Eugen Peter Schwiedland: Review of Karl Wasserrab’s Soziale Politik im Deutschen Reich (1889)

Schwiedland’s short review examines Wasserrab’s account of German social policy and its prospective continuation under Wilhelm II. Its central distinction is between useful empirical observation and insufficiently grounded theoretical prediction. The review moves from criticism of Wasserrab’s method through an outline of his institutional proposals to a judgment that privileges firsthand industrial knowledge over speculation.

Schwiedland questions whether the history of social science and German industrial policy can establish the future direction of imperial reform. Historical inquiry may illuminate existing policy, but it cannot make forecasts drawn from Wilhelm II’s throne speeches scientifically compelling. Even a prediction that eventually proves accurate would not thereby vindicate its method:

Die Arbeit mag ja, denn Verf. bejaht die Möglichkeit dieses Schlusses auf die Zukunft, was diese letztere betrifft, gerade das Richtige treffen, aber das Ergebnis wird ebenso als ein wissenschaftlich zwingendes angezweifelt werden können, wie auch die Thatsache seines künftigen Zutreffens heute nicht beurteilt zu werden vermag.

English translation: The work may indeed — for the author affirms the possibility of this inference as to the future — hit upon precisely what is right so far as that future is concerned; but the result will be just as open to being doubted as a scientifically compelling one as the fact of its future correctness cannot be judged today.

This objection does not entail rejection of historical explanation. Schwiedland accepts Wasserrab’s account of the pressures shaping Bismarck’s economic reform convictions: strained imperial finances, economic crisis, and increasingly effective Social Democratic agitation. The distinction is between identifying influences on an established policy and claiming authoritative knowledge of its continuation.

The review next summarizes Wasserrab’s survey of workers’ insurance institutions, noting that it does not use the latest sources, and his treatment of the old-age and invalidity insurance bill at its second reading. Wasserrab then envisages compulsory industrial associations, partly built on the existing occupational insurance associations, with cartels supplying preliminary forms of industrial organization. In this projected order, centralized management would pursue respectable rather than maximal profit. Schwiedland reports the claim that public-law compulsory associations would exclude exploitation by their nature, without supplying an independent endorsement of that institutional promise.

His concluding comparison with Wasserrab’s earlier Preise und Krisen makes the review’s evaluative standard explicit:

Wie in des Verf. früheren Schrift über „Preise und Krisen“ sind auch an der hier angezeigten die Mitteilungen von thatsächlichem Material aus der industriellen Betriebswelt, die Ergebnisse unmittelbarer Anschauung, das Beste und die theoretisierenden Ausführungen das Schwächste.

English translation: As in the author's earlier writing on "Prices and Crises", so too in the one noticed here the communications of factual material from the industrial world of business, the results of immediate observation, are the best part, and the theorizing discussions the weakest.

The review’s significance lies in this restrained methodological criticism: Schwiedland values concrete evidence from industrial practice while resisting the conversion of historical tendencies and proposed organizational forms into warranted predictions about social reform.