The attempt will be made in the following presentation to deduce the idea of the totalitarian state and its practical application, particularly in Germany, from the structural necessities of contemporary social conditions and to interpret them in their wider historical relationships.
It is not the intention of the present article to examine the whole content of Hayek's little book and Mises' theory of the business cycle, more fully elaborated therein. We shall confine our analysis to an examination of the question whether or not every increase of the money stream, however restricted, must bring about temporary disturbances of the structure of production which could properly be regarded as phases of a business cycle; we shall then add some remarks on sound or neutral credit expansion.
Such rules are valid for human as well as for natural history, and therefore the reasons that explain Italian fascism must be good, at least in their main outlines, for German fascism too, and vice versa or they are not reasons at all.
The scheme of economic institutions which I propose to discuss is the following: I assume separate independently managed units of production on the one hand and a centralized management of credit and investment on the other.
Our study will show that free competition by no means always attains the results attributed to it by its champions. We shall discover that it is not free competition, but rather the "obstacles" to a free market which prevent extreme fluctuations in production and price.
Indeed, it is by their methods of dominating and incessantly occupying the minds of men that the German fascists and Russian Bolshevists justify their claim to being the most highly accomplished democracies in the world.
Review of book by George C. Homans and Charles P. Curtis Jr. New York: Knopf. 1934. 300 pp.
Review of book by Frederic A. Ocg. New York: Macmillan. 1934. 905 pp.
Review of book by Karl N. Llewellyn. 2 parts. Leipsic: Weicher. 1933. Part I (text), 122 pp.; Part II (cases and materials), 350 pp.
Review of book by Robert Murray Haig and Carl Shoup. New York: Columbia University Press. 1934. 833 pp.
Review of book by Ellen Quittner-Bertolasi. Verof-fentlichungen der Frankfurter Gesellschaft fur Konjunkturforschung, ed. By Eugen Altschul, new series, no. 7. Leipzig: Hans Buske. 1933 57 pp.