The archive.

A demand curve, in ordinary teaching, is a path along which buyers slide as prices change. That picture is the error Morgenstern sets out to dismantle. The curve, he argues, is first a schedule of mutually exclusive intentions at a single moment — alternative maximum bids, not a record of successive purchases. Once a buyer actually transacts, expenditure and possession change, and the remaining points no longer mean what they did; a one-variable curve is valid for exactly one transaction unless it is reconstructed through a fresh reaction function. Elasticity, price discrimination, monopolistic competition, and the cobweb theorem all inherit the flaw. What begins as immanent critique of Marshall and Schultz becomes a bridge toward a game-theoretic view of markets as strategic situations that shift with every trade.

Eine individuelle Nachfragekurve einer Variablen ist dann, ganz gleich, welches ihre Form ist, gültig nur für eine einzige Verwendung, d. h. für eine Transaktion.

English translation: “An individual demand curve of a single variable is then, whatever its shape, valid only for one single use, that is, for one transaction.”

Competition need not belong to capitalism: this is the premise Hans Bayer develops in his 1948 journal article on competitive socialism. Drawing on Lange and Lerner, he asks how prices and decentralized decisions might serve publicly determined goals without requiring comprehensive administrative control. His proposed safeguard is selective public ownership, especially of basic industries, where he locates the most dangerous investment disturbances. Postwar Britain gives this sympathetic theoretical account a practical test: economic budgets, flexible planning, and employer–worker cooperation promise coordination compatible with individual freedom. The article’s revealing tension lies in Bayer’s confidence that planning can contain competition’s harmful effects while retaining its advantages—a confidence set against the still-preliminary results and material constraints of British reconstruction.

Can the history of an institution establish that it ought to endure? In this review of Harold G. Fox’s Monopolies and Patents, Fritz Machlup challenges the passage from historical origins to permanent justification. Fox’s defense of English monopoly grants rests, Machlup argues, too heavily on benevolent intentions and too little on economic effects. Against the claim that opposition to invention patents is recent, he recalls nineteenth-century controversy and the Dutch repeal of patent law in 1869. Yet he separates these objections from his appreciation of Fox’s detailed documentation. The review offers a compact example of how to distinguish a useful institutional history from the economic claims made on its behalf.

Each trader may seek the greatest possible gain, yet a market transaction need not be a straightforward maximization problem: its outcome depends on other independent wills. In this 1948 conference paper, Oskar Morgenstern makes that distinction the basis of his case for game theory in economics. His qualitative exposition moves beyond firms’ conjectures about competitors to the coalitions participants can form—and the payments that can hold those coalitions together. Cartels, labor unions, and buyers combining against a monopolist expose the limitations of treating competition or monopoly as fixed arrangements. Readers can discover why Morgenstern locates stability not in a uniquely optimal price or income distribution, but in sets of alternatives whose availability sustains the outcome actually adopted.

Clearly, free competition will not continue to prevail when people can gain by combining.

Being caught looking through a keyhole and taking part in a conversation pose different problems for a theory of other people. In this essay, Alfred Schütz uses that difference to test Sartre’s account of the Other. He takes seriously Sartre’s descriptions of the gaze, shame, and the body, yet asks whether a relation defined by objectifying or being objectified can explain mutual understanding. Speaking and listening, Schütz argues, require participants to follow and co-perform meaningful activity—not merely encounter an alien perspective that limits their freedom. His critique identifies what Sartre’s analysis already presupposes: our ability to understand another person as acting within a situation. The essay offers a concrete point of entry into the tension between Sartre’s account of interpersonal conflict and Schütz’s concern with the conditions of ordinary social interaction.

Can an international trade charter promote freer exchange when its exceptions leave governments ample room to restrict it? In this 1948 article, Richard Schüller argues that the Havana charter’s problem is not rigid liberalization but the possibility that exemptions will overwhelm its commitments. Balance-of-payments difficulties, development needs, and national planning all qualify its rules. Drawing on twelve years in the League of Nations Economic Committee, he locates its promise in the proposed International Trade Organization’s ability to scrutinize restrictions and organize reciprocal concessions. His assessment of the Geneva tariff agreements distinguishes substantial negotiated commitments from their uncertain practical effects. The article offers a concrete account of the tension between national discretion and international supervision, written while the institutions and agreements remained promises awaiting implementation.

Perfect competition, as the textbooks model it, assumes away nearly everything ordinary language means by competing: with homogeneous goods, complete knowledge, and prices already adjusted, there is nothing left to discover. Hayek's reversal is to treat rivalry as a dynamic process rather than a static end-state—the very means by which costs, consumer wants, and better substitutes come to be known. Advertising, undercutting, product differentiation, and reputation, dismissed by theory as imperfections, are for him the substance of competition and the ways buyers economize on ignorance. The right test of a market is therefore not its distance from an unattainable ideal but whether it improves on what would exist if competition were blocked by licensing or price-fixing. Competition, he concludes, is a process for forming opinion and spreading dispersed knowledge.

The practical lesson of all this, I think, is that we should worry much less about whether competition in a given case is perfect and worry much more whether there is competition at all.

Whether freedom or totalitarianism prevails, Mises writes in this 1948 memorandum to Leonard Read, will be settled in the democratic nations at the polls—but votes follow conviction, and conviction is formed long before any ballot. Anti-communism collapses, he warns, once its own spokesmen have absorbed socialist premises. The deeper obstacle is Marxian polylogism, the trick of judging an argument by the speaker's class instead of answering it, so that a defense of capitalism can be waved away as merely bourgeois. Economic education must therefore work first on intellectuals, whose ideas reach the masses only in simplified form. The essay ends by cataloguing ten dogmas of 'Progressivism'—abundance blocked by capitalism, depressions as inherent market failures, wealth endlessly taxable—that sound instruction has to unmask.

What matters is not to change the ideology of the masses, but to change first the ideology of the intellectual strata, the "highbrows," whose mentality determines the content of the simplifications which are held by the "lowbrows."

Newton’s absolute space was intended partly to secure God’s presence in a mechanical universe. How did it instead help authorize a worldview that could dispense with God? In this article, Eric Voegelin follows that reversal through the dispute between Newton’s defenders and Leibniz, distinguishing the success of physical science from the authority claimed for its philosophical assumptions. His central tension is between conceptual criticism and social prestige: an argument can fail philosophically yet prevail culturally. Linking this history to technological power and schemes of social engineering, Voegelin argues that methods suited to physical phenomena become destructive when treated as instruments for remaking human existence. The article offers a pointed account of how scientific expertise acquires authority beyond its domain—and why correcting physics need not undo that authority.

The theoretical dilettantism of the great scientist is socially effective; the argument of the great philosopher is socially ineffective.

Lower reported profits need not mean less investment. In this 1948 article, Walter Fröhlich examines how accounting rules divide business funds between disposable income and the resources needed to maintain capital. His distinctive premise—that businesses are generally more willing to reinvest than to make new investments out of income—makes depreciation and inventory valuation consequential for aggregate demand. Excluding inventory appreciation from profits may weaken an apparent incentive to invest while retaining more funds for replacement. Fröhlich traces this tension into taxation: an income measure useful for business decisions may make a poor tax base for countercyclical policy. The article offers a concrete way to distinguish accurate measurement, investment incentives, and economic stabilization—objectives that seemingly technical accounting conventions do not necessarily reconcile.

Popular sovereignty can authorize government without restraining it: this distinction anchors Hayek’s review of Bertrand de Jouvenel’s Power, first published in 1948 and reprinted here in 2013. Hayek admires de Jouvenel’s account of how ordinary motives and rationalist schemes can concentrate authority, especially when a simplified political design displaces the many institutions and loyalties that sustain social order. Yet admiration does not mean agreement with the book’s pessimism. Hayek argues that de Jouvenel gives too little weight to opinion and belief as forces capable of checking power. This short review offers a sharp encounter between two defenders of liberty who differ over how inevitable political domination must be—and an unexpected endorsement of Rousseau’s understanding of the rule of law.

The mechanics of inflation are not obscure; what defeats every cure is the refusal of the groups who count politically to pay the price of stopping it. Reading the American inflation of 1948 through the post-1918 collapses of Austria, Germany, Italy, and France, Schumpeter defines inflation as means of payment rising faster than output and divides the disease into three stages: incipient, advanced, and wild. America, he judges, has reached the advanced phase, where full employment turns new money into general price increases and bank lending breeds secondary credit inflation, the national payroll serving as its chief conductor. His program rejects price rollbacks and direct controls in favor of credit restriction, budget surpluses, and taxes that reward saving, warning with a nod to Lenin that a debauched currency corrodes the very classes on which the social order rests.

So inflation runs on by common consent.