Schwiedland’s essay argues that economic theory must begin from a psychology of the acting person rather than from an abstract calculator. Economic activity is never simply chosen in a vacuum; it is partly shaped in advance by the bodily, instinctual, and affective constitution of human beings.
Die wirtschaftliche Tätigkeit und ihre Objekte sind zum Teil durch die Eigenart des Menschen vorausbestimmt.
English translation: Economic activity and its objects are in part predetermined by the peculiar nature of man.
The opening anthropology distinguishes reflex, instinct, character, habit, and suggestion. Instincts are inherited purposive automatisms, often effective without conscious insight into means or ends. Schwiedland links economic conduct to instinctual complexes such as nutrition, protection, sexuality, family, possession, power, vanity, and sociability, while stressing that these impulses differ in urgency: hunger and self-preservation have a necessity that sexual, familial, or status impulses do not. Yet instinct is not destiny. The individual person is formed through several interwoven strata:
Aus diesen vierfachen Elementen setzt sich der psychologische Abriß des Menschen zusammen.
English translation: From these fourfold elements the psychological outline of man is composed.
This layered model is the essay’s central anti-reductionist move. Character modifies instinct as an individual “Resonanzboden”; habit turns acquired modes of action into second nature; and momentary moods, opinions, imitation, and suggestion disturb any simple deduction from fixed motives. Economic behavior is therefore patterned but not mechanically predictable. Schwiedland’s psychology allows him to explain both regularity and variability: wants recur because they are rooted in bodily and social dispositions, but their concrete objects are historically educated.
On this basis he criticizes the loose economic use of Bedürfnis for every motive. Human striving has two opposed psychological forms. Desire seeks the creation, repetition, or heightening of pleasure; need seeks release from deprivation, discomfort, or pain.
Die Begier veranlaßt selbst ihre eigene Tätigkeit; das Bedürfnis wird durch eine Beeinträchtigung veranlaßt, treibt durch Unlust zu deren Vermeidung.
English translation: Desire itself gives rise to its own activity; need, by contrast, is provoked by some impairment and drives, through displeasure, toward its avoidance.
The distinction matters because expanding consumption is not merely rational calculation. Repeated pleasure may intensify desire, as with amusement, luxury goods, alcohol, tobacco, or light; but pleasure may also lose force and produce a demand for variety. Needs, too, multiply when satisfactions become easy: comfort makes people more sensitive to discomfort. The growth of wants is thus a psychological-historical process in which habit enlarges the sphere of goods and services.
Schwiedland next defines the economic act from this motivational ground. Consumption is the end for which goods are procured, but not the essence of economic activity itself.
Nicht das Aufzehren, sondern die Beischaffung der aufzuzehrenden Güter bildet das Wesen der wirtschaftlichen Tätigkeit.
English translation: It is not the consuming, but the procurement of the goods to be consumed that constitutes the essence of economic activity.
Economy consists in procuring, securing, storing, distributing, and commanding goods or services for future satisfaction. From primitive procurement arise foresight, saving, and the principle of attaining effects with the least sacrifice. Natural economy seeks directly usable goods; exchange and money economy insert goods and money as mediating means; capitalist economy calculates outlay and surplus in money. As this structure develops, motives such as possession, ambition, family care, vanity, and power become economically decisive because they shape accumulation, allocation, and the direction of demand.
The final sections join psychology to cultural and ethical judgment. Culture is not mere material abundance, but the refinement and multiplication of human striving. Luxury is consequently ambiguous: it can waste life, deepen inequality, and deform desire, yet it may also create labor, stimulate invention, and diffuse once-exclusive goods into general use. The criterion is social rather than ascetic: expenditure is defensible when it contributes, in proportion, to bodily, intellectual, or moral development. Economic reform must therefore include the education of wants.
Die soziale Therapie besteht ja zum besten Teil in einer Beeinflussung des inneren Menschen.
English translation: Social therapy consists for the most part in influencing the inner man.
Schwiedland’s lasting interest lies in this early effort to ground economics in a non-reductive account of motivation, habit, and valuation. Against formal economic abstraction, he insists that demand is formed by bodily need, pleasure, imitation, class example, education, and moral discipline. The psychological foundations of economy are therefore also social foundations: to reform economic life is not only to rearrange goods, but to reshape the scale of desires through which goods become valuable.
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