Eugen Schwiedland · 1918
Eugen Schwiedland’s Volkswirtschaftslehre is a lecture-course introduction to political economy for the Technische Hochschule in Wien. It is systematic rather than narrowly original, moving from wants, goods, value, and production to enterprise forms, transport, trade, labor, money, credit, banking, and markets. Written during the First World War, it treats economic life as inseparable from technical development, state power, colonial expansion, and competition among national economies.
Wie einst, ist auch heute das Wirtschaften planvolle Sicherung von Dingen, die man anstrebte zur Befriedigung von Begierden oder von Bedürfnissen.
English translation: As of old, so today, economic activity is the purposive securing of things that one strove for in order to satisfy desires or needs.
This definition gives the book its organizing principle: economics studies purposive provision under scarcity, but provision is never merely individual. Schwiedland begins from the striving of persons toward gain and then translates that impulse into a historical account of peoples, cities, empires, and modern states. Italian commercial cities, Spain, Holland, France, England, Germany, the United States, Russia, and Japan appear as stages in an expanding world economy whose conflicts are at once commercial and political.
Der Antrieb zur wirtschaftlichen Entwicklung der Völker ist der Drang der Einzelnen nach Bereicherung.
English translation: The driving force behind the economic development of peoples is the individual's urge for enrichment.
The lectures therefore combine subjective and institutional economics. Usable things become economic goods through their relation to wants, and value arises through appraisal of particular goods; yet wants only become an economy through law, occupation, exchange, transport, credit, and enterprise organization. Schwiedland’s account is strongest when it shows how simple categories such as need, value, production, and exchange depend on historically formed institutions.
A central part of the work concerns the organization of production. Schwiedland does not present handicraft, putting-out systems, home industry, and factory production as a clean evolutionary sequence in which one form simply abolishes another. Instead, different forms survive together, overlap, and compete for buyers. This makes his account sociological as well as economic: development appears as a struggle among forms of enterprise with different relations to capital, skill, discipline, and market access.
Die aus verschiedenen Epochen herrührenden Betriebsorganisationen kämpfen nun miteinander um den Absatz.
English translation: The forms of business organization inherited from different epochs now compete with one another for sales.
The discussion of circulation extends this institutional perspective. Transport and communication are not secondary technical matters but powers that reorganize economic space. They widen markets, alter costs, change the scale of enterprise, and bind local production into national and global systems. Trade is treated functionally as mediation between acquisition and resale; its significance lies in the organization of distribution and the conquest of distance.
In jeder seiner Formen bewältigt der Verkehr Entfernungen; er ist ein Raumüberwinder, ob er nun Nachrichten, Menschen und Güter heranbringt oder wegführt.
English translation: In every one of its forms, transport overcomes distances; it is a conqueror of space, whether it brings in or carries away news, people, and goods.
Schwiedland also compares private enterprise, cooperatives, cartels, public undertakings, money, credit, and banks as rival means of economic coordination. He is receptive to cooperatives as instruments of self-help and economic education, but he is equally alert to concentration, cartel power, and the subordination of labor. In the later lectures, credit and banking complete the picture: modern capitalism is not only production for markets but command over capital flows, payment systems, and industrial direction.
The work’s limitations are those of its period, especially in its use of national and racial typologies and its largely uncritical treatment of colonial rivalry as a fact of power. Even so, it remains a revealing wartime synthesis. Schwiedland presents political economy as a practical science of wants, valuation, organization, transport, credit, and market power in a world already structured by global competition.
This work was divided into 140 sections when it entered the library's research corpus—an apparatus for search and citation, not necessarily the author's own table of contents. Each title opens its summary.
Put a question to this work; the Librarian answers from its 140 sections and cites the passage.
Ask the Librarian