Eugen Peter Schwiedland · 1913
Schwiedland’s brief German review examines Lescure’s 1912 pamphlet on general price movements. It proceeds from Lescure’s reputation as a historian of nineteenth-century production crises to his account of economic upswings: commodity prices, profits, wages, agricultural returns, and interest rates move in parallel.
The review’s conceptual centre is the contrast between monetary explanations of fluctuations and an explanation grounded in supply and demand:
Er widerlegt die Anschauung, daß Aenderungen in der Menge der Geldumlaufmittel die wesentliche Ursache der Schwankungen im Wirtschaftsleben sein könnten, setzt sich namentlich mit bezüglichen Ideen von Prof. Irving Fisher auseinander und erklärt den Wechsel der Konjunkturen aus dem jeweiligen Verhältnisse des Angebots zur Nachfrage.
English translation: He refutes the view that changes in the quantity of the circulating media of money could be the essential cause of the fluctuations in economic life, deals in particular with the relevant ideas of Prof. Irving Fisher, and explains the alternation of business conditions from the respective relation of supply to demand.
The verb “widerlegt” presents Lescure’s challenge to monetary causation as a successful refutation, with Irving Fisher singled out as an interlocutor. Schwiedland thus connects the observed co-movement of economic indicators to a dispute over the causes of the business cycle. His notice identifies Lescure’s explanatory position without reproducing its evidence or developing an independent critique; its significance lies in this compact reception of an argument against treating changes in circulating money as the principal cause of economic fluctuations.
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