Eugen Peter Schwiedland: Review of Wolfgang Heller (1922)

Schwiedland’s brief review of Die Grundprobleme der theoretischen Volkswirtschaftslehre presents Heller’s book as a connected history of theoretical economics. Its organizing purpose is to trace relationships among doctrines:

To watch the coherence of the trains of thought, to join isolated chains of speculation on theoretical problems seems to him a worthy subject of investigation.

The review proceeds from value and price to income distribution, then rent, interest, profit, and wages. Value theory runs from classical formulations through surplus value to the subjectivism of Jevons, Walras, and Menger, with cost considered along the way. Schwiedland identifies a decisive shift in price theory:

Whereas the elder theory laid special stress on the analysis of supply, the new one enters thoroughly into that of demand.

This contrast makes the history intelligible through changes in explanatory emphasis. Distribution receives a similarly relational treatment: physiocratic and classical accounts of circulation lead into marginal productivity, residual theory, its connection with costs, and the role of power in allocating wealth. The subsequent survey follows rent’s generalization, competing explanations of interest, and theories of profit and wages.

Schwiedland closes by locating Heller’s own doctrinal positions in his larger Hungarian treatise of 1920. The review’s contribution is thus a concise map of Heller’s historical synthesis, emphasizing continuity and conceptual connections without developing an independent critique of the theories surveyed.