The archive.

Defending competition is not the same as defending capitalists: this distinction gives Wilhelm Röpke’s review of Allan G. B. Fisher’s The Clash of Progress and Security its critical edge. Röpke welcomes Fisher’s account of how producers’ resistance to economic change can turn potential abundance into unemployment and idle capacity. Yet he asks whether entrenched interests obstructing change should be judged alongside newcomers reluctant to invest during a depression. His qualified agreement exposes a tension between securing existing livelihoods and allowing resources to move toward new uses. Readers encounter a liberal defence of institutional reform directed against business privilege, rather than on its behalf—and a precise disagreement over whether capitalism’s failures of adjustment warrant abandoning it.

Stable prices need not mean a sustainable recovery. In this 1937 conference contribution, Fritz Machlup asks how a boom can be recognized before its collapse—and what monetary authorities can realistically do about it. His distinctive concern is rapid growth in production itself: credit-financed investment may create imbalances even while falling costs keep commodity prices steady. A concrete example of locomotive orders shows why merely slowing growth in demand can produce a sharp fall in investment. Machlup’s case for restraint is deliberately limited: slower monetary expansion may soften a downturn, not abolish it. His discussion of American policy brings out a further tension: central-bank purchases supporting government bond prices can replenish the very bank reserves that credit restraint seeks to limit.

Explaining why firms form cartels is not the same as defending them. In this short 1937 reply to Myron W. Watkins’s review of Cartel Problems, Karl Pribram sharpens that distinction: depressed markets encourage separate firms to suppress competition defensively, even when their cooperation makes the wider economy less able to recover. He contrasts these collective monopolies with unified monopolies fostered by expansion, making market conditions central to his account rather than assuming capitalism’s inherent instability. The policy stakes emerge in his defence of classification: regulators need to distinguish how different combinations shift the risks of contraction onto others. This rejoinder offers a compact encounter with the tension between firms’ efforts to survive and the economic costs of their collective self-protection.

Before 1914, Reisch observes, payments between nations moved smoothly because trade was freer, exchange rates were stable, and gold served as a common standard; the wreck of that order — through inflation, the abandonment of gold, and what he takes to be erroneous theory — is the disorder this book proposes to cure by stages. He rejects Keynes's money as a mere state-defined unit of account and Hahn's notion of banks conjuring purchasing power from nothing, insisting that credit always rests on real goods or claims. With Ernst Ružička he sketches a subsidiary payment system: neighboring states set up foreign trade banks and reciprocal gold-denominated credit lines, issuing Valutabons whose A coupons cover favored imports and whose B coupons, carrying a customs premium, cover tolerated ones — Leistungskompensation in place of shipping gold.

Die Vermengung der Begriffe Zahlungsmittel und Kreditbefriedigungsmittel erweist sich jedoch als verhängnisvoll: Geld ist wohl Gegenstand der Gewährung von Kredit, Kredit aber ist kein geeignetes Mittel, beliebig viel neues Geld zu schaffen.

English translation: “The conflation of the concepts of means of payment and means of satisfying credit proves to be disastrous: money is indeed an object of the granting of credit, but credit is not a suitable means for creating arbitrary amounts of new money.”

Could the money already spent on the dole be reorganized so that the unemployed produce necessities for one another? That is the wager of this 1937 monograph, which treats postwar joblessness as structural rather than cyclical and finds ordinary relief a guarantee of idleness and emergency public works too costly to generalize. Mahr first dismantles rival schemes: Lederer's disguised socialization of idle plant and the substitute-currency plans of Graham and of Eaton, Cheadle, and Ewing, which would leak into the money economy and dump discounted goods on ordinary producers. His own Hilfswerk rests on binding advance orders, payment in restricted vouchers redeemable only within the scheme, and the inclusion of farm surpluses and part-time settlement, so that a disciplined emergency economy sustains the excluded without inflation or market displacement.

Wäre die ganze Produktion auf Vorausbestellungen aufgebaut, gäbe es natürlich auch keine Absatzkrisen, weil eben dann nur die Waren erzeugt würden, welche schon im Vorhinein ihre Abnehmer gefunden haben.

English translation: “If the whole of production were built on advance orders, there would of course be no sales crises either, because then only those goods would be produced which had already found their buyers in advance.”

From Poggio Bracciolini's first sustained notice, through Enea Silvio Piccolomini's richly imagined portrait, to Louis Le Roy's culminating myth, Voegelin traces how Renaissance humanists built and handed down an image of Timur. The conqueror served in turn as proof that modern deeds could rival antiquity, as an emblem of fortuna balanced against Bajazid's fall, and finally as the violent founder-sign of a new cultural age, comparable to Alexander before Hellenism. Voegelin's method is to catalogue the recurring anecdotal elements—the humble origin, the sworn band of first companions, Ankara, the three tents, the claim to be God's wrath—and to show that their very selection, stripped of Mongol political history, is what lends the portraits their characterological force. Only widening knowledge of Oriental sources and source-critical philology finally dissolved the fixed image.

Das persönliche Charisma, die Schöpfung eines Bundes und die Steigerung der erobernden Vernichtung bis zur Idee einer Exekution des göttlichen Willens sind die innersten Sinngehalte, bis zu denen die Humanisten in ihrem Bild von Timur vordringen.

English translation: “Personal charisma, the creation of a covenant, and the intensification of conquering destruction into the idea of an execution of the divine will—these are the innermost layers of meaning to which the humanists penetrate in their image of Timur.”

Naturally among the poorest countries in Europe, yet per head the richest in capital: from this paradox Somary's ten theses, delivered at the University of Zurich in February 1937, unfold a warning to a small neutral state. Switzerland's fortune, he argues, rests on four centuries of peace and a liberal order that replaced power between states with achievement between individuals—an order now collapsing. The decisive modern conflict, he contends, lies not between liberalism and socialism but between a peace economy and a war economy, in which the sovereign consumer becomes a burden and bureaucratic allocation supplants the market. He tracks the exposure of Swiss creditors to German debts, condemns Britain's 1931 devaluation as a spreading contagion, and grounds the country's last defense in the inviolability of life, liberty, honor, and property.

Auf das dringendste muß gefordert werden, daß die Pandorabüchse der Abwertung endgültig versiegelt und künftig nie anders als bei Kriegsgefahr geöffnet werde.

English translation: “It must be demanded in the most urgent terms that the Pandora's box of devaluation be sealed once and for all, and henceforth never opened except in the event of the danger of war.”

Shell valuables in Buin can buy pigs and manufactured objects, but not ordinarily taro: money’s reach is a social arrangement, not a given. In this contribution to the 1939 edition of the Lehrbuch der Völkerkunde, Richard Thurnwald examines economic organization through kinship, customary obligation, prestige, and political dependence rather than monetary calculation alone. Reciprocal help complicates household self-sufficiency; chiefly generosity connects distribution with power. These cases let readers distinguish planning from market exchange and wealth from capital without assuming that economic purposes stand apart from religious or social life. Thurnwald’s attention to local valuations also sits uneasily beside his hierarchical civilization language and racial and biologized assumptions—a tension that marks the limits of his account of economic diversity.

Wir sind es ja, die einzelne Tätigkeiten als „wirtschaftlich“ bezeichnen und herausheben.

English translation: “It is we, after all, who designate and single out particular activities as "economic.”

If the “least important need” is simply the one a person sacrifices, does saying so explain the choice? In this reply to Bernardelli, Felix Kaufmann makes that problem of circularity a test for claims of necessary truth in economics. He argues that definitions can secure certainty only by leaving open whether actual behaviour conforms to them. His treatment of marginal utility distinguishes rational valuation as a definition, its applicability to conduct as an empirical assumption, and diminishing utility through satiation as a claim grounded in experience. The point is not to discard these concepts, but to establish what they can explain. This compact methodological dispute shows how an apparently unassailable economic principle can acquire explanatory content precisely by becoming open to refutation.

How can practitioners find their way through four major laws, five implementing regulations and hundreds of administrative circulars? In this brief 1937 review of Alfred Etscheit, Alexander Etscheit and Otto Böhmer’s Handbuch des Devisenrechts, Helene Lieser judges the handbook by its usefulness in navigating German foreign-exchange law. She singles out its organization by factual situations, supported by an introduction that directs readers to the relevant provisions. Her concern is practical access rather than the merits of exchange controls: even practitioners abroad, she observes, benefit from these coordinated finding aids. The review offers a compact example of legal criticism attentive to how readers actually consult a reference work.

In two sentences, Helene Lieser’s 1937 review places a colonial source collection’s political purpose beside a brief favourable appraisal. She quotes Ernst Gerhard Jacob’s declared aim of equipping speakers, youth leaders and political instructors to demand the restoration of German colonial possessions, then notes its wealth of interesting material. The revealing contrast is between that mobilizing rhetoric, which casts colonial loss as an affront to national honour, and Lieser’s narrowly informational judgement. This short notice lets readers examine that juxtaposition without mistaking it for a developed argument about colonial policy or a critical assessment of Jacob’s sources.

Strip away its empirical content, and equilibrium theory is merely a "Pure Logic of Choice" — true by definition, silent about the world. In this 1937 presidential address Hayek asks what must be assumed about the knowledge of separate minds before such analysis can say anything causal. Equilibrium, he argues, means the compatibility of individual plans through time, and "correct foresight" is not a premise added from outside but the very thing equilibrium describes. The familiar appeal to a perfect market merely disguises omniscience as market form. What economics neglects is the division of knowledge — as fundamental as the division of labor — and the learning by which dispersed, situated fragments come into alignment. The essay marks Hayek's turn toward his mature account of markets as coordinators of knowledge no single mind could hold.

The situation seems here to be that before we can explain why people commit mistakes, we must first explain why they should ever be right.