3,422 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Modern culture, for all its machinery, has not freed anyone from material dependence, and that unfreedom, Schwiedland contends, now shapes character, morality, and world politics alike. His survey of the West's crisis runs from the psychic toll of rationalization and big-city life, through capitalism, individualism, and imperialism, to a social question that has outgrown classes and nations to set whole continents against one another. Europe, exhausted by war and stripped of prestige, confronts three non-European powers, the United States, Russia, and Japan, while its former colonies industrialize and awaken to national self-determination. Against economic feudalism by cartel and trust, he urges European integration, Riedl's collective trade treaties, and the League of Nations, insisting that peace must be built by deliberate effort, not awaited.
Willst du Kriege vermieden sehen, so organisiere den Frieden.
English translation: “If you wish to see wars avoided, then organize peace.”
Defending entrepreneurial initiative need not mean defending the power of capital. In this 1933 study, Eugen Peter Schwiedland distinguishes the creative organizer of production from the financier who controls enterprises through credit and other people’s assets. He judges business success by useful provision and collective welfare, not private earnings alone, while questioning whether bureaucratic management can preserve entrepreneurial judgment and adaptability. The sharpest tension lies in his proposed remedy: criticism of financial domination leads him toward stronger state authority and a sympathetic account of Italian fascist corporatism. Readers can examine how a defense of personal economic responsibility becomes joined to an authoritarian program of coordination—and where Schwiedland places the boundary between productive leadership and irresponsible power.
What evidence should ground an account of the earliest economic institutions? In this brief English-language review of W. Koppers’s Die Anfänge des menschlichen Gemeinschaftslebens, Eugen Peter Schwiedland approaches ethnology from a question pursued in his own Political Economy: how economic life began. He welcomes Koppers’s treatment of property alongside family, religion and other forms of communal life, but his strongest endorsement concerns method. Historically descriptive research, he argues, offers an alternative to philosophical sociology’s excessive reliance on imagination. Without testing that claim through detailed examples, the review records Schwiedland’s clear preference for ethnological evidence as a foundation for studying economic origins.
Advertising joins business technique to psychological influence: this is Schwiedland’s starting point in his brief English-language review of the third enlarged edition of Victor Mataja’s Die Reklame. Noting advertising’s expanding political uses, he commends Mataja’s scientific approach and impartial assessment of its forms and effects. The interest lies in what Schwiedland singles out for approval: an inquiry that considers advertising’s educational and enlightening potential alongside its economic results. This compact endorsement shows the criteria by which he welcomes advertising as a subject of systematic study, without offering specific findings or a developed critique.
Rising profits can conceal shrinking wealth. In this brief English-language review of Julius Wolf’s 1920 study, Eugen Peter Schwiedland foregrounds the unequal losses behind Germany’s currency depreciation: wages trail prices, salaries lag further, and bondholders’ nominal incomes remain unchanged. His largely expository account connects these contrasts to Wolf’s diagnosis of a government unable to align expenditure with revenue. The central tension is between apparent industrial prosperity and the continuing monetary expansion that undermines purchasing power and unsettles trade. Read as a contemporary assessment rather than a retrospective explanation, the review shows how Wolf’s forecast of further depreciation rested on political constraints on spending cuts, not simply on the quantity of banknotes.