Eugen Peter Schwiedland: Review of Franz Zizek’s Grundriss der Statistik (1922)

Schwiedland’s brief book review presents Zizek’s textbook as an account of statistical method joined to its practical applications. Its guiding aim is reliability and clarity of meaning:

Professor Zizek sets out to teach us how to construct statistics which are to be depended on and of which the meaning is unmistakable.

Schwiedland places this aim alongside Zizek’s scholarly training in Paris, practical statistical work in Vienna, and professorship at Frankfurt. His assessment proceeds chiefly by describing the book’s two-part structure. The first part follows statistical work from collecting materials and arranging them into groups to calculating relations and averages and identifying empirical uniformities. The second supplies tables concerning population, economic relations, and national culture. Method and subject matter remain connected:

In his presentation of these the author constantly reaches back to his first part containing the principles of his science, and seeks the method which gives the best results on the questions of political economy or sociology.

This return to principles is the review’s central conceptual emphasis: statistical procedures are selected in relation to the questions they must answer. Schwiedland particularly stresses economic coverage—production, distribution, transportation, and consumption—alongside banking, stocks and shares, and balances, which he identifies as previously untreated statistically. Labor and finance also receive important sections. The review thus emphasizes the textbook’s methodological coherence and breadth of application, without offering a detailed test of its procedures or findings.