The archive.

Should Cantillon be read for his place in economics’ ancestry, or for what his reasoning can still teach? In this 1932 review of Henry Higgs’s edition and English translation of the Essai, Hayek firmly favours the latter. His praise for making the work accessible accompanies a precise textual objection: neither the printed French nor the reconstructed English is straightforwardly the original, and the edition does not adequately distinguish its English sources. The review brings Hayek’s theoretical commitments into contact with the practical demands of scholarship. Readers can discover why he regards historical priority and conjectures about influence as less compelling than direct engagement with Cantillon’s analysis—and why access to that analysis still requires editorial transparency.

Statutes, reserve rules, and central-bank independence all fail, Strigl warns, against the one authority that can suspend them — the state itself. Written amid the crisis after 1929, as several central banks drifted back toward expansionary “accommodating” policy, this essay asks whether a currency can be secured against political manipulation rather than mere mismanagement. Its conceptual pivot is a reversal of Gresham’s law: where people are free to denominate contracts, wages, and credit in a sounder foreign currency, good money drives out bad, and depreciating money survives only through ignorance, habit, or coercion. Strigl’s remedy is not a new currency scheme but a legal one — treaties binding states never to prohibit a partner’s currency, creating an automatic and sensitive index of monetary health. A state that cannot outlaw the foreign money cannot inflate.

Der Geist der Zeit ist inflationistisch und manche Völker werden für ihre Heilung von währungspolitischen Irrtümern jetzt wieder schweres Lehrgeld zahlen müssen.

English translation: “The spirit of the age is inflationist, and some peoples will now once again have to pay dearly to be cured of their monetary-policy errors.”

Hermann Heinrich Gossen hoped his economic treatise would bring him the fame of Copernicus; its neglect instead led him to order the edition destroyed shortly before his death. In this brief encyclopedia entry, republished in 1937, Hayek sets that disappointment beside Gossen’s later recognition as a precursor of marginal-utility economics. His emphasis is precise: Gossen’s contribution lay in connecting diminishing satisfaction with the allocation of scarce resources and the explanation of subjective value. Readers can see how the choice between competing wants becomes a rule for maximizing satisfaction—and how the same reasoning extends to balancing productive effort against its burden. The entry offers a compact encounter with both an overlooked economist and the principles that made his work recognizable to later theorists.

Popular control need not produce radical change. In this signed encyclopedia contribution, William Emmanuel Rappard explains why Swiss referendums and initiatives have, in his judgement, served chiefly as conservative safeguards. He connects that political restraint to older patterns of social equality, cantonal autonomy, and collective executives whose members can remain in office despite voters’ rejection of their policies. His distinctive concern is the fit between institutions and the society sustaining them: federalism and neutrality accommodate linguistic and religious differences, while durable administration limits personal leadership. The account also acknowledges women’s exclusion from suffrage, qualifying Switzerland’s democratic reputation. Readers encounter a compact comparative argument about how popular supremacy can coexist with administrative continuity—and why constitutional arrangements alone cannot explain that balance.

Imports are always advantageous, exports only under certain circumstances: this asymmetry anchors Wilhelm Röpke’s brief account of Karl Heinrich Hagen’s contribution to trade theory. In this signed encyclopedia entry, republished in 1937, Röpke places Hagen between Adam Smith’s classical doctrines and the administrative concerns of older cameralism, then singles out his Cournot-influenced mathematical analysis of trade duties. The entry offers a compact introduction to an early German attempt to measure the effects of commercial policy—and a precise correction to its reception. Röpke rejects the claim that Hagen sometimes favoured import duties, distinguishing that mistaken reading from Hagen’s conditional assessment of exports.

A wool merchant who helped build banks and railroads also sought limits on Prussian absolutism. In this compact biographical encyclopedia entry, Wilhelm Röpke connects David Hansemann’s commercial initiatives with his constitutional politics: economic development required relief from political restraints. Yet the liberalism Röpke describes had definite boundaries—constitutional monarchy and strong representation for the propertied middle class, rather than democratic revolution. The entry offers a concise portrait of how institution-building in commerce and credit could accompany demands for political reform, without abandoning monarchy.

Hansemann was a moderate liberal, his objective a constitutional monarchy with strong representation for the propertied middle class.

More houses do not necessarily mean affordable homes. That distinction gives Karl Pribram’s European housing survey its critical edge. In this signed encyclopedia section, first published in 1932 and reprinted here in 1935, dwelling forms are inseparable from wages, land ownership, credit, and public finance. His comparisons expose the difficult economics of reform: rent controls protect tenants but can discourage maintenance; subsidies expand construction without necessarily putting new dwellings within workers’ reach; small houses require costly transport and infrastructure. Vienna’s municipal building and Germany’s subsidized expansion offer concrete tests of these tensions. Readers can discover why Pribram regards adequate housing as an enduring public responsibility while remaining attentive to the financial conditions that determine whom reform actually serves.

Does labor-saving machinery restore employment simply because it releases purchasing power? In this 1932 assessment of the Verein für Sozialpolitik’s Dresden meeting, Fritz Machlup insists that spending and reemployment are different problems. He tests fellow economists’ explanations against the roles of wages, capital formation, and restrictions on trade, arguing that “industrialization” too often becomes a catch-all for disturbances requiring distinct causal accounts. His defense of market adjustment also sets limits on policy expertise: understanding economic relationships does not tell officials precisely where equilibrium lies. The article offers both a record of economists’ resistance to autarky and an internal critique of their reasoning, showing why agreement against a policy is no substitute for explaining how it produces its effects.

Can a theory of prices explain whether people become better off? In this 1932 review of the first two volumes of G.-H. Bousquet’s Institutes de Science économique, Schumpeter treats that question as a test of economic theory’s reach. He admires Bousquet’s accessible presentation of Walras and Pareto, yet distinguishes equilibrium’s analytical power from its less secure application to the wider social environment. His sharpest discussion concerns Bousquet’s return to subjective satisfaction—and the claim that habit and new wants eventually cancel the felt benefits of economic improvement. Schumpeter praises the ingenuity of this argument without simply accepting its conclusion. The review offers a compact encounter with his critical standards: theoretical clarity matters, but so does recognizing the questions a successful method leaves unanswered.

Christian Jacob Kraus published little, yet his lectures reached officials who would carry out the Stein–Hardenberg reforms. In this compact 1932 encyclopedia entry, Karl Pribram makes that contrast the key to Kraus’s influence. He places the Königsberg teacher between Kant’s moral philosophy and the Scottish thinkers’ accounts of sympathy and economic freedom, then connects these commitments to Kraus’s opposition to guilds, serfdom and noble privileges. The entry offers a concise account of how Smithian ideas entered Prussian administrative circles—not principally through a major published treatise, but through the education of future reformers.

A prediction come true frames this 1932 pamphlet: the crisis, its author had forecast, would end only after Italian banking reconstruction, the collapse and reorganization of Germany's banks, Britain's suspension of gold, and the fall of the Kreuger concern. With those grim preconditions fulfilled, Somary asks whether the turn has come. He indicts moratoria and the German Stillhalteabkommen as evasions that postpone necessary write-downs, argues that commodity prices have reached a despair point from which raw-material countries will lead recovery, and reads France's vast hoarded gold reserve—explained through the memory of John Law and the assignats—as a latent support. His proposals bind reparations to guaranteed purchases of American wheat, cotton, and copper, cut expenditure to revenue, and rehabilitate currencies by telling the truth and writing down claims.

Mit „Kreditschöpfung“ ist wenig zu erreichen, es fehlt nicht an Kapital noch an Kredit, sondern an guten Schuldnern.

English translation: “Little can be achieved with "credit creation"; what is lacking is neither capital nor credit, but sound debtors.”

Why does socially necessary work so often carry low status, and what entitles workers to a share of the wealth they produce? In this signed encyclopedia entry, republished in 1937, Emil Lederer treats labor as a social relationship rather than merely a productive input. Guild pride, religious discipline, and factory dependence reveal how occupational esteem follows structures of power, not usefulness alone. Yet he also resists deriving a uniquely just distribution from labor’s contribution to value: management, monopoly, and inherited institutions complicate any such calculation. The entry offers a compact way to connect disputes over wages and dignity with a larger question—who controls production—while showing why mechanization and collective organization make that question increasingly difficult to avoid.