[Rezension zu Charles Gide: Cours d’économie politique, 6. Auflage]

Eugen Peter Schwiedland: Review of Charles Gide’s Cours d’économie politique (1921)

Schwiedland’s review of the sixth edition of Gide’s two-volume Cours connects the economist’s oppositional position in France with his pedagogical authority and emphasis on consumers. Its central contrast is between institutional marginalization and substantial influence on economic education.

Gide appears as a cooperative advocate, Protestant, scholar outside the academy, and economist suspected of sympathy toward Germany. Schwiedland recalls jointly editing the Revue d'économie politique with Gide until the war and credits it with disseminating German research abroad. He attributes the continued vacancy of the cooperative-studies chair intended for Gide at the Collège de France to Gide’s position on the imposed peace, which he compares to Keynes’s.

Against this exclusion, Schwiedland stresses the success of Gide’s textbooks:

Zu diesem Erfolge hat die Klarheit der Darstellung Gides und seine elegante Schreibweise ebenso beigetragen, wie die große Objektivität, mit der er alle Fragen und von der seinigen abweichende Meinungen behandelt.

English translation: The clarity of Gide's exposition and his elegant manner of writing have contributed to this success just as much as the great objectivity with which he treats all questions and opinions diverging from his own.

The praise links accessible exposition to fair treatment of competing arguments. Objectivity does not mean allegiance to an established school; Schwiedland instead defines Gide’s position through a double distance:

Er steht der klassischen Richtung und dem Sozialismus in gleichem Maße fern, obwohl er die Ausschaltung der privaten Unternehmergewinne für wahrscheinlich hält.

English translation: He stands equally remote from the classical school and from socialism, although he holds the elimination of private entrepreneurial profits to be probable.

The qualification separates Gide’s expectation that private entrepreneurial profits might disappear from identification with socialism. The review closes by connecting his cooperative commitments to the textbook’s structure: roughly one hundred pages concern consumers’ economic role, expenditure, saving, and related questions. This emphasis gives substantive economic content to the opening portrait of an independent scholar, bringing postwar intellectual politics, educational influence, and a consumer-centered outlook into a compact critical assessment.