The archive.

Shell valuables that must be passed on rather than kept pose a precise problem for economic explanation: what makes temporary possession desirable, and what binds a recipient to give in return? In this short 1923 review of Bronislaw Malinowski’s Argonauts of the Western Pacific, Eugen Peter Schwiedland approaches Kula exchange through social obligation, rank, and recognition. He emphasizes a distinction easily lost when every transfer is called trade: ceremonial gifts are not bargained over, yet their circulation stimulates canoe-building, voyages, and ordinary commerce. His comparisons with European jewels make prestige and attachment intelligible without equating them with practical usefulness. The review offers a compact examination of how custom governs reciprocity—and how giving wealth away can itself become a way of enjoying it.

Eugen Peter Schwiedland’s brief review of the sixteenth edition of Viktor Cathrein’s Der Sozialismus distinguishes critical force from documentary scope. He locates Cathrein’s opposition to socialist doctrines and their implementation within his Jesuit allegiance to Roman Catholic teaching and papal encyclicals, describing the criticism as both acute and inflexible. Schwiedland also notes the sharp treatment of the Marxian economic interpretation of history without rehearsing its argument. His concluding qualification gives this compact notice its particular value: the updated documents and facts are useful, but the account of the recent socialist movement extends only to Germany. Readers encounter a concise appraisal that identifies both the standpoint and the limits of Cathrein’s revised work.

Did printing money drive the German mark’s collapse, or did it follow a collapse already under way? In this short English review of the sixth edition of Karl Helfferich’s Das Geld, Eugen Peter Schwiedland endorses the latter explanation, contrasting the growth of note issuance with the far steeper rise of the dollar and import prices. His sympathetic assessment brings the practical demands of paying wages and sustaining enterprises into a dispute over monetary causation. It also questions who actually benefited from depreciation: debt relief offered governments little comfort, while industrial profits could mask the consumption of productive assets. The review gives readers a compact, pointed account of an exchange-rate-centred explanation of German inflation and the economic losses concealed by nominal gains.

Can monetary cooperation preserve the sovereignty of states whose economies remain interdependent? In this English-language review of Elemér Hantos’s Das Geldproblem in Mitteleuropa, Eugen Peter Schwiedland brings that institutional difficulty into focus. Hantos proposes a currency convention among six successor states of Austria-Hungary: national issuing banks would retain distinct policies while accepting common supervision, potentially by the Bank of England. Schwiedland’s measured reconstruction distinguishes the countries’ experiences of inflation and draws attention to the unprecedented arrangement envisioned for their recovery. This short review offers a concrete encounter with the tension between monetary stabilisation and national autonomy—and with a proposal that sought regional coordination without a single issuing bank.

The cost of drinking extends beyond the price of liquor in Eugen Peter Schwiedland’s brief 1925 review of Robert Wilbrandt’s temperance booklet. Schwiedland foregrounds Wilbrandt’s economic case: expenditure on alcohol, burdens on police and hospitals, agricultural land diverted to its production, and labour lost through diminished productivity. Against the reported wartime fall in consumption, renewed drinking appears as a drain on Germany’s strained resources. The review offers a compact account of how temperance advocacy could frame abstinence as a question of national productive capacity rather than private conduct, while conveying Wilbrandt’s claims and hopes for German youth without independently testing his estimates.

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.”

Abundant productive capacity alongside unemployment and unmet needs: this contradiction anchors Eugen Peter Schwiedland’s lecture, delivered in autumn 1931 and published in 1932. He argues that tariffs, payment restrictions, war debts, and collapsing confidence prevent an interdependent world economy from using its resources. His criticism reaches beyond governments to businesses whose debt-financed mechanization increased output without securing customers. Proposals for European commercial integration and coordinated capitalism turn the diagnosis into a question of institutional design: how can countries restore purchasing power when each seeks to export while excluding foreign goods? The lecture also exposes a tension within Schwiedland’s internationalism. His recognition of economic solidarity coexists with a racially hierarchical defence of European predominance, making cooperation both a remedy for shared distress and a means of preserving unequal power.

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.

A factory may lower its costs while a cartel raises its customers’ prices: industrial efficiency and public benefit are not the same achievement. In this contribution to Viktor Mataja’s edited Lehrbuch der Volkswirtschaftspolitik, Eugen Peter Schwiedland asks how governments can foster industrial capacity without mistaking business interests for national necessities. His perspective combines respect for entrepreneurial judgment with scrutiny of concentrated economic power. Mass production brings cheaper goods, but also dependence on expanding markets; joint-stock finance mobilizes savings, yet allows small controlling stakes to command vast assets. Against Europe’s postwar fragmentation and growing overseas competition, Schwiedland favours informed supervision rather than blanket prohibitions. The chapter offers concrete ways to distinguish productive coordination from restrictions on competition—and to understand why neither entrepreneurial freedom nor state intervention guarantees public welfare.