Eugen Peter Schwiedland: Review of Anaxagoras, Das Ziel der Weltbewirtschaftung. Ein Grundriß (1921)

Schwiedland’s short review examines a 1920 pamphlet by a Viennese lawyer writing as Anaxagoras, who condenses economic reflections developed during the war. The review moves from an account of exchange as a source of exploitation to the proposed coordination of world production, then questions both the diagnosis and the political feasibility of the remedy.

In Schwiedland’s reconstruction, Anaxagoras contrasts subsistence production, where work directly satisfies the producer’s needs, with exchange, where the pursuit of the greatest possible return separates economic activity from its human purpose. Service becomes a means to acquisition, while professions of benefiting the recipient conceal self-interest. This logic extends from individuals to relations among peoples:

Der Mensch mit seinen ungestillten Bedürfnissen wird Ausbeutungsobjekt und Völker leben auf Kosten anderer.

English translation: Man with his unsatisfied needs becomes an object of exploitation, and peoples live at the expense of others.

The proposed remedy targets economic organization rather than moral character. Schwiedland marks his distance from this approach by approvingly invoking Dostoevsky’s insistence that fraternity requires inward transformation. Anaxagoras, by contrast, distrusts ethical appeals as instruments readily manipulated by interested parties and seeks a solution through epistemological criticism. Schwiedland considers his attribution of the problem to the division of labour excessively rationalistic: it neglects that specialization is also a principal foundation of technical and economic progress.

Yet the organizational relations blamed for exploitation also supply Anaxagoras’s means of overcoming it. Coordinating specialized economies would reunite labour and need-satisfaction on a worldwide scale:

Dadurch würde das polyzentrale, synallagmatische, auf Erwerb gerichtete Wirtschaften zur unizentralen, sympragmatischen, auf Bedürfnisdeckung gerichteten Weltbewirtschaftung.

English translation: Thereby the polycentric, synallagmatic economic activity directed toward acquisition would become a unicentric, sympragmatic world economic administration directed toward the satisfaction of needs.

This conceptual contrast gives the proposal its direction: dispersed, reciprocal exchange oriented toward acquisition would yield to unified cooperation oriented toward meeting needs. Its institutional expression parallels the League of Nations programme. A world congress of leading scholars and technicians would address practical tasks provisionally arranged in twenty-one groups.

Schwiedland’s decisive objection concerns power rather than administrative design. Comparing Anaxagoras with Wilson, he asks whether both underestimate the strength of competing interests. The review closes by exposing the unresolved conditions of a binding world order:

Wer Richter sein soll im Widerstreit der leidigen Interessen, wer den Richterspruch vollstrecken soll, und ob überhaupt die Völker gegen ihren Willen zum Gesamtwohl der Menschheit gezwungen werden können, ist nach wie vor die Frage.

English translation: Who is to be judge in the conflict of the vexatious interests, who is to execute the judgment, and whether peoples can be compelled at all against their will to the common welfare of mankind, remains the question as before.

The review thus locates the difficulty of world economic coordination in the gap between a rationally articulated common good and the authority required to realize it. Expert knowledge may identify collective tasks, but it does not by itself establish legitimate adjudication, enforcement, or international consent.