Eugen Schwiedland · 1922
This file is the first volume of Eugen Schwiedland’s three-volume lecture-course in political economy, presenting the “peculiarity and foundations” of economic life. Its genre is systematic academic lectures: not a narrow technical manual, but a broad conceptual introduction that moves from method and anthropology through natural conditions, population, organization, capitalism, freedom, property, and social policy. Schwiedland’s central thesis is that economics must study the human ordering of life under material conditions: nature matters, but economic reality is made through persons, institutions, power, habit, technique, and ethical aims.
He announces the discipline as both empirical and normative. Economics must not float above facts, yet it also cannot renounce judgment about the purposes of social life:
Auch die Wirtschaftswissenschaft und ihre Anwendung bedarf eines Realismus der Betrachtung und eines Idealismus der Ziele.
English translation: Economics too, and its application, requires realism of observation and idealism of aims.
This double demand governs the volume. Schwiedland rejects any reduction of economics to commodities, money, or transport systems. These are outcomes and instruments; the deeper subject is the human relation that organizes them. His most programmatic formulation makes the point with unusual clarity:
So sind nicht Güter, Reichtum und Verkehrseinrichtungen, sondern menschliche Eigenschaften und Beziehungen das Hauptthema der Volkswirtschaftslehre.
English translation: Thus the principal subject of economics is not goods, wealth, and transport institutions, but human qualities and relationships.
The early lectures therefore treat geography, climate, waterways, mineral resources, location, sea access, colonies, and political space as real determinants, but not as destiny. Economic development depends on the interaction between natural endowment and the population’s capacities, institutions, and historical fate. Schwiedland repeatedly frames human beings as weak and dependent, yet also as technically and socially creative:
Nächst der naturgeschaffenen Umgebung bestimmt so der Mensch die wirtschaftliche Entfaltung — wird, ein gebrechliches Wesen, dessen Schicksal es ist, überwunden zu werden und zu überwinden, in der Folge der Geschlechter zum Mitschöpfer der Welt.
English translation: Next to the environment given by nature, it is man who determines economic development — a frail being whose destiny is to be overcome and to overcome, becoming, in the succession of generations, a co-creator of the world.
From this follows a dynamic conception of development. Culture and economy arise neither from soil alone nor from abstract freedom alone, but from the historically formed relation between territory, population, and political organization:
Der kulturliche Aufschwung, den ein Land erreicht, hängt ab von der Ausstattung seines Gebietes, von der Art seiner Bevölkerung und von deren Schicksalen.
English translation: The cultural rise that a country attains depends upon the endowment of its territory, upon the character of its population, and upon their fortunes.
A major conceptual move is Schwiedland’s treatment of capitalism. He defines it less as mere possession of capital than as purposeful, acquisitive organization animated by a specific spirit. This lets him analyze factories, firms, and institutions as forms of rational coordination, while also keeping moral and social consequences in view:
„Kapitalismus“ ist demnach grundsätzlich auf Erwerb ausgehende zweckmäßige Organisation — das zielrichtig geordnete Wirken eines Betriebes oder einer Anstalt — sowie der Geist, der Einrichtungen dieser Art hervorgebracht hat und sie in ihrer Wirksamkeit weiter durchdringt; dieser kapitalistische Geist ist der Erzeuger und der Verwender kapitalistischer Organisationen.
English translation: “Capitalism” is thus in principle a purposive organization directed toward gain — the goal-oriented, ordered functioning of an enterprise or institution — as well as the spirit that has brought forth such institutions and continues to permeate their operation; this capitalist spirit is both the creator and the user of capitalist organizations.
The later lectures, as represented in the notes, extend this institutional analysis into political economy proper. Formal liberty and juridical equality are historically important, but insufficient where unequal economic power makes freedom hollow. Schwiedland’s argument turns from liberal rights to social guarantees, including labor protection, maternal protection, cooperative or state counterweights, and material security. His formulation is direct:
Mit Freiheit allein ist dem einzelnen nicht gedient, es bedarf auch der Lebenssicherheit und einigen Behagens.
English translation: Freedom alone does not serve the individual; there is also need of security of life and a measure of comfort.
Thus democracy itself is incomplete if it remains only a mechanism of parties, majorities, and rights detached from living conditions. The social question is not solved by equal citizenship alone; it requires a more equal distribution of real opportunities and protections:
In Wahrheit kommt es eben nicht auf die Gleichheit der politischen Rechte an, sondern auf die größere Gleichheit der tatsächlichen Lage.
English translation: In truth, what matters is not equality of political rights, but a greater equality of actual condition.
The volume’s relevance lies in this synthesis. Written in the shadow of imperial crisis and postwar reorganization, it treats national economies as embedded in larger political spaces and insists that economic science must face both power and welfare. Schwiedland’s political economy is historical, institutional, and ethical: it begins with land and resources, passes through human technique and capitalist organization, and culminates in the demand that freedom be made socially effective. Its enduring value is the refusal to separate economic facts from the human relations and public purposes that give them meaning.
This work was divided into 109 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 109 sections and cites the passage.
Ask the Librarian