The archive.

Scientific cooperation need not depend on agreement about what science ultimately is. In this review of the early installments of the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, Felix Kaufmann supports the project while rejecting its physicalist doctrine: the claim that biological, psychological, and sociological concepts can be reduced to physical concepts. His concern is concrete—efforts to eliminate metaphysical pseudo-problems may also discard genuine questions. Judgments about probability, formalization, and linguistics test another requirement of unity: whether specialists can make their problems intelligible beyond their own disciplines. The review offers a critical participant’s perspective on an ambitious cooperative enterprise, distinguishing the value of shared inquiry from the adequacy of its philosophical framework.

Each reader should be enabled to obtain a coherent view of the problems dealt with, even if he cannot understand every detail.

Why should wartime allies trade as though they were strangers? In this 1939 letter to The Spectator, reprinted in 1997, Friedrich August von Hayek turns Norman Angell’s proposal for Anglo-French federal unity into an immediate economic challenge. Expensive domestic purchases, inferior substitutes and currency restrictions, he argues, weaken the partners’ combined productive capacity. His example of reciprocal luxury trade sharpens the point: suppressing industries poorly suited to military production need not free useful resources for war. This brief intervention shows Hayek testing a political aspiration against practical arrangements, distinguishing unavoidable cross-channel transport difficulties from policy barriers that allies could remove.

Comprehensive state control may be indispensable to modern warfare without making an economy socialist. In this 1939 essay from War in Our Time, Emil Lederer explains that distinction through the material demands of mobilization: military orders absorb labor and raw materials while civilian supplies shrink, so price controls alone cannot prevent shortages. His comparison of totalitarian preparation with democratic alternatives keeps attention on the real resources behind borrowing, investment restrictions, rationing, and substitute industries. The central contrast is between war’s excess demand and the idle capacity of peacetime depression. Readers can discover why apparently similar instruments of economic intervention serve sharply different purposes—and why even extensive planning cannot overcome limits imposed by population, raw materials, and productive capacity.

Full employment is both an economic objective and a condition of political survival in John Strachey’s programme for a transition towards socialism. In this short review, G. L. S. Shackle credits Strachey with understanding Keynes while questioning his circuitous route from orthodox socialist principles to Keynesian policy. His most pointed reservation concerns institutions: how can consumers remain free to choose if industries’ relative outputs are settled in advance? Shackle’s response lets readers see a sympathetic economist distinguish persuasive proposals for investment and consumption from an unresolved problem of planning. His closing admission that the book has changed his own thinking gives this appraisal a personal stake without dissolving its critical judgement.

Agreement is not enough to make an argument persuasive. In this 1940 review of Carl Snyder’s Capitalism the Creator, Hayek praises the statistical evidence for industrial progress while questioning its power to defeat rival economic explanations. His sharpest objection concerns the word “capitalism”: does it mean production using large quantities of capital, or free enterprise and private ownership? Evidence for the first does not necessarily establish the case for the second. The review offers a compact encounter with Hayek as a sympathetic but exacting critic, showing why he regards explicit theory and precise definitions as indispensable even to conclusions he largely shares.

Yet, although I happen entirely to agree with him on almost all these points, I fear that his facts will convince few who hold contrary opinions.

A comprehensive account of trade controls is not necessarily an account of trade planning. This distinction anchors Gottfried Haberler’s brief 1940 review of Heinrich Heuser’s Control of International Trade. Haberler values the book’s otherwise hard-to-find material on import quotas, exchange controls, and bilateral clearing and payment agreements, while noting its omission of the broader planning questions raised by the Russian and German systems. His judgement gives teachers of international trade a concrete assessment of the book’s usefulness, tempered by criticism of its editing and organization. The review offers a compact example of how Haberler separates descriptive coverage, theoretical analysis, and practical usability in assessing economic scholarship.

Gerhard Tintner’s brief review of S. Koller’s Graphische Tafeln zur Beurteilung statistischer Zahlen judges the book by its usefulness in statistical calculation. He identifies its nomograms—graphical aids covering several statistical distributions—and singles out the well-chosen practical examples as a help to users. The review offers a compact recommendation grounded in usability rather than theoretical novelty, showing precisely what Tintner valued in this medical statistician’s handbook.

When do statistical graphs substantiate an economic theory, rather than merely illustrate it? In this brief review of Joseph A. Schumpeter’s Business Cycles, Oskar Morgenstern admires the attempt to connect entrepreneurial innovation and credit expansion with economic history, yet questions the evidentiary force of its statistics. His objections are concrete: specialized business-cycle measurements go unused, and graphs sometimes lack scales and index bases. Neither criticism cancels his appreciation of Schumpeter’s discussion of time series and economic waves. The review offers a compact example of methodological judgement: Morgenstern distinguishes theoretical ambition, historically informed explanation, and independently useful statistical evidence without demanding that admiration exclude disagreement.

Written as Keynesian ascendancy pushed Austrian cycle theory to the margins, this reconstruction insists that its critics had mistaken its character: the theory is not a static contrast between saving and credit but a dynamic account of how investment reshapes the interdependence of industries over time. Its hinge is irreversibility—investment transforms fluid resources into specific, complementary capital that mistaken expectations can no longer unwind. Lachmann gives the theory a sectoral anatomy of consumers' goods, equipment, raw-material, and 'dynamic key' industries, and joins the Lundberg effect to the Ricardo effect to show how falling real wages during a boom divert entrepreneurs from long-period deepening toward speculation. Candid about limits, he finds the nineteenth-century railway booms fit the model but concedes that the 1929 crisis, with its stable prices and rising raw-material stocks, does not.

Once "free Capital" has been converted into buildings and machinery, any failure of events to conform to expectations will upset everything.

A statistical pattern is not yet an economic explanation—and a plausible model fit is not yet a tested result. These distinctions sharpen Gerhard Tintner’s brief 1940 review of Herman Wold’s study of stationary time series. Tintner admires Wold’s mathematical framework but questions what its applications to wheat prices and Swedish living costs actually establish. His reservation is specific: without significance tests, the validity of the results cannot be assessed. The review offers a compact encounter with an economist’s demands on mathematical statistics, showing why theoretical advances in describing fluctuations still require methods of inference before they can support empirical conclusions.

What began as a 4,000-word review for Economica, commissioned by Hayek, had swollen into a 20,000-word analysis—"a monster," Schütz calls it—of Talcott Parsons's The Structure of Social Action. This 1940 letter opens the celebrated transatlantic exchange between the émigré phenomenologist and the Harvard theorist of social action. Schütz reports reading Parsons's unpublished second manuscript three times, reserves his sharpest comments for an oral meeting he proposes in New York or Cambridge, and presses gently on their differences over the foundations of a theory of action. He encloses his essay "Phenomenology and the Social Sciences" from Farber's Husserl memorial volume and mentions his forthcoming paper on William James, folding a personal letter into a document at the crossroads of phenomenology and American sociology.

Ich verdanke Ihren Theorien auch dort unendlich viel Gewinn und Anregung, wo ich von ihnen abweiche.

English translation: “I owe your theories an infinite amount of profit and stimulation, even where I depart from them.”

Does buying shares withdraw purchasing power from the market for goods and services? In this 1940 paper, Fritz Machlup challenges the idea that stock speculation necessarily absorbs funds during a boom. His distinctive move is to follow bank deposits rather than classify loans by borrower or collateral: the effect depends on where money came from, where it goes, and what it would otherwise have financed. Against Keynes’s account of speculative liquidity preference, he shows how bearish sellers could seek liquidity through interest-bearing call loans rather than idle cash. Readers can discover why heavy trading and large brokers’ loans do not by themselves establish monetary contraction—and why Machlup judged speculation’s net effect during the twenties’ boom probably inflationary, while allowing that hoarding and debt repayment could become deflationary in the downswing.