Eugen Schwiedland, Wert und Preis und ihre Verknüpfung (1922)

Eugen Schwiedland’s Wert und Preis und ihre Verknüpfung is a single-author, short theoretical monograph in political economy, later intended for his Volkswirtschaftslehre. Its scope is not historical exposition but conceptual reconstruction: it defines value, clears away misleading distinctions, and then connects valuation to prices through exchange, money, offer, demand, costs, speculation, and state action. Its thesis is that value is a subjective consciousness of dependence upon usable and scarce goods, while price is an external counter-performance generated when such valuations enter social traffic.

Wert ist sonach eine seelisch-geistige Erscheinung — ein Gedankending, seelisches Sein.

English translation: Value is accordingly a psychic-mental phenomenon — a thought-entity, a mental existence.

This claim governs the first half of the work. Schwiedland begins from human purposes and the dependence on external things required to pursue them. Goods are not valuable because value inheres in them; they are valued because actors believe them usable and find their available units insufficient. Objective facts—qualities, quantities, scarcity—condition valuation, but the valuation itself remains psychic. Hence his correction of both “objective value” language and the Austrian preference for “Grenznutzen”: utility is an objective suitability or result, whereas value is the felt dependence of the economizing subject.

Daher ist der Wert einheitlich subjektiv.

English translation: Value is therefore uniformly subjective.

The same move lets him reinterpret the use-value/exchange-value distinction. Exchange value has no independent substance; it rests on the use, enjoyment, or lover’s value goods have for someone else. A diamond commands much because many desire a scarce object; water, normally replaceable, becomes highly valuable in need. Schwiedland’s value laws distill this into a scarcity-usefulness relation rather than a labor, cost, or pleasure calculus.

Der Wert wächst und sinkt mit dem Maße der Brauchlichkeit und der Seltenheit des Gutes.

English translation: Value rises and falls with the degree of the usefulness and the scarcity of the good.

The decisive turn comes when Schwiedland separates value from price. Price is observable, negotiated, and social; value is inward, anticipatory, and personal. This distinction gives the treatise its polemical edge against theories searching for a fixed exchange ratio in utility, labor, or production cost.

Wert ist ein Gefühl, Preis eine tatsächliche Gegenleistung: die Menge von Gütern, die man beim Austausch für andere empfängt.

English translation: Value is a feeling, price an actual counter-performance: the quantity of goods one receives in exchange for others.

Exchange, for Schwiedland, does not require equal values but different valuations. Barter enriches both sides because each prefers what the other gives. Costs can influence prices of reproducible goods over time, but costs themselves presuppose expected demand; they cannot generate value without want.

Man kann vielmehr gradezu sagen, daß der Tausch dort zustandekommt, wo verschiedene Personen gegebene Güter verschieden bewerten.

English translation: One may indeed say outright that exchange comes about where different persons value given goods differently.

The second half translates usefulness and scarcity into market categories: demand corresponds to effective desire at a given price, supply to a price-conditioned willingness to sell. Price therefore rises with demand and scarcity, falls with weaker demand and larger available stocks. Schwiedland is careful that “Angebot” is not mere physical stock and “Nachfrage” not boundless desire, but paid, limited market disposition.

Der Preis bewegt sich in ungleicher Richtung zu Veränderungen des Vorrates und in gleicher Richtung zu Änderungen der Begehr.

English translation: Price moves in the opposite direction to changes in supply and in the same direction as changes in demand.

Yet the treatise does not reduce price to a diagram. Its most concrete pages trace seller competition in abundance, buyer competition in shortage, merchants’ anticipations, withholding, panic selling, liquidity, cartels, and money. A rising demand may cause sellers to hold back; a falling market may throw goods anxiously onto the market. Monetary expansion weakens purchasing power; currency and banking policy can move prices from the money side. State price-setting, wartime policy, and valorisation show that institutions and power enter the value-price nexus.

Im ganzen sind die Preise Ergebnisse des Willens einzelner oder von Gruppen einvernehmlich vorgehender Wirtschafter, nicht aber Äußerungen etwaiger abstrakter Gesetze.

English translation: On the whole, prices are the results of the will of individual economic actors or of groups acting in concert, and not manifestations of any abstract laws.

The work’s relevance lies in this combination of Austrian subjectivism with a more institutional and behavioral price theory. Schwiedland accepts marginalist scarcity reasoning, but resists reified “utility,” fixed value substances, and single-cause price theories. Its structure—value concept, critique of value distinctions, price concept, price laws, supply and demand, costs and policy—ends in methodological modesty rather than system closure: real price formation is intelligible in its motives, but too many psychological, monetary, and political forces converge for a total theory to be simple.

Die Vielfältigkeit des Lebens macht es recht zweifelhaft, ob eine alle wirklichen Preisgestaltungen richtig erfassende allgemeine Theorie je zustande kommen wird.

English translation: The manifold nature of life makes it quite doubtful whether a general theory correctly comprehending all real price formations will ever come into being.