[Rezension zu] Charles Gide und Charles Rist: Histoire des doctrines économiques depuis les physiocrates jusqu’à nos jours, 3. verbesserte und ergänzte Auflage

Eugen Peter Schwiedland: Review of Gide and Rist (1922)

Schwiedland’s brief review assesses the third, revised and expanded edition of Charles Gide and Charles Rist’s Histoire des doctrines économiques depuis les physiocrates jusqu'à nos jours. Its praise concerns both scholarly impartiality after the war and a history of doctrine organized around the intellectual ancestry of contemporary economics. The renewed German translation and the authors’ unchanged objectivity toward German research provide his opening evidence of scholarship persisting across national antagonisms.

Schwiedland describes the authors’ outlook as inclined toward relativity: earlier doctrines contain the seeds and development of currently dominant views. Historical inquiry thus illuminates the present:

Sie studieren auf dem Gebiete der Lehrmeinungen das Vorgewesene, um das Gegenwärtige zu verstehen, und das verleiht ihrem Buche Frische und Originalität.

English translation: In the field of doctrines they study what has gone before in order to understand what is present, and this lends their book freshness and originality.

The review’s central distinction is between tracing ideas internally and explaining them through economic history:

Ihre Absicht ist, die innere Entwicklung der Gedanken zu verfolgen, die das Gerüst der heutigen Volkswirtschaftslehre ausmachen; auf die Wirtschaftsgeschichte ist sehr wenig bezug genommen, Vorgänge und Einrichtungen werden nur da und dort als Illustrationsfakten herangezogen.

English translation: Their intention is to trace the inner development of the ideas which constitute the framework of present-day economics; very little reference is made to economic history, and events and institutions are adduced only here and there as illustrative facts.

Schwiedland presents this selectivity as a defining method rather than an explicit defect. He closes by noting that each part is independently written by one of the two authors; the resulting shifts in presentation further enliven the book. Rist’s newly added final chapter on Bolshevik doctrines extends its contemporary reach. The appended editorial note reserves a fuller appraisal of the German edition for a subsequent review, marking the limited scope of this favorable assessment.