The archive.

A weak currency can stimulate exports while fostering production that stabilisation will render untenable; a strong currency can depress exports when recovery demands more goods. This double bind anchors Eugen Peter Schwiedland’s brief English-language review of Richard Kerschagl’s monetary pamphlet. Schwiedland’s emphasis falls on the productive consequences of monetary disorder, rather than currency stability considered in isolation. He values Kerschagl’s comparative account of national reconstruction efforts and identifies statistical tables covering 1913–1920 as its means of connecting inflation, domestic prices, and exchange rates. The review offers a compact view of why neither export growth under depreciation nor monetary strength necessarily signals a sound recovery.

Family organization may underpin communal life without making the state an enlarged family. This distinction anchors Eugen Peter Schwiedland’s brief review of Richard Thurnwald’s study of the Bánaro of New Guinea. Schwiedland foregrounds kinship as a structure of reciprocal duties and political association as a means of mutual protection, while tracing the account’s links between marriage arrangements, chiefly power and economic inequality. His appreciative notice also conveys Thurnwald’s conjectures about early marriage forms, including group marriage, which the review acknowledges is nowhere demonstrable in the present. Readers encounter a concise reception of Thurnwald’s research in which concrete descriptions of kinship pass into speculative institutional history—and definitions of social groups receive particular praise.

Advocating deflation is not the same as confronting the difficulties of carrying it out. This distinction drives Eugen Peter Schwiedland’s brief collective review of three monetary pamphlets by Lancelot Hare and Yves-Guyot and Arthur Raffalovich’s Inflation et déflation. Schwiedland finds Hare’s theoretical foundations thin and the French authors’ historical account incomplete, but singles out a telling contrast: threats of the guillotine for refusing assignats did not prevent their eventual abolition. His compressed verdict offers neither a rival monetary theory nor an account of specific implementation obstacles. It instead exposes the practical question he finds unanswered by all four works: what does a commitment to deflation demand beyond arguing in its favour?

Economy does not begin with hunger, appropriation, or consumption, this economic-anthropological treatise insists, but with foresight — the moment human groups anticipate future want and deliberately store, produce, and allocate. Schwiedland traces that emergence across horde, family, clan, and tribe, through hunting and totemism, hoe agriculture bound to mother-right, and patriarchal pastoral nomadism, drawing on Thurnwald and Wundt. He rejects the 'golden age' of natural simplicity as a fiction: the earliest human condition is insecurity and scarcity, without stores or provision. Language, tools, fire, and settled life become the structural levers of a new organized existence, while labor divides by sex and status and property layers common tribal land over personal possession. Exchange grows from raid, gift, and ceremonial reciprocity into barter and money — 'treasure' made mobile — yet its essence remains planned provision, not the market alone.

Der Tauschverkehr ist neben der Herstellung von Gütern die zweite große Quelle des Wohlstandes.

English translation: “Alongside the production of goods, exchange is the second great source of prosperity.”

What connects competing economic theories beyond their disagreements? In this brief English-language review, Eugen Peter Schwiedland presents Wolfgang Heller’s book as an attempt to link apparently isolated lines of theoretical inquiry. His clearest example is the shift from older price theory’s emphasis on supply to newer analysis of demand. Rather than judging the rival schools, Schwiedland highlights Heller’s attention to conceptual connections, including those between distribution, costs, and power. Readers find a compact account of Heller’s historical purpose, with a useful distinction: his own theoretical positions are developed in a separate Hungarian treatise, not expounded in this review.

Does money’s development depend chiefly on theories of value or on the institutions that organize payments? In this brief 1922 review of Richard Kerschagl’s book, Eugen Peter Schwiedland cautiously identifies an institutional thesis: clearing centres and government administration as a centre of payments help shape monetary development. His concise assessment distinguishes Kerschagl’s historical treatment of monetary theory from what remains to be explained—how a medium of exchange becomes legal tender. The review offers a compact glimpse of this shift in explanatory emphasis, while preserving the provisional character of Kerschagl’s account.

International financial control could become an obstacle to the development it was meant to oversee: this tension draws Schwiedland’s attention in his short review of E. J. Tsouderos’s account of Greece’s economy. He highlights Tsouderos’s case for adapting supervision to the demands of territorial expansion, while offering his own qualified optimism about Greek agriculture, shipping and trade. Unfinished railways give that qualification a concrete basis. Particularly revealing is Schwiedland’s endorsement of Tsouderos’s proposed Balkan economic arrangement: reduced tariffs and restored banking relations might prepare the ground for political understanding. The review offers a compact view of how this sympathetic reviewer connected Greece’s prospects with both domestic improvements and cooperation across borders.

Luxury and forced labour stand side by side in Eugen Peter Schwiedland’s brief review of Richard Thurnwald’s Psychologie des primitiven Menschen. Praising Thurnwald’s ethnological account, Schwiedland foregrounds two sources of economic change: desires that exceed material necessity and the power to make others work. Shells, beads, and stones acquire value through distinction or supernatural associations; slavery and tribute, in his account, expand production and differentiate occupations. The review offers a compact encounter with an approving interpretation of Thurnwald in which technical limits, symbolic value, and coercion all shape economic life—and in which the language of “progress” accommodates domination as well as invention.

Against theories that lodge value in labor, cost, or the object itself, this short monograph — later folded into Schwiedland's Volkswirtschaftslehre — grounds value in a subjective consciousness of dependence on useful and scarce goods. Utility, he argues, names an objective suitability, whereas value is the felt dependence of the economizing subject; hence his correction of both 'objective value' language and the Austrian preference for 'Grenznutzen.' Price, by contrast, is external, negotiated, social — an actual counter-performance received in exchange, one requiring not equal values but divergent valuations, so that barter enriches both sides. Translating usefulness and scarcity into supply and demand, Schwiedland tracks seller competition in abundance, buyer competition in shortage, hoarding, panic selling, cartels, and monetary policy, yet ends in methodological modesty: no single theory can capture every real price.

Wert ist ein Gefühl, Preis eine tatsächliche Gegenleistung: die Menge von Gütern, die man beim Austausch für andere empfängt.

English translation: “Value is a feeling, price an actual counter-performance: the quantity of goods one receives in exchange for others.”

The entrepreneurs capable of rebuilding industry may also acquire the power to bend national policy to private ends. This tension gives Eugen Peter Schwiedland’s 1923 review of Herbert von Beckerath’s book its focus. In presenting Beckerath’s account, Schwiedland explains why postwar shortages and mismatched resources favoured integrated industrial combines rather than cartels of separate firms. He then presses the question of leadership: can roughly two dozen powerful figures supply the judgement these vast organizations require, accommodate workers, and ease international antagonisms? His explicit insistence that economic problems are also ethical questions sharpens the review’s interest. Readers encounter an argument for entrepreneurial coordination whose confidence in practical competence stops short of confidence in the responsible exercise of power.

Can geography explain both the formation of nations and the growth of world wealth? In this brief 1923 review of O. D. von Engeln’s Inheriting the Earth, Eugen Peter Schwiedland finds stimulating material without being persuaded that it forms a unified account of economic development. He reports Engeln’s claim that shared surroundings, rather than race, language or religion, create nations, but reserves his strongest appreciation for the factual discussion of resources and exchange between temperate and tropical regions. The review’s interest lies in this selective judgement: Schwiedland questions the book’s coherence while welcoming the knowledge and prospects offered by its treatment of tropical cultivation, migration and settlement colonies.

Opposition to Marxism does not necessarily imply a defence of liberalism: this distinction frames Eugen Peter Schwiedland’s affirmative 1923 review of Mises’s Die Gemeinwirtschaft. Writing in English, Schwiedland places the book against German nationalist alternatives that reject liberalism alongside Marxism. He foregrounds Mises’s shift from the unequal distribution of wealth to the conditions of its production: could socialism increase output, and could it calculate rationally without market prices? His account also presents consumer choice, rather than control of the workplace, as the basis of economic self-determination. This short review offers a concrete instance of Mises’s early reception, showing which arguments a sympathetic contemporary selected and why he regarded a liberal defence of capitalism as a distinctive intervention.