2,793 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
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.
What becomes of economic self-interest when prestige depends on giving valuables away? In this 1923 review of Malinowski’s Argonauts of the Western Pacific, Eugen Peter Schwiedland treats Kula exchange as a challenge to textbook accounts of early economic life. He emphasizes how custom, ceremony, and public recognition organize exchange without eliminating the desire for gain. His distinctive concern is what economists can learn from ethnographic observation: generosity and acquisitiveness need not be opposing explanations, and practical usefulness cannot alone account for value. The review offers a compact encounter between fieldwork and economic theory, while Schwiedland’s bourgeois-versus-Bolshevik comparison exposes the contemporary political categories he brings to Malinowski’s findings.
Protection against inflation appears here not as social relief but as a “curious monopoly” enjoyed by wage-earners and salaried employees. That reversal captures the standpoint of Eugen Peter Schwiedland’s 1923 review of Siegfried Strakosch’s book on Austria’s economic crisis. Strongly endorsing Strakosch’s practical and scientific authority, Schwiedland argues that socialist labour protections weakened production and burdened business. He also acknowledges the destructive effects of the peace settlement, new frontiers, trade barriers and currency instability. The interest of this short review lies in how these explanations are weighted: readers can see an economic indictment of labour policy taking shape around business uncertainty and middle-class losses, even while the reviewer describes pressures extending far beyond domestic legislation.
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.
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.”
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.