Schwiedland, Die bisherige Entwicklung und heutige Gestaltung des Wirtschaftslebens (1917)

Schwiedland’s two Vienna lectures present economic history as a movement from small, self-sufficient units toward ever wider, more specialized, and more fragile systems of mutual dependence. The work begins from a material anthropology: human culture rests on the appropriation, transformation, and multiplication of the earth’s gifts.

Trägerin und Ernährerin des Lebens ist die Erde.

English translation: The earth is the bearer and sustainer of life.

From this premise Schwiedland constructs a stadial history. He reviews competing schemes—List, Hildebrand, Schmoller, Bücher, Philippovich, Sombart—but adopts the clearest narrative form from Bücher: house economy, city economy, national economy. The first lecture follows this sequence. In the house economy, production is directed to one’s own need; in the city economy, craft, market, and municipal regulation create a bounded circuit of exchange between town and countryside; in the national economy, the modern state organizes territory, administration, transport, money, tariffs, industry, and social policy into a single “Volkswirtschaft.”

Einfacher faßt Bücher diese Entwicklung in drei Perioden, deren jede das Leben anders gestaltet: die Haus-, die Stadt-, die Volkswirtschaft.

English translation: More simply, Bücher grasps this development in three periods, each of which shapes life differently: the household economy, the town economy, and the national economy.

The core conceptual move is to treat economy and political power as structurally intertwined. Economic areas do not merely expand; they require an organizer. The household, city, and state each impose order on otherwise dispersed activities. Hence Schwiedland is skeptical of “Weltwirtschaft” as an already achieved organic unity. World trade exists, but world organization does not.

Noch steht, mit einem Wort, keine universale Gesamtheit über den einzelnen Wirtschaften.

English translation: In a word, no universal totality yet stands above the individual economies.

The second lecture deepens this by analyzing specialization. As economies enter relations of exchange, they adapt to others and become one-sided: occupations split, professions multiply, regions specialize, and technical division of labor penetrates production. This brings higher productivity but also dependence. Schwiedland’s account of modernity is therefore double: specialization enriches humanity, yet binds every producer, consumer, region, and state into a vulnerable web.

Der Umfang der Abhängigkeit wird größer

English translation: The scope of dependency grows greater.

He illustrates this with long passages on world markets, price formation, capital migration, industrial and agrarian zones, and the international origins of ordinary goods. The modern economy is no longer a sum of autonomous households but a dense organism of contracts, credit, transport, tariffs, banks, insurers, and states. Naumann’s formula, quoted approvingly, captures the social form of this interdependence:

alle leben von allen, alle streiten mit allen

English translation: all live off all, all contend with all.

Yet Schwiedland refuses the liberal inference that international division of labor will harmonize the world. His wartime context is decisive. He argues that industrial states dependent on foreign food, raw materials, markets, and capital flows are strategically exposed. The rise of industries in raw-material countries threatens older European industrial powers; imperial expansion is interpreted less as mere capitalist appetite than as a struggle for secure supplies, settlement zones, and markets. The “world economy” thus generates not pacific unity but competition among large state-imperial blocs.

The lectures culminate in a theory of rationalized economic power. Modern competition forces nations to intensify skill, organization, cheap production, technical progress, and market knowledge. The guiding impulse of the age is not simple exchange but purposeful organization:

deren leitender Gedanke Zweckbewußtheit, Rationalisierung, ist.

English translation: whose guiding idea is purposiveness, rationalization.

The World War, in Schwiedland’s view, exposes the danger of excessive inter-state dependence and accelerates a turn toward self-sufficient imperial groupings, stronger peasantries, domestic resources, and state direction. He ends by suggesting that wartime controls may survive because they reveal how public organization can subordinate private economic freedom to collective need. The final hope is not laissez-faire restoration but a more balanced ordered economy,

daß die bisherige Anarchie im Wirtschaftsleben einer ausgeglicheneren Kultur weiche.

English translation: that the hitherto prevailing anarchy in economic life may give way to a more balanced culture.

The work is important as a 1917 synthesis of historical economics, state theory, mercantilist revival, and wartime political economy. Its categories are marked by their period, including assumptions about race, empire, and national power, but its central insight remains historically revealing: globalization, for Schwiedland, is inseparable from specialization, dependence, state organization, and the search for security.