2,793 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
A monopoly designed to cheapen Vienna’s meat supply failed when Hungarian cattle suppliers boycotted its market. In this 1918 review of Karl von Peez’s study of the Landsverleger-Compagnia (1622–1624), Eugen Peter Schwiedland reads archival business history through the pressures of First World War provisioning. He singles out currency depreciation, price ceilings and dependence on external producers as points of comparison, while praising Peez’s use of company accounts and official scrutiny. The tension is concrete: imperial privilege and a sovereign’s share in the profits could not secure control over supply. This brief review offers a focused encounter with Schwiedland’s economic-historical judgement—particularly his attention to the constraints that cross-border trade placed on wartime price regulation.
Property, in this second edition of 1918, is an institution 'of overriding, all-dominating effect' whose usefulness is inseparable from its dangers — dependency, class power, and duty. Schwiedland separates factual possession from socially recognized right, then follows the tacit proviso that binds ownership — Paulsen's clause that the community may dispose otherwise where welfare requires — through agrarian history: from village use-rights, Flurzwang, and Allmende to the conquest-born great estate that concentrates power and hardens social ranks. Urban land becomes speculative capital, movable wealth becomes securities and industrial enterprise, and inheritance law carries wealth and position to descendants. Surveying personality, legal, labour, and utility theories, he finds each partial and settles on social usefulness as the only decisive ground, defending rent limits, inheritance restrictions, and expropriation where ownership threatens the common welfare.
Der Großbesitz ist der Ausdruck, aber auch ein Anreger der gesellschaftlichen Klassenscheidung.
English translation: “Large property is the expression, but also an instigator, of class division in society.”
Not an abstract mechanism of labour, capital, and exchange, but a formation shaped by land, climate, water, mineral deposits, borders, and neighbours — that is the national economy as this 1918 essay conceives it. Schwiedland turns each physical condition into an economic form: coastlines invite navigation, mountains isolate and obstruct, alluvial plains concentrate population and cities, poor soils drive emigration. Water is the most expansive medium — rivers that irrigate, carry, and power, canals and isthmian cuts that rewrite routes, the sea that lifts history from river civilizations to Atlantic and Pacific world traffic. Coal and iron ground industrial modernity in subterranean endowment. The racial and climatic idiom demands critical distance, yet the argument is not fatalism: environment sets possibilities and resistances, while labour, breeding, mining, and organization remake nature, so that man becomes a co-creator of the economic world.
Der große Handel und Verkehr ist Seehandel und Seeverkehr und die große Politik erstrebt die Beherrschung der Meere.
English translation: “Great commerce and traffic are maritime commerce and maritime traffic, and great politics aims at the mastery of the seas.”
Not goods and wealth but human qualities and relationships form the true subject of economics: so runs the governing thesis of this first volume of a revised three-volume course, rewritten after 1918 for readers who now demanded critical reflection on inherited institutions. The old sweep remains, the competition of states from Italy to England, the passage from feudal order to industrial capitalism, but the postwar edition weighs capitalism and socialism at length, dissecting Marxism, syndicalism, guild socialism, and Bolshevism, and refusing historical materialism's reduction of culture to the mode of production. Value is grounded in marginal utility, capitalism defined as both purposive organization and a pervading spirit, and the whole framed by a demand for realism about grown conditions joined to idealism of aims.
Mit Freiheit allein ist dem einzelnen nicht gedient, es bedarf auch der Lebenssicherheit und einigen Behagens.
English translation: “Freedom alone does not serve the individual; there is also need of security of life and a measure of comfort.”
Economics begins, for Schwiedland, in reflection on why some peoples prosper while others fall behind, and wealth, he warns, is relative, unstable, and worth having only as a condition of cultural and political power, ruinous to the nation that mismanages it. From that premise a sweeping course unfolds: the rise and fall of Italy, Spain, Holland, France, and England; the passage from medieval estates to liberal industrial capitalism; then a systematic doctrine of environment, population, value, and price. Economic activity he defines as foresighted provision for future wants, value as marginal utility (Grenznutzen) after Menger and Böhm-Bawerk. Against the materialism, speculation, and inequality that economic freedom breeds, these lectures to Vienna's engineering students end in an appeal for conscious idealism and reform.
Der Antrieb zur wirtschaftlichen Entwicklung der Völker ist der Drang der Einzelnen nach Bereicherung.
English translation: “The driving force behind the economic development of peoples is the individual's urge for enrichment.”
Amid the collapse of 1919, with the monarchy gone and proletarian parties newly powerful, the demand to socialize the means of production had to be tested against its own practicability. Socialization, Schwiedland insists, is less a matter of ownership than of use: large enterprises should be withdrawn from private greed and directed to public needs without destroying the incentives that make them productive. He reads wartime cartels, forced syndicates, and Richard Riedl's Austrian control apparatus as precedents for socialization by administration rather than expropriation, and he sifts which sectors, mining, coal, electricity, transport, suit public monopoly and which must stay competitive for export. Cautious and experimental throughout, this lecture to Vienna's engineers and architects concludes that the success of any Kontrolismus depends finally on the moral quality of the population.
Die Bändigung der Unternehmenschaft unter Erhaltung der Vorteile, die sie der Menschheit errungen hat.
English translation: “The taming of entrepreneurship while preserving the advantages it has won for humanity.”
Care for persons sits alongside the efficient use of human capacities in Eugen Peter Schwiedland’s brief review of Rudolf Goldscheid’s collected essays. Schwiedland singles out Goldscheid’s “human economy”: an insistence that economics attend not only to goods but also to the ethical worth of persons and the waste of human labor. His appreciation is qualified by a pointed literary judgment: he suggests that Goldscheid’s subjective, sentimental presentation has impeded the recognition his ideas deserve. This short notice shows what Schwiedland finds economically significant in Goldscheid’s work, while distinguishing his endorsement of its intellectual substance from his reservations about its style.
Can public ownership curb excessive drinking without denying ordinary people their drink? In this brief German review of Arthur Greenwood’s book, Eugen Peter Schwiedland foregrounds the British Labour Party’s proposed answer: remove the commercial incentive to sell more and stronger alcohol. His favourable account centres on wartime Carlisle, where an influx of munitions workers was followed by overcrowding and increased drunkenness. Public administration of drinking establishments, withdrawal of licences, and the provision of food and light refreshments supplied a practical precedent for reform. The review offers a compact account of how changing ownership and the services a public house provided could be presented as an alternative to prohibition.
Can tracing the origins of psychic life advance the study of society? In this brief review of Aurel Kolnai’s book, Eugen Peter Schwiedland questions both the conceptual links psychoanalysis offers and its capacity to reach readers beyond the Freudian school. He singles out the connection between delusional formations and philosophical systems as speculative, while acknowledging Kolnai’s fluent exposition. His practical objections—specialist terminology, no summary of findings, no table of contents—give the notice its particular interest: explanatory credibility and usability become linked tests of psychoanalysis’s entry into social inquiry.
An economist can educate a generation while remaining an institutional outsider. That contrast shapes Eugen Peter Schwiedland’s brief 1921 review of the sixth edition of Charles Gide’s Cours d’économie politique. As Gide’s former co-editor, Schwiedland brings personal knowledge to his account of a cooperative advocate whose postwar political stance, he argues, obstructed an intended appointment at the Collège de France. His praise of Gide’s clarity and fairness leads to a concrete feature of the textbook: a hundred pages devoted to consumers, expenditure, saving, and related questions. The review offers a compact view of what Schwiedland valued in economic teaching—independence from established schools, serious attention to opposing opinions, and recognition of consumers as economic actors.
Worker control of industry need not mean freedom for every worker—or protection for consumers. This tension shapes Eugen Peter Schwiedland’s paired review of G. D. H. Cole’s defence of guild socialism and G. C. Field’s critique. Presenting the programme through Otto Bauer’s sympathetic account, Schwiedland singles out its institutional machinery: national worker guilds, joint producer–consumer decisions, and state levies to equalize incomes. His description of the remaining authority as a “shadow state” sharpens the problem to which Field’s objections return: who restrains powerful industrial groups? Without delivering a separate final verdict, Schwiedland gives those objections the closing emphasis. The compact review allows readers to distinguish the democratic claim to industrial self-government from the questions of expertise, public accountability, and individual freedom that its implementation raises.
Could inheritance become a means of equalizing life chances rather than perpetuating family advantage? In this brief German review, Eugen Peter Schwiedland examines Rich. Bondam’s proposal to pool estates within districts of roughly 200,000 inhabitants and distribute the proceeds equally. His account makes the institutional cost concrete: inherited property would have to be converted into money, with real estate sold at auction. Schwiedland’s clearest approval, however, goes to Bondam’s criticism of existing society and especially of schooling, informed by his experience as a secondary-school teacher. The review lets readers distinguish sympathy with an egalitarian diagnosis from endorsement of the machinery proposed to remedy it.