The archive.

A household’s economic independence need not mean freedom from domination. In this brief English-language review, Eugen Peter Schwiedland presents Richard Thurnwald’s account of state and family formation, in which families gain autonomy from the clan while producers become subject to landlords, soldiers and priests. Schwiedland’s emphasis falls on the connections between political scale, social hierarchy and exchange: collective work can coexist with individual ownership, just as centralized taxation can coexist with private commerce. He conveys Thurnwald’s developmental scheme largely without criticism, adopting its hierarchical classification of peoples. The review offers a compact view of how this scheme links the widening reach of political organization to changes in household dependence, occupational specialization and trade.

Nationalism appears here not as Europe’s permanent inheritance but as a historically conditioned form of social life—and one that might face new competitors. In this brief English-language review of Waldemar Mitscherlich’s book, Eugen Peter Schwiedland welcomes the fresh perspective offered by a sociological “pluralism” that treats institutions as arising under distinct conditions rather than through continuous organic evolution. His compressed account connects nationalism with the modern state and growing individualism. Its most pointed turn concerns “State-Unionism”: associations intended to secure economic self-sufficiency while preserving member states’ sovereignty. Schwiedland’s comparison with Keynes gives the review a concrete tension: how might states meet pressures for economic cooperation without surrendering their political independence?

Can nations secure economic independence without making others dependent? In this short English-language review of Adolf Lenz’s 1920 book, Eugen Peter Schwiedland follows the connection between tariffs, cartels, foreign lending and coercive economic expansion, distinguishing domination through markets from political empire. His reconstruction-minded assessment brings Lenz’s proposals for sharing surplus resources and granting recovery loans into direct conflict with postwar reparations and exclusive national control of supplies. A revealing tension remains unresolved: the programme promises every recognised political unit a subsistence minimum, yet anticipates the disappearance of nations requiring continuous support. The review offers a compact encounter with international economic obligation conceived both as protection against deprivation and as a limit on national autonomy.

Equal cash shares need not mean equal economic opportunities: differences in rural and urban living costs complicate Richard Bondam’s plan to redistribute inherited wealth. In this brief review, Eugen Peter Schwiedland singles out that practical tension and Bondam’s proposed remedy—dividing each year’s bequests equally within districts of about 200,000 inhabitants. His account makes clear that the scheme concerns annual inheritances, not all existing property, and combines redistribution with adults’ freedom to spend their shares. Schwiedland reports rather than tests Bondam’s promised benefits; the review’s interest lies in its precise account of how an egalitarian proposal accommodates purchasing power, locality, and individual discretion.

Can nationalism be explained without treating it as the organic outgrowth of the past? In this brief English-language review, Eugen Peter Schwiedland welcomes Waldemar Mitscherlich’s alternative: a theory of “plurality” that considers social phenomena through their distinctive conditions of existence. His praise centres as much on this sociological method as on the book’s account of nationalism. Particularly revealing is his interest in forces that might surpass nationalism, including “state unionism”—a voluntary association of sovereign states retaining their independence. The review offers a compact encounter with Schwiedland’s methodological sympathies and his approval of an approach that makes nationalism historically conditioned rather than inevitable.

Money can still settle a debt while buying far less—and gold itself need not provide a stable measure of value. In this compact 1922 double review, Eugen Peter Schwiedland pairs Edwin Cannan’s explanation of wartime monetary expansion with J. Shield Nicholson’s account of inflation’s unequal social effects. His presentation connects the depreciation of paper currencies and gold to a pointed distinction between rising money incomes and actual purchasing power. Nicholson’s threatened middle class brings the distributional stakes into view: not everyone can compensate for higher prices by securing higher income. The review’s closing appeal to productive expenditure, restored note convertibility, and moral strength shows how monetary stabilization becomes, in Schwiedland’s treatment, a problem of social discipline as well as currency management.

Can economic interdependence restrain the rivalries it helps create? In this brief 1922 double review, Eugen Peter Schwiedland pairs Seligmann’s explanation of Britain’s changing great-power adversaries with Demangeon’s account of Europe’s diminished economic position after the war. The decisive uncertainty is Britain’s response to American ascendancy: renewed competition or accommodation. Schwiedland’s own voice emerges as he turns from Europe’s lost advantages to its future livelihood, insisting that productive service, reflection and work must replace inherited privilege. His closing hopes—for constructive American leadership, an Anglo-American settlement and goodwill among European peoples—give this compact review its distinctive tension: European effort is necessary, but recovery also depends on international arrangements Europeans cannot determine alone.

Psychological inquiry and factory experience offer complementary approaches to easing industrial work in Eugen Peter Schwiedland’s brief double review of Frank Watts and B. S. Rowntree. Schwiedland credits Watts with seeking compatibility between social ethics and economic benefit, while finding his exposition insufficiently clear. Rowntree supplies the practical contrast: employee participation in management, tested in his own enterprise, alongside demands that production and the distribution of returns serve the community. The review’s concrete interest lies in this pairing of psychological hopes with workplace institutions—including the York chocolate factory’s works council and company magazine—through which readers can trace two distinct approaches to improving relations between employers and workers.

Can economics judge the effectiveness of human action without judging its aims? In this brief English review of Robert Wilbrandt’s Oekonomie, Eugen Peter Schwiedland presents a reformer’s answer: economics should address deficiencies in the means required to achieve practical ends. Schwiedland follows the move from that apparently neutral task to national efficiency as a standard for criticizing economic arrangements. His concise account also brings a tension into view: Wilbrandt excludes political opinions from his deductions, yet links forms of economic organization to conservatism, liberalism, socialism, and anarchism. Rather than testing the system independently, Schwiedland makes its governing commitments legible, allowing readers to examine how a science concerned with means becomes a programme for economic reform.

What makes statistics dependable—and their meaning unmistakable? In this brief 1922 review of Franz Zizek’s Grundriss der Statistik, Eugen Peter Schwiedland highlights the connection between statistical principles and the questions they serve. His notice emphasizes how Zizek returns from tables of population and economic life to methodological choices, rather than treating figures as self-explanatory. Banking, stocks and shares, and balances receive particular attention as subjects Schwiedland identifies as previously untreated statistically. Readers encounter a concise contemporary assessment of the textbook’s scope and practical orientation, not a detailed test of its methods or findings.

Giolitti’s proposal for compulsory works councils gives Eugen Peter Schwiedland a concrete point of departure from George D. Herron’s confidence in Italian national renewal. In this brief 1922 review, Schwiedland turns from Herron’s vision of overcoming individualism to the practical history of industrial reform. He recalls his own advocacy of compulsory workers’ committees in 1891 and Emil Steinbach’s Austrian legislative projects, defeated, he reports, by an alliance of bureaucrats, industrialists, and Social Democratic labor leaders. His hope that Italy will prove more receptive gives the review its distinctive stake: a reform advocate tests an apparently new Italian initiative against earlier Austrian proposals and the resistance that frustrated them.

Public ownership need not mean the exclusion of private enterprise. In this brief 1922 review of A. E. Davies’s The Case for Nationalization, Eugen Peter Schwiedland records proposals for state banks, insurers and shipping companies to compete with private firms. His concise account, which offers no explicit verdict, also singles out a practical legal change: municipalities would receive general authority to establish businesses, with legislation defining exceptions rather than authorizing each venture separately. The review lets readers distinguish these arrangements from outright communal ownership and from bounded worker participation in management—different institutional choices within the English workers’ socialization programme as Davies presents it.