Eugen Peter Schwiedland: Review of Robert Wilbrandt’s Oekonomie (1922)

Eugen Peter Schwiedland’s signed book review presents Wilbrandt’s Oekonomie as an attempt to reconstruct economics around a universally applicable practical principle. Its movement is compact: it first explains Wilbrandt’s dissatisfaction with existing economic science, then follows his proposed foundation into a criterion of economic criticism and a classification of economic organizations. Schwiedland chiefly reconstructs the project’s internal logic, without independently testing its claims.

Wilbrandt’s starting objection concerns the scientific standing of economic maxims grounded in individual aims and ideals. Such premises, Schwiedland explains, cannot furnish conclusive or universally applicable principles. Wilbrandt instead begins with a constraint common to otherwise divergent purposes: no practical goal can be achieved without the requisite means. Economics therefore acquires its unity from the problem of inadequate means, not from agreement about desirable ends.

The enemy fought by "Oekonomie" is the deficiency of the means required for any kind of practical aim; preventing such deficiency must be its foremost object.

This definition separates economic expertise from judgment upon human aspirations. The economist’s task is to identify effective methods for overcoming deficiencies; practical actors perform “Oekonomie” when they successfully apply those methods. Schwiedland thus presents both a delimitation of economic science and a corresponding conception of economic conduct: economics assists purposeful action without prescribing its purposes.

The review then traces a consequential move from this apparently neutral foundation to criticism of existing economic arrangements. Wilbrandt’s governing question becomes how to bring the national economy to the highest possible efficiency. Schwiedland describes this criterion as objective rather than subjective and reports Wilbrandt’s effort to exclude moral and political opinions from his deductions. Efficiency supplies the bridge between helping individuals secure necessary means and evaluating the organization of an economy as a whole.

Wilbrandt distinguishes four organizational forms: a single disposing will (Alleinwirtschaft), mutual exchange (Tauschwirtschaft), collectivism (Gemeinwirtschaft), and renunciation (Hingabewirtschaft). These form a proposed developmental sequence:

He supposes that a chronological order of these four types is possible, each of them being more difficult of realization and each bringing economic success into the reach of a greater number of individuals, than the preceding one.

The cautious formulation matters: the review reports a possible ordering, not an established historical law. Increasing difficulty of realization accompanies a widening reach of economic success. Wilbrandt also associates the four forms psychologically with conservatism, liberalism, socialism, and anarchism, respectively. These correspondences connect organizational analysis to political dispositions despite the stated exclusion of political judgments from deduction. Schwiedland closes by noting that fuller development is reserved for subsequent publications. The review’s significance lies in this concise account of a reform programme: scarcity of means grounds the discipline, efficiency grounds criticism, and organizational types connect economic possibilities with political psychology.