet Mahr sees them breeding new pathologies, a wage-price spiral as governments bound to full employment accommodate every union demand, consumer egoism and status display in Veblen's sense, monotonous work, empty leisure, falling birth rates, and swelling cities. The social market economy of Müller-Armack and Erhard is defended as the best available order, but framework alone cannot suffice. His remedy is twofold: decentralized industry paired with garden-home settlements that restore meaningful activity outside the factory, and a moral renewal led by a nonpartisan elite schooled in Christian ethics and noble simplicity against the artificially inflated needs of prosperity.

Demzufolge sind die Regierungen einzugreifen gezwungen, wenn in irgendwelchen Bereichen der Volkswirtschaft ein Rückgang der Beschäftigung einsetzt.

English translation: “Governments are consequently compelled to intervene whenever a decline in employment sets in in any sector of the economy.”

No one can narrate the whole of human history exhaustively; every attempt must select, symbolize, and philosophically order. From that premise Engel-Janosi builds a genealogy of the modern effort to write universal history, tracing the underlying Grundeinstellungen that shape it—providence, secular progress, cyclical decline, national mission, cultural morphology, mythic meaning. Polybius first grasps world-historical interconnection, Augustine gives it a providential architecture, and the Enlightenment shifts its center from salvation to civilization. Ranke narrows practice to the Roman-Germanic world, Hegel excludes the peoples not chosen as vehicles of spirit, and Marx secularizes providence through modes of production. Spengler forces historians to stop equating Western development with world history, and Toynbee ends by turning history back toward myth. The essay validates no final system, only the enduring problem of the whole.

Wie immer man die geistige Leistung dieses Zeitalters beurteilen mag, eines ist gewiß: es sah und wollte Geschichtsschreibung im Sinne von Universalgeschichte.

English translation: “However one may judge the intellectual achievement of this age, one thing is certain: it saw and willed historiography in the sense of universal history.”

Every standard objection to development aid gets its hearing here first — that recipient states expropriate foreign property, drift toward socialism, squander funds through corruption, and repay generosity with nationalist ingratitude — before Kerschagl answers them one by one. Aid can check communist expansion as the Marshall Plan once did, even if friends cannot be bought; a new humanitas demands it; and corruption is met not by withholding help but by devising controls that spare the delicate matter of sovereignty. He contrasts Western dollar loans, repayable in hard currency, with Eastern credits settled in goods, calls for a coordinating umbrella over the IFC, IDA, and Export-Import Bank, and argues — invoking Nehru's claim that knowledge matters as much as bread — that material aid is worthless without education.

Diese Hilfe müsse aber so rasch wie möglich geleistet werden; denn es sei besser, einen Brand in seinen Anfängen zu löschen als bereits niedergebrannte Ruinen nutzlos unter Einsatz einer wirtschaftlichen oder politischen Feuerwehr zu retten.

English translation: “But this aid, it is said, must be rendered as quickly as possible; for it is better to extinguish a fire at its beginnings than uselessly to try to salvage already burned-out ruins by deploying an economic or political fire brigade.”

Rather than beginning in practical need, science begins in wonder and in the recognition of patterns, and some patterns, Hayek argues, can be explained but never precisely predicted. He defines complexity by the minimum number of variables required to instantiate a pattern, and places biological, mental, and social phenomena firmly on the far side of that threshold. A simple theory of an inherently complex order is likely false unless padded with a ceteris paribus clause that destroys its simplicity; statistics, treating elements as unconnected, cannot rescue it. Darwinian natural selection becomes his model of legitimate pattern prediction, falsifiable because it excludes certain sequences, yet unable to forecast actual forms. Economics and linguistics, built on systems of equations that yield no numerical prices, share the same standing and the same humility.

Staunen und unbefriedigte Wünsche haben den Menschen zu wissenschaftlicher Forschung angetrieben.

English translation: “Wonder and unsatisfied desires have driven man to scientific inquiry.”

Can economic theory be independent of experience while its application remains answerable to facts? In this brief review of Ludwig von Mises’s Epistemological Problems of Economics, reprinted here in 2013, Hayek offers a sympathetic but interpretive answer. He reads Mises’s early essays as a challenge to the belief that theory can be distilled from historical observation, distinguishing the deduction of possible patterns from evidence that those patterns apply. His suggestion that Mises stands closer to Karl Popper than their terminology implies gives the review its particular tension: an editorial note records Mises’s rejection of that affinity. The result is a compact encounter with Hayek as a methodological mediator, clarifying both the role of experience and the explanatory knowledge available through comprehension of human action.

That eternal being realizes itself in time is the lecture's lapidary thesis, and Voegelin at once refuses to let it become a closed philosophy of history observed from outside. The knower here is an actor within the very process he interprets, so the subject-object model breaks down. He organizes the inquiry around four relations between philosophy and history and locates its metaphysical center in the soul, understood not as a substance but as the sensorium of transcendence. Plato's Symposium and Gorgias supply the governing symbols, Eros, the metaxy, the judgment myth, and the key term fließende Präsenz, the flowing presence of eternity within experiential time. From this vantage he criticizes the ideological systems and imperial world-theologies that objectify being into pseudo-objects, and closes on an Augustinian note: history is an exodus from Babylon, wherever love for eternal being awakens.

Auch heute noch sind wir mit den Reichen geplagt, die ihre Welt auf dem Weg der Expansion suchen, anstatt in das metaxy der fließenden Präsenz vorzustoßen.

English translation: “Even today we are still plagued with empires that seek their world by the path of expansion, instead of pressing forward into the metaxy of the flowing presence.”

As the Goldwater campaign was being branded a 'radical right,' Sennholz set out to reverse the label, arguing that true extremism means allegiance to collectivism rather than distance from the reigning liberal consensus. His Extreme Right is Jeffersonian—committed to private property and limited government—and appears radical only because the political center has drifted left. He then prosecutes three men of the Kennedy circle: Walt Rostow, whose stages of economic growth he reads as disguised Marxian materialism; Arthur Schlesinger Jr., convicted of importing class conflict into American politics; and McGeorge Bundy, whose call for a presidentially defined 'national purpose' he likens to Führer and Gefolgschaft. Closing with Hayek's Road to Serfdom, this 1964 American Opinion essay recasts the political axis as liberty versus collectivism.

The materialism of Marx and Rostow denies man's freedom of choice. Instead it makes everything a superstructure of man's material basis, especially of his state of technology.