[Rezension zu] Charles Gide: Des institutions en vue de la transformation ou de l’abolition du salariat

Eugen Peter Schwiedland: Review of Charles Gide (1921)

Schwiedland’s brief German review assesses Charles Gide’s Des institutions en vue de la transformation ou de l’abolition du salariat (1920). It identifies the book as twelve lectures delivered to American listeners shortly before Gide’s retirement from teaching at the University of Paris. Gide’s standing as a spokesman for the cooperative movement frames the review’s unequivocally favorable judgment:

Sie weist alle Vorzüge der Gideschen Darstellung auf: Anschaulichkeit, Tatsachenfülle, knappe und harmonische Form, und gibt einen vortrefflichen Ueberblick über die französischen Verhältnisse auf dem behandelten Gebiete.

English translation: It exhibits all the merits of Gide's exposition: vividness, abundance of facts, concise and harmonious form, and it gives an excellent survey of French conditions in the field treated.

The praise joins clarity and formal economy to factual richness: the book’s value lies in making French institutional experience accessible. Schwiedland then maps its scope through the distribution of lectures. Three concern producer cooperatives, three agrarian reform and agricultural cooperatives, and two profit-sharing. Consumer cooperatives, workers’ ownership of shares in their enterprises, the Familistère at Guise, and the abolition of the wage relation each receive one lecture.

This enumeration supplies the review’s substantive orientation. It places cooperative organization, participation in enterprise income and ownership, and the prospect of abolishing wage labor within a shared field of inquiry. Schwiedland does not weigh these alternatives against one another; his central claim concerns Gide’s achievement as an expositor. The review’s relevance is thus its concise endorsement of a survey linking practical institutional arrangements to the broader question of transforming the wage relation.